As researchers and a former police officer, Miroslav Nožina and Filip Kraus offer readers a unique lens into the Vietnamese diasporic experience in the Czech Republic (CR) as it relates to crime networks. Drawing on decades of research on the topic, the authors present an analysis that is newly available to an English-speaking audience. They make clear that Vietnamese organized crime does not exist independently. Problems such as poorly managed migration policies in Vietnam, the CR, and the broader European Union, they assert, are responsible for pushing migrants into “socially ostracising, economically over-exploiting or politically excluding” illegal activities (p. 12). Although their focus is the CR, Nožina and Kraus seek to “understand the phenomenon of Vietnamese crime in a wider international context” (p. 3).
The monograph is replete with examples of the legal, illegal, and semilegal dealings of “respectable men” and the mercenaries (bộ đội) who often assist them. The introduction previews Vietnamese migration to the CR, criminal networks, and their modi operandi. Qualitative data for the ethnographic study are based on police reports, interviews with police forces and foreign services, as well as members of the Vietnamese diaspora in the CR and nonmigrants in Vietnam.
Nožina and Kraus employ the concept of a transplanted “village mentality” (chapter 2) to frame and analyze their findings. They argue that “a traditional Vietnamese considers himself not as an independent individual but as a component within a system of relationships” (p. 7)—in essence, part of a collective society in which the diaspora and criminal networks exist in a partially mutual yet exploitative symbiosis.
The case study begins in chapter 3 with Vietnamese migration to the CR in the 1950s and increasing after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The social, economic, and political changes following the Velvet Revolution also saw an increase in organized crime within the diaspora.
Chapter 4 expands on the legal and illegal components of the Vietnamese diaspora and the locations where they merge. The illegal components are categorized by size: small, middle, and large organizations. While the 2008 global financial crisis had adverse effects on both old and new migrants, newer migrant workers who lost their jobs were more susceptible to being siphoned into illegal work. This was partly attributable to the overwhelming debt new migrants accumulated from various broker agencies (dịch vụ) that supported their transit to Europe.
Chapter 5 includes “models” used to show how criminal activity, often of an economic nature, operated in various situations. Street peddlers, fruit and vegetable sellers, restaurant owners, migration brokers, and apartment owners/renters could all be fronts for illegal operations. Other illicit activities include tax evasion, tobacco counterfeiting, identification documents forgeries, drug smuggling and illegal substance production, and human and wildlife trafficking.
A key part of the authors’ argument is that Vietnamese migrants transplant the “village mentality” abroad, yet we found support for this assessment lacking. Namely, Nožina and Kraus “argue that the function of criminal networks [in the CR] and their coexistence with other members of the diaspora are mainly based on the Vietnamese traditional ‘village mentality’ and emigrants’ exploitation strategies being transferred to the Western cultural space combined with traditional patterns of Asian criminal societies” (p. 7). But the authors first need to demonstrate that such a village mentality existed prior to migration by linking to participant observation in Vietnam, rather than rely on limited secondary references. Second, Nožina and Kraus need to demonstrate a process of transference, in which migrants carried such a preexisting mentality or worldview with them rather than, for example, learning it in the country of reception. This incongruence between the data and interpretation may have resulted from the confidential nature of much of the police reporting, but the consequence is that readers are left unable to evaluate the gap between the evidence and claims. Further, the book's focus on Vietnamese migrants transferring their “village mentality” to the CR seems at odds with Nožina and Kraus's discussion of otherwise structural factors such as restrictive migration policies or economic precarity.
Nevertheless, we found the book a useful foray into how criminal networks operate, at times, by straddling the line between licit and illicit activities. It synthesizes work on Vietnamese organized crime previously unavailable beyond Czech-speaking audiences and offers insight into increasing human trafficking from Vietnam. The book will be of interest to students of criminology, security, and migration.
