Politics

When United Nations sponsored elections were held in 1993, there were high hopes that Cambodia would finally be able to escape the nightmare of war, the killing fields, famine, and economic turmoil that its people had endured since 1970. Large amounts of international development assistance, a rapidly expanding NGO sector, and a pragmatic power-sharing arrangement between former adversaries, seemed to bode well for the future. Yet, as the country was once again preparing for elections in 1998, serious tensions and conflicts continued to undermine the transition process.

This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia. It demonstrates that such an approach to conflict resolution is flawed and that liberal pluralism is not necessarily a reliable vehicle for heralding change in developing societies.

The study has assessed the reconstruction programs in the post-conflict societies of Cambodia and Rwanda in the context of existing security challenges to women compared to their pre-conflict role and status. It has examined the causes of violence against women and how much the political stability, democratic form of government and economic progress helps to ensure security to women.

Scholars from a number of disciplines have, especially since the advent of the war on terror, developed critical perspectives on a cluster of related topics in contemporary life: militarization, surveillance, policing, biopolitics (the relation between state power and physical bodies), and the like.

This is the first book on the transformations wrought by Cambodia's 2002-08 economic boom. It explores the impact of the boom on governance, economic structure, and opportunities for the poor. It provides new insights into the relationship between economic growth and political stability in post-conflict societies. It is a cross-disciplinary study involving Cambodian and foreign scholars.

Illuminating developments in contemporary Cambodia with political and aesthetic theory, this book analyses the country’s violent transition from socialism to capitalism through an innovative method that combines the aesthetic approach and critical theory.

One figure strides across modern Cambodian history―Norodom Sihanouk. From his accession to the throne of Cambodia in 1941 until his extravagant funeral ceremony in 2013, the prince turned ‘king father’ in later life never dodged controversy. But this is not a biography of Sihanouk; the focus is upon the final decades of the French protectorate, the rise of a counter-elite and winning of Cambodia’s independence.

International development efforts have increasingly focussed on governance and institutional reform as a means to address poverty and accountability, in particular decentralisation reform wherein public officials are held accountable for their decisions and responses to the voices and demands of the people through local elections, and key public services are provided locally.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market.

This ambitious cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in colonial Cambodia breaks new ground in understanding the history and development of religion and colonialism in Southeast Asia. In How to Behave, Anne Hansen argues for the importance of Theravada Buddhist ethics for imagining and articulating what it means to be modern in early-twentieth-century Cambodia.