Acts of Citizenship and Alternative Perspectives on Voice among Stateless Vietnamese Children in Cambodia (original) (raw)
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Children's Experience and Practice of Belonging: The Realities of Integration among De Facto Stateless Vietnamese Children in Cambodia, 2022
In Southeast Asia, the prioritization of economics and security over rights (Nishikawa 2009: 226) by states manifests in the plight of stateless children, meaning "children without a state" (J. Bhabha 2011: 1). As a strand of research that explores how "contexts of reception" shape migrant experiences, most of the literature on the legal exclusion of migrants has focused on the experiences of adult immigrants in the United States (Akinwumi 2006; Kleifgen and Le 2007; Menjivar 2006; Rumbaut 1994, 2005), but some of it has begun to explore the legal displacements of children raised in "mixed-status" families (Dreby 2015) and the "collateral consequences" for the American children of deported parents (Golash-Boza 2019). I focus on statelessness as a salient context of reception defining the integration of children of Vietnamese descent in Cambodia. A focus on de facto statelessness diverges from the literature on children of migration in Southeast Asia,
Seeing like the stateless: Documentation and the mobilities of liminal citizenship in Cambodia
This paper explores de facto statelessness amongst ethnically Vietnamese communities in Cambodia. It demonstrates that the inaccessibility of citizenship rights is not rooted directly in what documents an individual possesses, but in collective mobilities driven by a combination or past and present and potential risks. Specifically, the reluctance of officials to replace documents for those they perceive not to be ethnically Khmer means that even ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians possessing a full set of documents e and who have never crossed a border e are encouraged to pursue similar mobilities to those who have none, including first generation immigrants. The higher level of environmental risk associated with these ethnically mediated, informal livelihoods further reduces these households’ stocks of physical documentation, inducing a reliance on social networks that are vulnerable to evictions and harassment. On this basis, this paper proposes the category of liminal statelessness, in order to better conceptualize a situation in which people with different legal statuses and abilities to prove them share livelihoods characterized by the non-exercise of citizenship rights.
Challenging Khmer citizenship : minorities, the state, and the international community in Cambodia
The idea of a distinctly ‘liberal’ form of multiculturalism has emerged in the theory and practice of Western democracies and the international community has become actively engaged in its global dissemination via international norms and organizations. This thesis investigates the internationalization of minority rights, by exploring state-minority relations in Cambodia, in light of Will Kymlicka’s theory of multicultural citizenship. Based on extensive empirical research, the analysis explores the situation and aspirations of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese, highland peoples, Muslim Cham, ethnic Chinese and Lao and the relationships between these groups and the state. All Cambodian regimes since independence have defined citizenship with reference to the ethnicity of the Khmer majority and have - often violently - enforced this conception through the assimilation of highland peoples and the Cham and the exclusion of ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese. Cambodia’s current constitution, too, defines citizenship ethnically. State-sponsored Khmerization systematically privileges members of the majority culture and marginalizes minority members politically, economically and socially. The thesis investigates various international initiatives aimed at promoting application of minority rights norms in Cambodia. It demonstrates that these initiatives have largely failed to accomplish a greater degree of compliance with international norms in practice. This failure can be explained by a number of factors, among them Cambodia’s neo-patrimonial political system, the geo-political fears of a ‘minoritized’ Khmer majority, the absence of effective regional security institutions, the lack of minority access to political decision-making, the significant differences between international and Cambodian conceptions of modern statehood and citizenship and the emergence of China as Cambodia’s most important bilateral donor and investor. Based on this analysis, the dissertation develops recommendations for a sequenced approach to minority rights promotion, with pragmatic, less ambitious shorter-term measures that work progressively towards achievement of international norms in the longer-term.
Political Geography, 2019
The paper explores the liminality of long-settled ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia from the perspective of the triadic nexus between Cambodia, Vietnam, and the diaspora. Drawing on qualitative data, the paper argues that the predicament of the Vietnamese is co-produced by the two states, who both view them as an inconvenience and refrain from taking full responsibility for the group. Instead, Cambodia and Vietnam share the custody of the diaspora, alternating care and control through the work of the Association of Khmer-Vietnamese in the Kingdom of Cambodia (AKVKC). Such 'shared custody' allows the two states to grant some de facto rights to the Vietnamese while postponing their access to Cambodian citizenship. In addition to shedding new light on the case of the Vietnamese diaspora in Cambodia, the view of the diaspora as 'inconvenience' departs from mainstream understandings of diasporas as threats and/or resources. Furthermore, the concept of 'shared custody' adds to the literature on state-diaspora relations by drawing attention to the role of the host-state in (co-)shaping diaspora groups and engagement.
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By the time I arrived in Phnom Penh in 1996, the Second Prime Minister Hun Sen had called a French Cambodian government official a "dog" and declared vigorously that those holding two passports were "down-grading for the nation" (Ker 1996). One month later, Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party (CPP) declared single citizenship for government leaders an official position. During the fracas, I interviewed the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Marina Pok, a French Cambodian citizen. When asked about her position on the dual citizenship of government officials, she queried in French-accented English: "Why should one give up one's dual nationality? Is it against the interest of the nation? Is it to have a pure Cambodian nation?" 2 This dual affiliation had become as excruciating as "sitting between two chairs." My paper focuses on the charged debate in Phnom Penh regarding the status of dual citizens in the Cambodian government during the 1990s. Through it, I show how the sense of "true" belonging to the postwar nation diverged between local and transnational government officials. Those who were against government officials carrying dual citizenship included both CPP members and diaspora Cambodians, though their arguments differed. Ultimately, the arguments for and against dual citizenship sought a baseline definition of national identity and a way to identify those who could signify its center. That the debate on dual citizenship was possible at all reflected new global developments regarding multiple citizenships. Dual citizens have increased worldwide in the last 20 years. 3 A significant increase in this trend was related to the 1990s "decade of return" as the break-up of the Soviet Union and its client states sent thousands of refugees who had resettled in North America, Australia, and Europe, back to homelands undergoing free market makeovers and a "transition to democracy." The most controversial dual citizens were those returning to high-level government posts in the countries they had fled. Such rewards of exile transpired in several new nations in Eastern Europe, but Cambodia's government of dual citizens was unique in rank and scope. 4 The majority of Cambodian exiles returned from the US, Canada, Australia, and France, which recognized some form of dual citizenship. For the first five years of the new
Governing through Abandonment: Child Rights Deployed Cambodia 1990s
This article describes and analyses the “empowerment” form of child rights deployed in the move to democratise Cambodia in the 1990s, as it was embedded in 1990s “abandonment politics” (Povinelli, 2011). I sketch a genealogy for that form, and identify the problematic of abandonment as a generative link between the political and biological category of “child”, rights, and the technologies of liberal governmentality. Though available to other modes of government, these technologies emerged to manage the “condition of abandonment” of neophyte “abandoned beings” (Agamben, 1998:27). In the 1990s, defined largely by “abandonment pedagogies”, a new form of child rights seemed able to address long and short term cross-sectoral issues. To show how this elucidates the content of international child rights as deployed, I describe the international discourse of child rights as it was taught and translated into programs for street children on Cambodian ground.