The neoliberal 'order'in Cambodia: political violence, democracy, and the contestation of public space (original) (raw)
Related papers
2005
Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of the Third World. However, for many Third World countries, the promise that the market will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, the free market has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills. In Cambodia, the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. Neoliberal policies further explain why authoritarianism remains the principal mode of governance among Cambodia’s ruling elite, an inclination that is often elicited through the execution of state violence. In this study, neoliberalism is conceived as effectively acting to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics in Cambodia. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the neoliberal rhetoric of ‘order’ and ‘stability’, which can be read through Cambodia’s (re)production of public space. The preoccupation with ‘order’ and ‘stability’ in Cambodia serves the interests of capital at the global level, and political elites at the level of the nation-state, a reality that has been fiercely contested by Cambodians. This contestation is strongly evidenced in the burgeoning geography of protest that has emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the post-transition era. This study advocates public space as a model for democracy and development. Public space is the site where ‘the voiceless’ can materialise their claims and make their demands heard, it is a medium for the contestation of power as it provides visibility to subaltern groups, and it is the space in which identity is constructed, reified, and contested. In short, public space is the crucible of democracy. Democracy as public space puts power back in the hands of the people, and unlike the concept of ‘civil society’, it allows us to move beyond Eurocentric ‘top-down’ models of development and democracy.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2009
Neoliberal policies explain why authoritarianism and violence remain the principal modes of governance among many ruling elites in posttransitional settings. Using Cambodia as an empirical case to illustrate the neoliberalizing process, the promotion of intense marketization is revealed as a foremost causal factor in a country's inability to consolidate democracy following political transition. Neoliberalization effectively acts to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the neoliberal rhetoric of order and stability, which can be read through the (re)production of public space. The preoccupation with order and stability serves the interests of capital at the global level and political elites at the level of the nation-state. Citizens themselves may fiercely contest these particular interests in a quest for a more radical democracy, as evidenced by the burgeoning geographies of protest that have emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the posttransition era.
Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order: Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space
Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills. This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism. Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia. ______________________________________________________ Reviews: Gunn, G. C. 2013. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43.1: 188-191. Brickell, K. 2011. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52.3: 372-374. Percival, T. 2011. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32.2: 270-272. Christie, R. 2010. South East Asia Research, 19.2: 349-372. Ordóñez de Pablos, P. 2010. International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 1.4: 65-66.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2010
Neoliberal subject formation in posttransitional Cambodia has been facilitated through the ‘commonsense’ rhetoric of good governance, which is conceived here as a primary discursive formation in the creation of consent for neoliberalism. Neoliberal subjectivation is the process whereby one memorizes the truth claims that one has heard and converts them into rules of conduct, thereby effectively locking in the rights of capital. As disciplinary rationalities, strategies, technologies, and techniques coagulate under neoliberal subjectivation in contemporary Cambodian society through the proliferation of particular discursive formations like good governance, the structural inequalities of capital are increasingly misrecognized. This constitutes symbolic violence, which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such. How we interpret the fluidity between those who produce and those constrained by neoliberal discursive formations is paramount if we are to counter problematic notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or monolithic and begin to recognize the systemic violent geographies that neoliberalism (re)produces both in posttransitional Cambodia and beyond.
2009
In spite of a United Nations sponsored transition to democracy and peace in the early 1990s, violence remains a ubiquitous feature of the Cambodian landscape in the posttransitional era. Contra the commonplace Orientalist renderings that suggest an inherently violent and authoritarian culture underpins Cambodia’s failure to consolidate democracy and its ongoing encounters with violence, this study advances an alternative interpretation. Combining (post)Marxian and poststructural theoretical approaches, this study proceeds as a (post)anarchist critique through a series of distinct yet thematically connected chapters that examine the intersections between neoliberalism and violence, and the (re)productions of space that both result from and contribute to their entanglement. This critical approach reveals how neoliberalization plays a paramount role in the continuation of violent geographies in Cambodia’s contemporary political economy. The first half of this study theorizes the geographies of neoliberalism and violence through an analysis of the discursive procession of neoliberalism and the imaginative geographies that position it as the sole providence of nonviolence. In orienting itself as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism as discourse actively manufactures the misrecognition of its violences. Struggles over public space are viewed as a necessary reaction against such symbolic violence, allowing us to relate similar constellations of experiences across space as a potential basis for emancipation, and thereby quicken the pace at which neoliberalism recedes into history. The second half of this study examines the violent geographies of neoliberalism in ‘postconflict’ Cambodia, bringing empirical focus to the (re)visualizations, (re)administrations, and (re)materializations of space that have informed the neoliberalization of violence in the country. The pretext of security under which marketization proceeded, the asphyxiation of democratic politics through ordered productions of space, the discursive obfuscations of the ‘culture of violence’ thesis, and Cambodia’s ongoing encounters with primitive accumulation are all revealed to inform the exceptional and exemplary violences of neoliberalization. Ultimately, this study illuminates the multiplicity of ways in which the processes of neoliberalization are suffused with violence. A critical appraisal of neoliberalism’s capacity for violence can open geographical imaginations to the possibility of (re)producing space in ways that make possible a transformative and emancipatory politics.
Violent Neoliberalism: Development, Discourse, and Dispossession in Cambodia
2015
Violent Neoliberalism explores the relationship between neoliberalism and violence through a critical poststructuralist perspective. Springer exposes the supposed humanitarianism of what has become the world's most dominant political economic model as a process of transformation that is shot through with a significant degree of cruelty. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues informed by the empirical experiences of development, discourse, and dispossession in contemporary Cambodia, Violent Neoliberalism engages as a diagnostic rupturing of commonsense to reveal the manifold ways in which ongoing patterns of neoliberalization have become engrossed with violence.
Environment and Planning A, 2011
Focusing exclusively on external forces risks producing an over-generalized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variegations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although neoliberal economics were initially promoted in the global south through the auspices of structural adjustment programs designed by the International Financial Institutions, powerful global south elites were only too happy to oblige. Neoliberalism frequently reveals opportunities for well-connected government officials to informally control market and material rewards, allowing them to easily line their own pockets. It is in this sense of the local appropriation of neoliberal ideas that scholars must go beyond conceiving of ‘neoliberalism-in-general’ as a singular and fully realized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, and work towards conceiving a plurality of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ with particular characteristics arising from mutable geohistorical outcomes that are embedded within national, regional, and local process of market-driven socio-spatial transformation. What constitutes ‘actually existing’ neoliberalism in Cambodia as distinctly Cambodian is the ways in which the patronage system has allowed local elites to co-opt, transform, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework that ‘asset strips’ public resources, thereby increasing peoples’ exposure to corruption, coercion, and violence. It is to such an 'articulation agenda' that this article attends, as in seeking to provide a more nuanced reading to recent work on neoliberalism in Cambodia by outlining some of its salient characteristics, I reveal a more empirical basis to theorizations of ‘articulated neoliberalism’.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2013
Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of capitalism/primitive accumulation, civilization/savagery, and law/violence, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing 'trilateral of logics'. In deciphering this triadic system, this article offers a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal process, and its civilizing effects, which together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Proceeding as a diagnostic assessment of sovereign power, where although signposted by Cambodia's contemporary experiences of violent land conflict, this article is not intended as a fine-grained empirical analysis. Instead, it forwards a theoretical dialogue where Cambodia's neoliberalizing processes offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique, where in particular it is argued that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills, but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.
Cambodia Rising: Neoliberal Violence and Development
JATI: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013
Cambodia enjoyed a decade of rapid growth between 1998 and 2007, when it was the sixth fastest growing economy in the world. While Cambodia’s economy suffered a contraction in 2009 from the global economic crisis, it has since enjoyed a recovery, with the International Monetary Fund projecting Cambodia's GDP growth to reach 7.7% in 2017. However, this spectacular economic growth has been accompanied by an intensification of the violence of Cambodia’s neoliberal development. Human rights watchdog groups have observed that recent cases, including the 2012 murders of the environmental journalist Hang Serei Oudom and the environmental activist Chut Wutty, exemplify Cambodia's culture of impunity and the disinterest of the judicial system in pursuing justice for victimized activists. In this paper I shall consider the violence that has accompanied Cambodia’s transition to neoliberalism with its adoption of the Washington Consensus policy prescriptions after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991, and I shall conclude with a reflection on what the 2013 general elections portend for the country.