CAMBODIAN YOUTH IN CREATING MORE LIBERAL DEMOCRACY (original) (raw)

The focus of this thesis is to study close relations between dramatic shifts in young demographics and growing youth activism in Cambodia, which recently led to increasing confrontations and sometimes deadly clashes between the government and youth. This thesis develops theoretical frameworks that are applied to address three hypotheses to see whether a transformation of Cambodian youth from the minority to the majority group of the population necessitates reorganization of the state institutions, Cambodian youth of better education are more likely to participate in politics and capable of mobilizing others for political engagement, and generational confrontations and collective violence between the government of the elderly political leaders and Cambodian youth are resulted from their loss of trust in the institutions and the absence of the public space as an alternative to the state institutions for them, are correct or not. This research found that Cambodia has already become a country of young population since 2008 and, unlike their parents, most young Cambodians are literate; but both the National Assembly and the Senate are dominated by elderly political leaders. Also, civil society organizations have no regular and persistent platforms for Cambodian youth to work out their demands with the government while traditional media is dominantly controlled by the state and the government-allied private companies, and the social media is carefully censored. These situations very likely justify the above three hypotheses, so youth integration into the state institutions and more public space in variable forms are suggested as mechanisms to resolve and prevent crises of this phenomenon. Though this thesis may have its constraints in areas of its theoretical frameworks due to an early assumption of the literature and a quantitative method regarding data collection on the internet, its findings produce very fruitful inputs for the government‘s and non-governmental organizations‘ work and policy as well as the field of research alike since the theme of research is new.