Controlling the Opposition Abroad: Cambodia’s Extraterritorial Activities in Long Beach, California

This article presents findings from research conducted in Long Beach, California on the history, motives, and functions of the Cambodian People’s Party Youth Organization (CPPYO), a network of Cambodians outside the country who support Cambodia’s long-time ruling party, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Officially, the CPPYO, headed by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s son, Hun Manet, was created to promote the current government and to provide political options for Cambodians living abroad. However, many Cambodians in the Long Beach area see the CPP’s presence in the US as invasive and as a threat to their autonomy. To understand how the CPPYO functions in Long Beach, we make use of Gerschewski’s three pillars of authoritarian stability¹ and Glasius’ framework for identifying extraterritorial authoritarian practices.² We conclude that the CPPYO is primarily a strategy for repressing opposition abroad, but that it also contributes to the ruling party’s legitimacy through the participation of Long Beach Cambodian Americans, who accept the CPP’s authoritarian control as a condition for participating in Cambodia’s socioeconomic system. This study contributes to a growing body of research interested in identifying and interconnecting the various legitimation processes, strategies, and practices developed by autocracies to stabilize rule at home and abroad.³

[i] Johannes Gerschewski, “The Three Pillars of Stability: Legitimation, Repression, and Co-Optation in Autocratic Regimes,” Democratization 20, no. 1 (January 1, 2013), https://tinyurl.com/y4shf3uj.

[ii] Marlies Glasius, “Extraterritorial Authoritarian Practices: A Framework,” Globalizations 15, no. 2 (February 2018): 179–97, https://tinyurl.com/nav3k986.

[iii] Glasius, “Extraterritorial Authoritarian Practices”; Alexander Dukalskis and Johannes Gerschewski, “What Autocracies Say (and What Citizens Hear): Proposing Four Mechanisms of Autocratic Legitimation,” Contemporary Politics 23, no. 3 (2017): 251–68.