Studies on Southeast Asia, no. 68. Ithaca; London: Southeast Asia Program Publications at Cornell University, 2016. xxiii, 229 pp. (B&W photos.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-87727-768-2.
This publication seeks to make sense of Cambodian politics after the UN intervention in the early 1990s by paying particular attention to the political parties and their national (or nationalist?) imaginings of Cambodia as a nation. Although the Cambodians share the same sense of national identity, the political parties have advanced their different imaginings that compete with each other and this kind of competition is regarded as the major challenge to liberal or multiparty democracy. This publication offers some interesting theoretical insights but still lacks real explanatory power.
In terms of structure and train of thought, the publication is generally coherent. It is divided into five chapters: Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Starting Points; Of Hun Sen: The Sdech Kân Narrative; Royalists: Between Embodiment and Doctrine; Democrats: Democracy and the Post-PPA Nation; and Reassessing Political Contestation in the Kingdom of Cambodia. An epilogue follows the last chapter. The UN intervention that led to multiparty elections in 1993 not only reintroduced liberal democracy into the country but also restored the centuries-old institution, the monarchy. After that, Cambodian politics witnessed a series of national elections and some degree of competition among political parties, most notably the Cambodian People’s Party or CPP led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, the royalists and other opposition parties, the strongest of which was the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP).
The author argues that these political parties do not share the same understanding of Cambodia as a nation. Each political party has its own political project, advancing “radically different imaginings of the national community” and claiming that it “represent[s] the true Cambodia” (xviii). Their different nationalist (or traditionalist?) imaginings have hindered the process of democratization. In other words, the Cambodian party leaders have invented strategies to paint themselves as moral leaders, based on the conception of traditional kingship or leadership and, thus, none can be called a democrat. In the author’s words, “Cambodian elites were not democratic at heart, in the sense that they did not endorse liberal democratic principles. But neither did they purport to be” (167). This is not a new argument and nobody would disagree with this assessment, but what is interesting about this work is that the author did what no others have done as far as documenting what political leaders said about their projects. She relied on archival sources and did an impressive number of interviews with members of the ruling and opposition elites. As a result of her ethnographical research, she was able to do a discursive analysis in a way that helped her shed some good light on their opposing imaginings of Cambodia as a nation.
As someone who has written on Cambodia, I find the chapter on Hun Sen’s nationalist imagining most interesting. I learned more about his efforts to reinvent himself as the reincarnation of the sixteenth-century king by the name of Sdech Kân, who was a commoner but became king after he had overthrown the supposedly unjust reigning king Srey Sokonthor Bâ (r. 1504–1512). Since the early 2000s, Hun Sen has adopted several strategies to make sure he is perceived as a just or moral leader, and the best representative of Cambodia, because of his similarities with Sdech Kân.
The publication has both an intellectual appeal and shortcomings. On the one hand, it is an academic attempt to stimulate interest in Cambodian politics and the politics of Southeast Asia from a cultural or constructivist perspective. Most arguments are developed in a way that is theoretically and analytically interesting, as well as empirically rich. To that extent, the book is worth reading and is likely to gain attention at a time when liberal democracy, human rights, and globalization come under challenge and are still in retreat, as evident in various regions of the world, including Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the publication is based on a particular perspective that ignores what some scholars have written. Because of its overemphasis on cultural factors and discursive analysis, the publication runs the risks of downplaying material factors such as power relations and security dynamics. The author makes no serious effort to do a systematic review of what has been written from different perspectives. In her preface, she briefly acknowledges political science scholarship but quickly moves on without discussing any of it in a serious way. This kind of work requires a thorough academic literature review.
Due to this kind of neglect, the publication raises more questions than it answers, one of which is whether nonmaterial factors matter to the degree that the author contends. When examining her analysis closely, I find her line of argument far from clear and compelling. She implicitly refers to terms like elite manipulation and a material base that appear to undermine her constructivist reasoning. For instance, she contrasts the royalists’ political failures and the CPP’s successes by suggesting that the former lacked “a material base” whereas the latter enjoyed “overwhelming dominance over the body politics” (173). Another question that can be raised is why Hun Sen started to reinvent the Sdech Kân narrative in the early 2000s but not long before. Was it because of his genuine belief in the myth all along or was it because he later found it easier to manipulate the population after he had already dominated the political arena? I also find this work far from convincing because it says nothing about the security dynamics in Cambodian politics. The author makes scant reference to Hun Sen’s “vulnerability” (63) but leaves out any security analysis advanced by other scholars. Another question, but not the last one on my mind, is whether it is now the constructivists’ turn to explain the retreat of liberalism because of national imaginings and populism or whether political scientists can still explain the relative decline of liberal powers and the rising challenge of powerful illiberal states like China and Russia.
Sorpong Peou
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada