By presenting patients as subject rather than object, the article intends to engage the reader in the patient's quest for moral reparation when trust is breached. The use of anthropological method helps give the perspectives or experience of those who are relatively disempowered their rightful place at the heart of discussions about healthcare quality.

The issue of security has recently gained acute relevance for theoreticians and policymakers, but the way in which culture relates to security has yet to be given the attention it deserves. This article argues that all discourses and practices of security – ours as well as those of others – are cultural in nature, are historically positioned, and therefore inescapably plural. The article uses a case study of today's revival of Buddhism in Cambodia to illustrate how an anthropological approach may be applied in order to begin challenging the inherent ethnocentricity of much security theory. It explores a particular indigenous scheme of security, and how that scheme relates to power and moral legitimacy. The way Cambodians understand and deal with danger should, it is contended, alert us to the need for social scientists and policymakers to seek culturally sensitive understandings of security. This may help us make sense of local behaviour that may seem unreasonable according to our values; it can provoke us to check and refine our theory rather than indiscriminately apply it; and it may help limit the hegemony of privileged systems of ideas and the violence these can sometimes do to disempowered systems.

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This article discusses the ongoing hybrid war crimes tribunal taking place in Cambodia — in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — in relation to the simultaneous eviction of the Boeung Kak Lake community in the capital, Phnom Penh. Presenting these two phenomena alongside one another highlights the contradiction inherent in the liberal peace model's humanitarian rhetoric of societal reconstruction and its economic imperatives, which serve the interests of the elites. The material discussed here suggests that so-called transitional justice interventions may accompany a period of stabilisation, which is good for the global market, but do little to enhance fairness and peace for ordinary people.

Using Cambodia as a case study, this article takes an anthropological stance to explore how the penetration of global neoliberal values impacts upon understandings of moral order and thereby influences gender-based violence in war-torn societies. It argues that the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment programmes and radical free-market reforms affect not only the politico-economic climate but also moral, social and cosmological order. This can generate fears about the decay of 'culture' and, since female propriety is often equated with national virtue, the female body may then be subjected to intense policing and violent disciplining. The article describes how some Cambodian women are responding to violations by seeking moral rehabilitation in the Buddhist temple. Although the patriarchal structure of the temple may seem to be anything but empowering for women, religious participation by violated women makes cultural sense. The material presented here therefore challenges us to consider whether Cambodia's brutal history and supposedly misogynistic culture is experienced as the greatest threat for vulnerable women today, or whether it is the absorption of war-torn societies by the global system, and the cultural disintegration this is felt to engender, that is the more pernicious factor.