Kem Ley and Cambodian Citizenship Today: Grass-Roots Mobilisation, Electoral Politics and Individuals

Abstract

Starting with a bang in 2013 and ending silently in 2017, Cambodia experienced a brief democratic momentum that saw people taking to the streets to demand political change. Kem Ley -a political analyst and grass-roots organiser -provided a rallying point that ordinary Cambodians gathered around particularly after his 2016 murder, yet his political legacy remains meagre. The Grassroots Democratic Party that Kem Ley was involved in setting up commands next to no popular allegiance and performed poorly both in local elections in 2017 and national elections 2018. This article seeks to explore an elusive aspect of Cambodia's democratic momentum: civil society activists moving to engage in electoral politics. It is argued that Cambodian activists have sought to reshape party politics according to civil society logics, but that this has been an ambiguous enterprise with little appeal to a sharply divided electorate.From erupting triumphantly in 2013 to dying with a whimper in 2017, the greatest push for democracy since the 1993 reintroduction of multi-party politics rocked Cambodia. In connection with the 2013 national elections, many ordinary Cambodians took passionate Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden

Civil Society Between Repression and Cooptation: Adjusting to Shrinking Space in Cambodia

“…32–33). Relatedly, several works criticised the neo-liberal donor paradigm of the “New Policy Agenda”, in place since the 1990s, which encouraged the establishment of tripartite state, market, and civil society partnerships (or so-called mixed welfare systems) in the field of social service delivery, while, concurrently, promoting civil society as an accountability mechanism to ensure good governance in a cooperative, non-conflictive manner (e.g., Norman 2014; Öjendal 2014). Öjendal (2014, 26; 27), for instance, lamented a shift “[f]rom advocacy to development” among Cambodian CSOs, which, according to him, was encouraged by “development NGO-ism”.…”

“…Öjendal (2014, 26; 27), for instance, lamented a shift “[f]rom advocacy to development” among Cambodian CSOs, which, according to him, was encouraged by “development NGO-ism”. Similarly, Norman (2014) argued that pressure from the World Bank had led NGOs to shift “[f]rom shouting to counting”. In line with the World Bank's development paradigm, he specified, NGOs had ceased to mobilise demonstrations and other more confrontative forms of advocacy to instead participate in donor-sponsored consultations with government agencies, while, concurrently, professionalising their management systems to conform to donor demands for financial “accountancy” (ibid., 244; 251).…”

“…While the strategy of accepting (partial) cooptation is often effective in enabling Cambodian CSOs to secure their organisational survival and maintain their activities, its success in permitting them to exert social and political influence tends to be limited, owing to the manifold structural limitations embedded in the autocratic political system in which Cambodian civil society operates. Specifically, the participation of CSOs in government consultations, promoted by international donors under the labels of good governance and the establishment of tripartite state, market, and civil society partnerships since the 1990s (e.g., Norman 2014), has often provided the regime with a veneer of democratic legitimacy, while the ability of CSOs to use these fora to influence public policymaking has remained highly circumscribed. During my research, several Cambodian civil society activists argued that the alignment of local CSOs with individual state agencies, in particular the MOI, also had to be seen in the wider context of “power struggle[s] among factions of ruling elites” 84 and “conflict[s] within the ruling party”, which CSOs could tap in order to promote their own interests 85 and strengthen the state “as state” 86 to prevent [or stop] it from merely being a vehicle of the CPP.…”

“…When investing the joint impact of repression and cooptation on civil society, the case of Cambodia is interesting to study, because the country's one-party regime, led by the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), since the 1990s has ruled through a combination of repression and cooptation (Luo and Un 2022; Peou 2019). Concurrently, Cambodia has a sizable CSO community – owing largely to gaps in state service provision and high levels of foreign funding to NGOs (e.g., Coventry 2017; Norman 2014; Springman et al 2022, 2) – that has been long been affected by these regime strategies. From 2013 to 2017, the country experienced a “democratic momentum”, during which the CPP's political dominance was challenged by the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), a political opening that prompted the emergence of new, politically relevant civil society initiatives (Norén-Nilsson 2019; Norén-Nilsson and Eng 2020).…”

A geographer's place matters: Reflections from a ‘local scholar’ and the politics of North/South knowledge production

“…The country's media freedoms have become more and more limited, and critical and activist movements against development have faced crackdowns and violence (Lawreniuk, 2020). The risks are high, particularly for local critical researchers and activists (Lee, 2018; Norén‐Nilsson, 2019; Young, 2019), while Western scholars, who are largely based outside Cambodia, do not face the same threats.…”