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Trade policy is generally considered to be a key leverage in the pursuit of labor norms, environmental standards, and human rights. This is even more so for the European Union (EU), which exerts an extensive market power and exclusive competences in trade while lacking a full-fledged foreign policy. In recent years, there has been a growing demand for making sustainable development provisions "enforceable" and for more frequently applying trade sanctions. Taking a post-development perspective, we interrogate the EU's enforceability discourse around the trade-sustainability nexus. We focus specifically on the conditionality behind the Generalized Scheme of Preferences (GSP). The EU GSP regime bears the "carrot" (reduced tariffs), the "stick" (preferential tariff withdrawals), and increasingly intrusive "monitoring" mechanisms. Drawing on the post-development literature, we problematize the discourses that fundamentally enframe the EU GSP conditionality regime: development through trade, performance of power, and epistemic violence. Empirically, we analyze these frames by looking at public-facing texts produced by policy elites in the EU as well as in Cambodia and the Philippines during the two most recent GSP reform cycles since 2014. We argue that the dominant discursive acts of policy elites in the EU and the two target countries congeal into a global presupposition that there is no alternative to the EU GSP regime, thereby effacing counterhegemonic perspectives and stripping emancipatory notions such as "dialogue" and "partnership" of their radical potential. This formulation demands a genuine commitment to researching with the very people the EU is intent on regulating, reforming, and rescuing to unsettle taken-for-granted views about EU trade sanctions

As a small state, Cambodia viewed the ASEAN and China as almost equally important pillars of its foreign policy. Amid the intense strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific, Cambodia faced the dilemma of how to maintain the ASEAN centrality without diplomatic cost to its key ally China, and how to balance its national interest with regional interest. In this context, the article aimed to explain the importance of the ASEAN as a cornerstone of Cambodia’s foreign policy, examine the motivations of Cambodia’s deep political embrace of the Asian giant, and underline its implications for the Indo-Pacific from the lens of small state foreign policy. The article was based on qualitative, empirical analysis that comprises primary and secondary data pertinent to the current topic. The article concluded that Cambodia leaned more towards China than it did towards the ASEAN, thus weakening its centrality in driving the broader regional architecture and that domestic politics was the primary driving force of Cambodia’s foreign policy towards that direction. At this juncture, Cambodia should step back from the present degree of its strategic engagement with China and look for ways to diversify its relations with other major powers while getting back on the democratic path and upholding human rights.

In the article, considerations are based on the implementation of two main goals of the sustainable development strategy. The differences observed in practice in the group of countries with low and medium-low incomes in closing the poverty gap measured by income and the number of people remaining in poverty over a relatively long period can be modeled by measuring the routine intensity of tasks in a given profession. This is indirectly related to an important classical factor in the measurement of knowledge capital and may be important in the study of the relationship between the convergence strength of the analyzed group of countries and the intensity of routine work, which are always negatively correlated with each other.

article published in Journal of Global Buddhism; Vol 22, No 1 (2021)

This article analyses how and to what extent state regulation of civil society organisations (CSOs) have resulted in elitisation, i.e., the process of obtaining elite status within and beyond civil society. This is studied in the context of emerging democracy in Indonesia and shrinking civic space in Cambodia. Combining Bourdieu's concepts of field and elite with strategic action fields, the article uses data from interviews with civil society leaders. It finds different patterns. In Indonesia, elitisation occurs through a process of CSO formalisation and bureaucratisation, with elites gaining legitimacy owing to their formal offices. As a result, competition for formal positions intensifies: This is particularly notable among national CSO leaders, who may shift their activities to the grassroots level to seek further empowerment and other capitals to legitimise their elite status, facilitate the rise of leaders in existing fields, and create pluralistic forms of elites. Regulations have also resulted in the marginalisation of non-formal elites and shifted the locus of legitimacy from activism to formalism. Meanwhile, in Cambodia, regulatory formalisation and bureaucratisation has not only reduced the space for elite competition and level of competitiveness, but also created ‘most dominant actors' or 'hyper-elites' who are loyal to and support the regime and its priorities while punishing those who do not. This has resulted in a monolithic form of elites.

Elitisation in Cambodian civil society and how such processes relate to holding elite status in the state, electoral politics, and economic fields, is poorly understood. This article seeks to identify different pathways to becoming an elite within and beyond Cambodian civil society. We focus on four case studies, representing different forms of organisations within the sectors of agriculture and youth. Three main questions are explored. Firstly, we identify different forms of capital needed to reach elite status in civil society. Secondly, we explore how elite status within civil society is related to elite status within other fields, by identifying three pathways of boundary-crossing (Lewis, 2008a) from civil society into the state, electoral politics, and economic fields. Thirdly, we map the perceived possibilities and limitations of each field. In exploring these questions, this article argues for a reappraisal of Cambodian civil society, shifting attention to the networks and platforms that fall outside of the dominant focus on professional NGOs. By empirically tracing how elites move between fields, it aspires to provide a better understanding of the contours of, and relations between, civil society and other fields (including government, electoral politics, and business), including in terms of what particular forms of power pertain to each.

Concessions granted to investors in Cambodia have generated a deep sense of insecurity in rural forested areas. Villagers are not confined to a passive “everyday resistance of the poor,” as mentioned by James Scott, insofar as they frequently engage in frontal strategies for recovering land. Such has been the case in the northeastern provinces, where indigenous livelihoods are recurrently threatened by foreign and national companies. But what happens when a land conflict ends up in a stakeholder dialogue? The article intends to follow such a story that occurred for the first time in Ratanakiri, in a vast territory inhabited by several ethnic groups. After gruelling hostilities with the encroacher, dispossessed farmers finally accepted, encouraged by international/national NGOs, to comply with existing mechanisms associated with international law regulations and World Bank procedures. It ends up in an institutionalised mediation, technical and apolitical, which turned to the disadvantage of the people, with evident power imbalance. Our analysis, while portraying the trajectories of national/international actors involved in the mediation process, reveals the effects on this mediation on local sociopolitical organisations.

Struggles revolving around questions of land access and control occupy a central place in the political and social life of contemporary Cambodia. In this study, we examine three cases of struggles against economic [State] land concessions. In a context of unequal power distribution among the actors involved, we elicit the place of the peasantry and its agency to resist and engage in negotiations with multi-level State authorities and market actors. We show how conflict management occurs through hybrid institutions to produce contingent rules that are specific outcomes of the negotiation between actors. Despite the shrinking space of contestation in Cambodia, these contingent rules reveal that opportunities for negotiation can be created for smallholder farmers to protect their land resources. Beyond the specificities of each particular conflict transformation trajectory, we also argue that State land management is a dynamic process that combines a calculus by authorities to retain social legitimacy and reproduce their sovereign power in respect of land.

Education remains one of the main tools to fight poverty, rendering it a pivotal part of policy in developing countries. Nonetheless, education in developing countries is often underfinanced, resulting in a lack of schooling facilities and a low quality of the education provided. Cambodia, the country of interest in this dissertation, lags behind its neighbors due to the echo from the dictatorial rule of the Khmer Rouge and their offensive against the education sector in the 1970s. The education sector in Cambodia feels the consequences even today. Particularly rural students face limited access to career guidance, which prevents them from engaging with their interests. To explore this further, this dissertation is based on an educational Randomized Control Trial (RCT) which combines a personality test with personalized career paths in an electronic application and provides detailed information about high school and vocational training. The focus of the analysis is set on the application and the overall impact of the RCT to see whether students look differently at career information once it is made self-relevant and whether the intervention can encourage students to transition to high school. Survey data is complemented with rich administrative data. The implementation of the RCT took place at the beginning of 2020 and was interrupted by the nation-wide school closure due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. In an effort to speak to students directly after they were told to stay home, our team managed to reach 67% of our initial sample of 3,261 students over the phone. We asked about their studying routine, how they kept up with the curriculum and used their time apart from studying, how they perceived the crisis, and collected background information on their family’s situation. Again, we put the survey answers in the context of administrative data which was collected before and after school closure. The analysis of the application in chapter 2 reveals that most of

In der Friedensforschung ist eine Debatte darüber entbrannt, ob in den 1990er Jahren der Krieg einen Gestaltwandel durchlaufen hat. Während die einen in dieser Debatte einen neuen Krieg aufziehen sehen, betonen die anderen, daß sich der Krieg nicht grundlegend gewandelt hat. Die Debatte ist bislang jedoch nur wenig befriedigend verlaufen. Beide Seiten haben darauf verzichtet, aufgrund operationaler Kriterien systematisch Evidenzen zu erheben. Deshalb wird hier ein Vorschlag unterbreitet, wie dieses Defizit zu überwinden ist. Es werden erstens vier Kriterien herausgearbeitet, die den Gestaltwandel des Krieges beobachtbar machen. Und es werden zweitens anhand dieser Kriterien sechs Kriege untersucht. Damit wird illustriert, daß sich die Debatte mit systematisch erhobenen empirischen Evidenzen bereichern läßt. Dabei deuten die untersuchten Kriege darauf hin, daß sich der Krieg tatsächlich wandelt.

In the realm of global environmental governance, accountability has been key to the debate concerning pervasive environmental deterioration. Among the factors underlying this deterioration, a perceived challenge is the lack of clear mechanisms for identifying to whom the actors in environmental governance in general, and in other sectors, for example, hydropower, agricultural land, mining, and infrastructure in particular, are accountable to for their actions. To investigate the challenge of this situation, this article explores the ways in which the protest movements of grass-roots communities and non-governmental organizations endeavour to hold government and foreign corporations accountable for the actions they have taken which have contributed to environmental degradation in Cambodia. Drawing on two case studies, this article argues that these protest movements have played an increasing role in requiring environmental accountability from both government and corporations.

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.

In this article, we explore the experiences of survivors of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Cambodia as they transition from living in trafficking-specific shelter facilities to living in the community. We analyzed data from Chab Dai's Butterfly Longitudinal Research (BLR) project, a 10-year longitudinal study with survivors of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Cambodia utilizing a prospective panel design. We present findings from our analysis of 236 interviews and narrative summaries of interviews conducted with survivors between the years 2011 and 2016 (n=79). An interpretive phenomenological approach was used to understand survivors' experiences during this transition. Themes included: conflicted feelings about life in the community; difficulties completing school and securing employment; violence in the community; limited follow-up; unfulfilled expectations; feeling loved like a family member in the shelter, but abandoned in the community; vulnerability in the community due to dramatic differences between shelters and the community; and varied experiences with case closure. We underscore the importance of understanding and listening to the voices of survivors about their experiences in the anti-human trafficking sector and discuss implications for the design and implementation of services for survivors of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia., In diesem Beitrag beschäftigen wir uns mit den Erfahrungen von Überlebenden von Menschenhandel und sexueller Ausbeutung in Kambodscha während des Übergangs vom Leben in Schutzeinrichtungen hin zu "normalem" Gemeinschaftsleben. Hintergrund ist das Chab Dai zugehörige "Butterfly Longitudinal Research"-Projekt, eine prospektive Längsschnittstudie. Wir berichten Ergebnisse aus der interpretativ-phänomenologischen Analyse von 236 Interviews, die mit insgesamt 79 Personen zwischen 2011 und 2016 geführt wurden. Themen, die hierbei resultierten, waren konfligierende Gefühle über das Leben in der Gemeinschaft; Schwierigkeiten beim Erlangen von Schulabschlüssen und bei der Arbeitssuche; Gewalt in der Gemeinschaft; begrenzte Nachbereitung und Begleitung; unerfüllte Erwartungen; Erleben von Liebe und Akzeptanz in den Schutzeinrichtungen vs. Verlassenheit und Einsamkeit in der Gemeinschaft; Vulnerabilität infolge drastischer Unterschiede zwischen Schutzräumen und "normalem" Alltagsleben; Erfahrungen mit Entzug der Unterstützung(sleistungen). Abschließend diskutieren wir die Bedeutsamkeit eines Forschungsansatzes, der die Betroffenen selbst zu Wort kommen lässt und mögliche Implikationen aus unserer Studie für das Design und die Implementierung von Diensten für Überlebende von Menschenhandel und sexueller Ausbeutung in Südostasien.

In the end of 2015, ASEAN Community will be fully implemented in Southeast Asia. The community will bring ASEAN countries to the next stage of cooperation in order to bring prosperity to the region. However, several obstacles still have to be faced by ASEAN. Territorial dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia concerning Preah Temple, Malaysia with The Phillipines over Sabah, etc are some of the problems. Other problems related to South China Sea, even involving five ASEAN members on dispute. Although it is clear that member of ASEAN countries agree to settle their problems according to ASEAN mechanism as the most respective organization in the region, on several occasions they prefer to take it bilaterally or bring it to the Hague. The assumption of non-interference principle as the organization conflict solving mechanism does not apply accordingly. As such, we have to find other ways. Peace can only be achieved through closer relations between ASEAN countries. Closer relation creates better understanding between people within those countries. If "high level" (G to G) conflict resolution does not work, we have to turn to the people. Closer relations among its people will be a "grass root" power to force the government to end their dispute. This paper will examine how ASEAN Socio-Culture Community (ASCC), alongside CSO's within them, will work in creating closer relations among ASEAN countries, in order to solve disputes in the region.

Mirroring trends elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Cambodia has witnessed a pronounced shift towards stricter authoritarianism over recent years. The state appears more firmly ruled by prime minister Hun Sen than at any time during the past three decades, while the de facto status of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) more closely resembles the single party regimes of neighboring states. One of the major tools of political control and expansion of authority employed by the hierarchical CPP network is the construction of major infrastructure projects, most notably hydropower dams and irrigation schemes. This article focuses attention on the hydraulic infrastructure aspects of exacting political authority and social control by the elite over the nation, drawing upon Wittfogelian perspectives for a conceptual framework. It maintains that Cambodia increasingly represents a modern variant of a hydraulic society, but primarily functions as a satellite hydraulic state of China. The growing influence of China over Cambodia’s hydraulic development has helped elevate Hun Sen to resemble a neo-classic hydraulic despot. Hydraulic society concepts help provide partial understanding of contemporary power relations and party-state ascendency, including the longevity and resilience of Hun Sen’s supremacy.