Violence, democracy, and the neoliberal ''order'': the contestation of public space in posttransitional Cambodia more

This article was downloaded by: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] On: 23 December 2008 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 782980718] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Annals of the Association of American Geographers Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t788352614 Violence, Democracy, and the Neoliberal “Order”: The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia Simon Springer a a Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Online Publication Date: 31 December 2008 To cite this Article Springer, Simon(2008)'Violence, Democracy, and the Neoliberal “Order”: The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia',Annals of the Association of American Geographers,99:1,138 — 162 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00045600802223333 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045600802223333 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Violence, Democracy, and the Neoliberal “Order”: The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia Simon Springer Department of Geography, University of British Columbia Neoliberal policies explain why authoritarianism and violence remain the principal modes of governance among many ruling elites in posttransitional settings. Using Cambodia as an empirical case to illustrate the neoliberalizing process, the promotion of intense marketization is revealed as a foremost causal factor in a country’s inability to consolidate democracy following political transition. Neoliberalization effectively acts to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the neoliberal rhetoric of order and stability, which can be read through the (re)production of public space. The preoccupation with order and stability serves the interests of capital at the global level and political elites at the level of the nation-state. Citizens themselves may fiercely contest these particular interests in a quest for a more radical democracy, as evidenced by the burgeoning geographies of protest that have emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the posttransition era. Key Words: Cambodia, neoliberalism, public space, radical democracy, violence. Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 Las pol´ticas neoliberales explican por qu´ el autoritarismo y la violencia siguen siendo las principales maneras ı e de gobierno de muchas elitesdirigentes en entornos postransicionales. Utilizando a Camboya como un caso ´ emp´rico para ilustrar el proceso de neoliberaci´ n, se revela la promoci´ n de un mercadeo intenso como el ı o o principal factor causal en la inhabilidad de un pa´s para consolidar la democracia despu´ s de una transici´ n ı e o pol´tica. La neoliberaci´ n act´ a eficazmente para sofocar un florecimiento aut´ ctono de pol´ticas democr´ ticas. ı o u o ı a Tal asfixia sucede bajo la ret´ rica neoliberal de orden y estabilidad, que se puede leer a trav´ s de la (re)producci´ n o e o del espacio p´ blico. La preocupaci´ n con el orden y la estabilidad sirve a los intereses del capital en el ambito u o ´ internacional y a las elites pol´ticas en el nivel naci´ n-estado. Los ciudadanos mismos pueden impugnar fieramente ı o ´ estos intereses particulares en la b´ squeda de una democracia m´ s radical, seg´ n se evidencia por la surgencia de u a u m´ s lugares de protesta que han emergido en los espacios p´ blicos de Camboya en la era postransicional. Palabras a u clave: Cambodia, neoliberalismo, espacio p´ blico, democracia radical, violencia. u T he furtherance of free market reforms, which Cambodia experimented with in the late 1980s (Um 1990; St. John 1997), was a project simultaneous with peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) from February 1992 to December 1993. Alongside a democratic constitution, a liberalized economy was a mandated outcome of what was at the time the largest operation in the history of the United Nations (UN). Despite over a decade passing since UNTAC left Cambodia following the promulgation of a new constitution that marked the beginning of the country’s new life as a democratic and free market state, conditions of repression, surveillance, and intimidation continue in the small Southeast Asian country (Human Rights Watch 2003). The realities of Cambodian political life are far from democratic, open, and just. This article argues that neoliberalization1 is a foremost causal factor in Cambodia’s inability to consolidate democracy, and further explains why authoritarianism remains the principal mode of governance among the country’s ruling elite, an inclination often Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(1) 2009, pp. 138–162 C 2009 by Association of American Geographers Initial submission, February 2007; revised submissions, October 2007 and February 2008; final acceptance, February 2008 Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC. The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia elicited as violence. Democracy is widely recognized as the only justifiable system of government, and as such neoliberals pay lip service to democracy in an effort to facilitate the complicity of national populations in allowing the market to reign supreme (Jayasuriya 2000; Rodan and Hewison 2004). Neoliberalism is conceived as effectively acting to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the rhetoric of order and stability, a language shared by the international financial institutions (IFIs), bilateral donors, and indigenous elites alike. This can be read through Cambodia’s violent geographies, specifically via the (re)production of the country’s public space. Order and stability preserve an economic system that serves to maintain the power and privilege of indigenous elites at the expense of the poor, which in turn entrenches patron–client relations as neoliberalism positions elites to informally control markets and material rewards. Conceptualizing neoliberalism requires an understanding of the complex interplay of local and extralocal forces acting within the global political economy (Peck 2001; Brenner and Theodore 2002). Glassman (1999) alerts us to this notion in his analysis of the Thai state as a concurrently internationalized and internationalizing agent. In focusing exclusively on external forces, we risk producing overgeneralized accounts of a monolithic and ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for local variability and internal constitution. On the other hand, overly concrete or introspective analyses of the local are inadequately attentive to the significant connections and necessary features of neoliberalism as a global project (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002). Accordingly, Peck and Tickell (2002, 383) propose “a processual conception of neoliberalization as both an ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ phenomenon whose effects are necessarily variegated and uneven, but the incidence and diffusion of which may present clues to a pervasive ‘metalogic.’ Like globalization, neoliberalization should be understood as a process, not an end-state.” Such a comprehensive approach to Cambodia’s neoliberalization is taken up here, as I attend to both macro- and micro-levels of analysis. Although order and stability may appear as worthwhile goals, we must ask why “order” always seems to benefit the preservation of the status quo and in whose interest our nations and cities are being “stabilized” (Mitchell 2003b). The preoccupation with order and stability in Cambodia is viewed here as serving the interests of capital at the global level, and political elites at the level of the nation, which are reified primarily 139 (although not exclusively) in the spaces of the capital, Phnom Penh, as cities are increasingly recognized as the primary loci of neoliberalization, “central to the reproduction, mutation, and continual reconstitution of neoliberalism itself” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 375). These particular interests are fiercely contested by a growing number of Cambodians, where such contestation is strongly evidenced in the burgeoning geographies of protest that have emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the post-UNTAC years. The Cambodian experience is of course not unique, and the findings of this article resonate within a larger, global pattern of increased calls for order and stability vis-` -vis democa racy as global marketization intensifies. The violent responses to protest movements challenging neoliberal policies in cities as dispersed as Stockholm, Lilongwe, Seoul, Quebec, Asuncion, Port Moresby, and Istanbul serve as instructive examples of how the unmediated usage of public space and the very practice of democracy have come into conflict with the neoliberal order,2 and highlight how the macro and micro are mutually imbricated. Rather than a singular and fully actualized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, Brenner and Theodore (2002) appropriately encourage us to think in terms of “actually existing neoliberalisms,” where, as protean outcomes of historically specific, internally contradictory, and contextually embedded within national, regional, and local processes of market-driven sociospatial transformation, neoliberalism is continually redefined by the consequences of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and ongoing political struggles. In this sense, and extrapolating from Harvey’s (2005) account of “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics,” this article contemplates “neoliberalism with Cambodian characteristics” and its associated geographies of violence by weaving together the literature on Cambodia with empirical findings obtained from research undertaken in Cambodia over seven months, from June to December 2004. In-depth interviews with thirty-two individuals were conducted, where diverse Cambodian perspectives were obtained using purposeful sampling. Various interest groups were recruited including, among others, human rights workers, university students, teachers, market stall owners, homemakers, motorbike taxi drivers, and civil servants. Interviews provided a forum for collaborative, qualitative research between Cambodian individuals and myself to reveal their perceptions and experiences of violence and democratic processes in an Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 140 Springer use is regulated, is referred to as representation of space, whereas public space as it is actually accessed and used by various social groups is called representational space. This is an important distinction because it draws attention to the difference between the “official” status of a space and the actual ability of various individuals and groups to use it (Arefi and Meyers 2003). Lefebvre’s dichotomy hints at the underlying contestation of all public space insofar as recognizing that space is “not merely an empty container waiting for something to happen, but is both constructed by and the medium of social relations and processes” (Cope 1996, 185, emphasis in original). Representation not only demands space, it also creates it. Accordingly, public space can be conceived as the product of two competing ideologies (Mitchell 2003b). On the one hand, the ordered view constitutes public space as the site of control and is typically associated with authoritarian tradition where panopticism and repression are used to maintain order and stability. This vision is rivaled by the unmediated view, which conceptualizes public space as the site where the voiceless can make their demands seen and heard, as a medium for the contestation of power, and as the space in which identity is constructed, reified, and contested. In short, the unmediated view envisions public space as the crucible of democracy (Ruddick 1996). Much like its counterpart in democracy, public space is a process, never a complete project, always in a state of flux between those who seek to deprive it and those who seek to expand it. Although many scholars recognize the democratic character of public space (Sennett 1978; Habermas 1989; Fraser 1990; Henaff and Strong 2001; Avritzer 2002; Barnett and Low 2004), this idea itself is very much contested. Miles (2002) argues that public space has long been an exclusionary site, with a tenuous relationship to democracy. There is a vast literature on the exclusion from public space of women (Massey 1994; Bondi and Domosh 1998; McDowell 1999), ethnic minorities (Ruddick 1996; McCann 1999; Tyner 2002), gays and lesbians (Duncan 1996; Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter 1997; Casey 2004), the elderly and young (Valentine 1996; O’Neil 2002; Elsley 2004), those with disabilities and special needs (Butler and Bowlby 1997; Freund 2001; Gleeson 1998), and homeless people (Davis 1992; Daly 1998; Mitchell 1997). Yet where else but in public space can excluded groups make themselves seen and demand their inclusion? If at different times spaces may “change in their role for accommodating different social groups” (Atkinson 2003, 1830), surely contesting one’s exclusion and taking effort to overcome some of the silencing that has been characteristic of Cambodia’s current political situation. Participants came from two geographical settings, Phnom Penh and Pursat, to represent the voices of core and periphery dwellers, respectively. These sites were chosen based on previous experience in each, which enabled participant recruitment from a group of people with whom I had already established a high level of mutual trust and rapport, thus reducing the potential dangers of conducting research in settings where speaking out about violence and government oppression represent a significant threat to both participants and researcher (see Hays-Mitchell 2001; Knox and Monaghan 2003). Existing relationships with potential participants also made it appreciably easier to identify additional research participants using snowball sampling. In every instance, participants determined the time and location of the interview. Finally, in an effort to deepen my understanding of the research locale and facilitate deeper rapport with participants, I spent several months in intensive Khmer language training prior to commencing interviewing. I begin this article by examining the theoretical terrain of public space and violence, emphasizing that although open and unmediated public space can provide opportunities for a more radical form of democracy to emerge, public space is often also a space of violence, manifested both as violence from above and violence from below.3 In the empirical sections that follow, I contextualize the theoretical frame of public space, democracy, and violence in posttransitional Cambodia. Through a progressive sharpening of the scalar focus from macrolevel geopolitical stratagems of proxy war, foreign policy doublespeak, and the business of aid, to microlevel programs of interspatial competition, (re)criminalization of the poor, crackdowns on demonstrations, and the resultant contestations of public space, I demonstrate how local elites may come to assimilate global concerns for neoliberalism in ways that are conducive to authoritarianism. Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 Theorizing Public Space and Violence: Placing Order and Stability in the Neoliberal Context Philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) draws a distinction between the visualization and administration of space on the one hand and its materialization on the other. In Lefebvre’s terms, public space that is controlled by government or other institutions, or whose The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia public space forces the very issue and can potentially secure such accommodation and change. Women, minority groups, and the homeless have only achieved entrance to the public through determined social struggle, demanding the right to be seen and heard (Mitchell 1995). Public spaces thus gain political importance when they are taken by marginalized groups and restructured as spaces for representation (Mitchell 2003b). To demand inclusion in a space often means forcibly occupying the space of exclusion, which entails an awareness that the idea of public space has never been guaranteed and by its very definition must be contested through embodied engagement. In contrast to masculinist notions of brute force, this is a question of solidarity, not one of strength. It is precisely the potential for emancipation and collective empowerment that makes an unmediated vision of public space so important and the ordered view so deleterious to vulnerable groups. Although attempts to control public space are clearly present in the disciplinary arsenals of many types of regimes and economic development strategies, in the current context of widespread neoliberalization, elites, corporate state planners, and IFIs such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) frequently challenge the collectively endowed values that citizens attach to public space and espouse the ordered view because they seek to shape public space in ways that limit the threat of democratic social power to dominant economic interests and corresponding neoliberal policy goals (Fraser 1990; Harvey 2001). Although the very nature of space as inherently protean ensures that the already powerful can never achieve total political control (Massey 2005), they may attempt to regulate public space by keeping it relatively free of passion (Duncan 1996). To remove the passion from public space, corporate state planners attempt to create spaces based on a desire for security more than interaction and for entertainment more than democratic politics (Goss 1996). This entails a “Disneyfication” of space (Boyer 1992; Davis 1992), whereby processes of heightened surveillance, commodification, and semiprivate usage become increasingly commonplace. In this light, the struggle for democracy is inseparable from public space, as it is not what is said that is at stake, but rather where it is said. Public protest is easily silenced when important gathering places in a city have all become highly policed public space, or its corollary, private property (Mitchell 2003a). Public space is ideally, in the unmediated view, a medium that allows for embodied self-representation. Thus, when public space is deprived, individuals 141 cannot situate their self-representation existentially. Consequently, contestation is impermissible and selfrepresentation becomes (almost) disembodied in form. When the pendulum swings too far in the direction of the deprivers (i.e., toward the ordered view), the resulting deprivation of public space has two apparent consequences: (1) the erosion of individual volition resulting in a submissive population, presumably the desired effect of the ordered view; or (2) the materialization of “hidden transcripts” and occasional violent outbursts against those who oppress public space, representing a rebellion against a cruel dominant–subordinate relationship (Scott 1990), and the undesired effect of the ordered view. Where marginalization, exclusion, and vulnerability generate fear, violence becomes one of the only practicable forms of public self-representation (Hyndman 2007), and in this sense it can be an invigorating and liberating process for those who participate (Arendt 1958). Often it is only by being violent that excluded groups have gained access to the public spaces of democracy and acquired what Lefebvre (1996) refers to as “the right to the city” (Honderich 1980; Mitchell 1996). Deutsche (1996, 278) has convincingly demonstrated that “conflict is not something that befalls an originally, or potentially, harmonious urban space. Urban space is the product of conflict.” This is the paradox of democracy, because without competition and conflict, there cannot be a democratic polity. Any society that sanctions political conflict, however, runs the risk of it becoming too intense, producing a strife-ridden society where civil peace is jeopardized (Mitchell 1996). Democracy is premised on the idea of managing conflicts nonviolently or, in other words, the idea of trading bullets for ballot boxes. Yet a contradiction exists, as many democracies are born in the violence of revolution and few wish to recognize how intimately related ballots and bullets are (Rapoport and Weinberg 2001). Indeed, the classic passage by Thomas Jefferson that states “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” (quoted in Le Vine 2001, 261) suggests that violence is imperative to democratic renewal. This quote also hints at the emancipatory potential of violence, where despite arguments from those who seek to protect the status quo in the name of order and stability, violence from below may generate reallocations of wealth and open paths to political empowerment (Honderich 1980; Iadicola and Shupe 2003).4 Furthermore, we must remember that what constitutes violence (much like crime) is often defined from above (McIlwaine 1999). That is, the “legitimacy” of Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 142 Springer weak or absent (Peck 2001; Plehwe and Walpen 2006). Thus, neoliberalization has made states differently powerful, where instead of a reduction in the “size” of the national state, the hollowing out process characteristically involves a coinciding “roll-back” and “roll-out” of state functions (Peck 2001). Moreover, it is not the state per se that is being hollowed out but “a historically and geographical specific institutionalization of the state, which in turn is being replaced, not by fresh air and free markets, but by a reorganized state apparatus” (Peck 2001, 447). Such “hollowing out” undermines the capacity of states to attend adequately to the needs of their citizenry by exacerbating the social circumstances that underscore conflict, namely by perpetuating inequality. Ultimately, repression is frequently used to protect state power and maintain control (Welsh 2002). Accordingly, the reorganized state apparatus is by nature decidedly authoritarian in its character. Neoliberalization is a process that replaces Keynesian-style redistributions such as progressive taxation, income transfer programs, and social service delivery with a regressive regime of market discipline, in which new modes of state intervention either trap the working poor between unemployment and dead-end service jobs or actively enforce their involvement through the (re)criminalization of poverty, large-scale incarceration, social surveillance, and a range of microregulatory interventions that ensure persistent “job readiness” (Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002; Coleman 2004). In Cambodia, this is adequately illustrated by increasingly common acts of regulation, disciplining, and containment of the already marginalized or newly dispossessed poor through crackdowns on unions and forced evictions. Preventative measures used to realize the ordered view of public space, such as prohibition of assembly, may reduce the frequency and scale of demonstrations in the short term, but they ultimately alienate the population and spawn more violence as they increase the likelihood of clashes between police and activists on an extended timeline (Tilly 2003). This is precisely why Warner (2002, 70) maintains, “any distortion or blockage in access to a public [space] can be so grave, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated.” Violence begets more violence, which counteracts the ultimate goal of a nonviolent society. Recognition and acceptance of the unmediated view of public space by all interested parties offers the only tenable solution to this vicious cycle. Unfortunately, as this article will demonstrate, democracy as public space is a vision that neoliberalism is unwilling and indeed incapable of accommodating. violence in a given society relates to whether it furthers or threatens the social order. Consequently, the elimination of violence from below in public space has often been the exclusion of those who are a priori defined as illegitimate and thus threatening to the existing order (Mitchell 2003b). Moreover, the “existing order” increasingly means the economic order, as there is “a growing corporate stamp on the monopoly on violence” (Atkinson 2003, 1834). The corollary of the corporatization of violence is neoliberalism and, accordingly, it is the victims of capitalism (the poor) and those without property (homeless people) who are recast as both the transgressors of public space and dangerous perpetrators of violence (Davis 1992; Mitchell 1997). The question of legitimacy is at bottom one of authority, literally referring to that which is justifiable based on existing laws, which are themselves determined by the already powerful and implemented through means of violence, whether implied or actualized (Blomley 2000, 2003). Thus, contra conventional wisdom, it is violence (and its monopolization and obfuscation through law) that paradoxically determines legitimacy in contemporary societies. So whereas order defines legitimacy in its own terms through either explicit or implicit violence, unmediated public space recognizes democracy by igniting debate about what is legitimate and illegitimate (Deutsche 1996). This is precisely why neoliberalism is so concerned with privatizing space, because the pervasiveness of the contemporary property regime, and its associated violence, places the legitimacy of private space seemingly beyond question (Blomley 2000, 2003). The unmediated vision of public space, a view that understands a collective right to the city, is thus increasingly threatened everywhere that neoliberal ideology has planted its seeds (Mitchell 2003b). Amid widespread privatization and spending cuts, which are concomitant to the IFIs’ promotion of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), “[explicit] violence has become . . . an attempt by embattled nation-states to regain their footing” (Ungar 2002, 49), meaning that violence from above is often the result of a state that has been transformed by following the neoliberal doctrine. Neoliberalism rhetorically advances the notion that to optimize individual freedom and economic efficiency, all that is needed is for the “interventionist” welfare state to step aside. Yet with paradoxical simultaneity, neoliberalism impels “deregulationist” states to assume markedly officious measures so as to produce or mobilize markets where competitive forces were formerly Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia 143 Cambodia’s Geopolitical Struggles: From Cold War Proxy to the Washington Consensus During the late twentieth century, Cambodia hosted nearly three decades of war, marked most significantly by three appalling atrocities. First, a merciless bombing campaign led by the United States turned neutral Cambodia into a napalm inferno and left approximately 600,000 dead as the Vietnam War spilled across its borders (Kiljunen 1984). Second, there was an autogenocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime, where in a population of 7 million at the time, an estimated 1.5 million people died as a result of overexertion, malnutrition, disease, and execution (Heuveline 2001).5 Third, with Cold War geopolitics continuing to command the foreign policy agendas of many global north governments, there was a decade of silence on behalf of the international community following the tragedy of the Pol Pot era, as it was communist Vietnam that had brought down the Khmer Rouge regime and continued to govern Cambodia as a client state throughout the 1980s (Kiernan 1996). As the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, and the global political climate shifted, the Cambodian question that had been allowed to fester for a decade could finally be answered. Democracy came to Cambodia in 1993, following a UN-sponsored transition intended to provide a final solution to the country’s ongoing civil war. These unfolding events in Cambodia took place during a time of monumental change at the global level. The early 1970s marked the beginning of an economic paradigm shift, as disillusion with the record of state involvement in social and economic life swept over the global north, leading to a new economic orthodoxy that believed the most efficient economic regulator is to “leave things to the market” (Rapley 2004). With this emergent neoliberalism, or what Williamson (1990) once identified as the Washington Consensus, the involvement of the state in the economy was deemed overly bureaucratic and thus an inefficient and unnecessary drain on public coffers. To address the growing debt crisis, development aid was exported to the global south primarily via the auspices of the WB and IMF in the form of SAPs prescribing deregulated markets to promote free trade, streamlined taxation, and the selloff of public enterprises and state-owned corporations. Throughout the 1980s, SAPs were not part of the platform used to push markets into Cambodia. Instead, the first half of the decade saw de facto privatization creep across the country, and in response to the emerging sea change in global geopolitics, the Cambodian government introduced a number of economic reforms in 1989, consisting of changes to land tenure, tax, and marketing policies; a new investment law designed to attract foreign capital; and a separation of the state from production through the reduction of subsidies and the privatization of state-owned businesses (Um 1990; St. John 1997). These reforms came on the heels of Cambodian leader Hun Sen’s visit with the staunchly capitalist Thai Prime Minister Chatichai, who was vocal in his desire to transform Indochina “from a battlefield to a market place” (Um 1990, 97). The timing of the Cambodian reforms was not incidental, as the fall of the Soviet Union that same year signalled to Cambodian elites that the communist era had ended, leaving autarky or the free market economics of the West as the two most obvious remaining options. With Chatichai’s coaxing, the Cambodian government decided to get on board early, presumably in the hope of securing new international patrons before the rush of other former Soviet satellites came to the same conclusion. Furthermore, the lack of SAPs throughout the 1980s was not due to unsuitability of the economy per se; rather, it was a case of Cambodia still being under Vietnam’s communist wing and the West’s reluctance to get further embroiled in the Indochina quagmire. The UNTAC mission of the early 1990s effectively rectified this problem, where under the banner of “democracy,” a host of neoliberal reforms washed in along with the expediting and expansion of those already started by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) in the late 1980s. Although globalization of the economy is not a new experience for the global south, and has deep historical roots in both Southeast Asia and Cambodia, the amplification of this process under SAPs is new.6 The result has been a constricted ability of most states to regulate their economies, which often translates into declining local control over social and political conditions (Riddell 2003). In line with a fundamentalist orthodoxy that ensures that democracy is only extended to the realm of the political, as a preordained economic system remains insulated from popular concern (Abrahamsen 2000), the architects of UNTAC made certain that neoliberalism, an ideology derived from a very different context in the post-Keynesian west, was a requirement of Cambodia’s posttransitional government. From this perspective, it is possible to see UNTAC as concerned not with democracy per se but rather with conferring legitimacy on a regime that had recently emerged from Vietnamese Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 144 Springer sert its control over key resources in order to translate its position into effective power, if not comprehensive statehood” (Le Billon and Springer 2007, 19; see also Le Billon 2000). The phrase shadow state is borrowed from Reno (1995), who uses it in the context of Sierra Leone to refer to a system through which leaders draw authority from their abilities to informally control markets and material rewards. The shadow state response allows elites to amass extraordinary wealth that is pocketed rather than put back into developing the country, as this money is obtained through unofficial channels. Potential rivals are bound to the rulers in exchange for largesse, negating the creation of strong bureaucracies that could potentially heighten independent tendencies among elites. Such actually existing neoliberalism thereby allows systems of clientelism and patronage to continue. In the Cambodian context, the shadow state response became an answer to the political challenges posed by neoliberal governance, whereby in addition to being a means of allocating goods and services, the market was used as a form of social regulation (Graf 1995). Rather than opposing the dominant neoliberal paradigm, the Cambodian polity, when placed into a transitional phase, had an interest in coopting its general shell in an effort to reshape it into an instrument of coercive power and subsequently to benefit from the opportunities it presented elites for self-enrichment (Le Billon and Springer 2007). Thus, the popular assertion among Cambodians that mafia governs their country is only partially correct. The term mafia implies criminality, so whereas CPP’s consolidation of wealth has been in some respects illicit, they have primarily used “legitimate” means of accumulation by dispossession (see Harvey 2005; Glassman 2006) through the framework provided to them by the neoliberal model. In addition to violence, whether latent or realized, such legitimation also includes the ability to control the privatization of public assets insofar as ensuring that the members of the ruling party and their inner circle of clients end up with the private rights to ownership. clientelism and whose leader, Hun Sen, was already proving himself committed to a neoliberal cause. When immediately following the UNTAC mission CPP lost the 1993 elections to Prince Norodom Ranariddh and his FUNCINPEC party (a French acronym for National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Co-operative Cambodia), the international community was effectively stunned. Yet this unexpected turn of events was ultimately of little consequence, as a blind eye was turned when CPP, still in control of the military (a major failing of UNTAC to be sure), refused to accept FUNCINPEC’s electoral victory. Threatening secession of all the land to the east of the Mekong River and the resumption of civil war, Hun Sen was allowed to force his way into a co-prime ministerial position (Peou 2000). The official explanation for UNTAC’s acceptance of an outcome inconsistent with the election results is that it was not in a position to confront CPP militarily (Boutros-Ghali 1995). A skeptical view suggests that Cambodia was preordained as the UN’s successful peacekeeping model, and to avoid having the whole operation blow up in its face, the UN agreed to preside over the creation of an inauspicious coalition between CPP and FUNCINPEC (Roberts 2001). Even more critical would be to posit that if the mockery Cambodian elites made of democracy and peace was so easily disregarded (see later in the discussion of the 1997 coup d’´ tat), then the final aspect e of Cambodia’s triple transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to free market was clearly given precedence over the other two. As the Cambodian state is increasingly both neoliberalized and undergoing internationalization (Glassman 1999) in its developmental agenda, planning agencies, decision-making powers, and economic orientation as each becomes increasingly integrated into transnational circuits of capital and expertise (Sneddon 2007), what makes actually existing neoliberalism in Cambodia distinctly Cambodian is how local elites co-opted, transformed, and rearticulated neoliberal reforms. This has been done in such a way that reinforces existing patron–client relations through a framework that initially “asset stripped” foreign resources brought in to support the building of the liberal peace (Richmond and Franks 2007). Later in the transitional process came the instrumentalization of violence in one major sector of the national economy, where through means of plundering Cambodia’s forests, “shadow state” strategies were used “as coping mechanisms by a political leadership struggling to as- Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 Legitimizing a Coup d’´ tat: Donor Apathy e and the Business of Foreign Aid Partisan fighting continues to mar the Cambodian landscape, the most obvious incident being the bloody CPP-led coup of July 1997, which effectively terminated the power-sharing arrangement made following the 1993 elections. Although the coalition government The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia was officially continued, Hun Sen handpicked Ranariddh’s replacement, Ung Huot, who amounted to little more than a CPP puppet.7 Nevertheless, most multilateral and bilateral donors refused to label the July violence a coup and were largely indifferent to the impact this event had on Cambodian democracy. Prior to the coup, donors emphasized their support was contingent on Cambodia’s continued path toward democracy. Further democratization, however, was not the primary objective. Instead, “[p]olitical stability for economic development was [the international community’s] top concern” (Peou 2000, 379). In contrast to the period from 1993 to 1995 when donors attached few conditionalities to their aid, the year 1996 marked the beginning of donor demands, primarily directed at the promotion of stability, which may have encouraged Hun Sen to justify his coup against Ranariddh (Peou 2000). Thus, although aid was reduced following the coup from the amount of US$475 million, pledged at the Consultative Group Meeting (CGM) just days before the coup on 1–2 July 1997, to US$375.4 million (Peou 1998), the reduction was temporally insignificant as stability was soon restored with Hun Sen at the helm. The amount of aid actually dispersed to a recipient country rarely equals the amount pledged by donors. Cambodia typically receives approximately 60 percent of the amount pledged each year (Marston 2002). In this regard, 1997 may be viewed as a “good” year for Cambodia’s aid business, as the actual disbursement figure was approximately 79 percent of the total pledged amount. Moreover, as early as late July during an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced that Washington was already prepared to wipe the slate clean for Hun Sen (Peou 2000). CPP was only required to denounce the use of force against opposition parties and allow Ranariddh to return to Cambodia to participate in elections scheduled for 1998. As for multilateral donors, the IMF did not have to respond to the incident, as it had been withholding Cambodia’s SAPs since May 1996 due to its vexation with the scandalous deforestation taking place as a shadow state response to its prescribed forestry concession model (Le Billon 2000; Le Billon and Springer 2007). Although the WB did temporarily suspend aid to Cambodia in 1997, this seemed to be an act of solidarity with the IMF rather than disapproval of the July military confrontation, as the announcement was not made until 23 September 1997. The WB’s statement was prepared in conjunction with the IMF, which at 145 that time publicized that it was suspending further assistance to Cambodia, not because of the disdain that was shown for democracy in July, but as a result of the Royal Government of Cambodia’s (RGC) inability to meet its economic conditions (Tith 1998). China did not try to hide its favoritism of Hun Sen, saying it would not interfere with the will of the Cambodian people (Peou 2000), a position also held by France, which made it known that it viewed Hun Sen as the only guarantor of stability (Bjornlund and Course 1998). Japan, the largest bilateral donor to Cambodia, vowed to maintain its assistance plan and justified this position by contending that Hun Sen had promised to preserve the country’s democratic institutions and coalition government (Liz´ e 2000). The nee oliberal pragmatism of ASEAN was also evident. The group considered CPP’s use of force “unfortunate” and Cambodia’s admission into ASEAN was delayed “until a later date,” but at the same time, the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states was reaffirmed and ASEAN investors continued to move in (Peou 2000). Although the Americans temporarily suspended aid, the deferral only lasted a total of thirtyfive days, as humanitarian aid (half of the $35 million pledged) was formally resumed on 8 August 1997 (Human Rights Watch 1997). The near universal refusal among donors to label the events of July 1997 as a coup implicitly conferred legitimacy on Hun Sen’s violent ascendancy, thereby betraying democratic processes in favor of the stability offered by the entrenched power of Hun Sen’s regime. The insignificant reduction in aid and lukewarm response to the coup are not surprising if we consider that observers like Kevin (2000) and Roberts (2001) view the July upheaval as marking a transition from violence to politics, one that would supposedly bring about increased stability as Hun Sen was able to consolidate his hegemonic position. That the coup itself was a brazen display of violence and, in the long run, by virtue of the apathetic response, irrelevant to most donors is closely related to the very question of aid. This is a query that is ultimately not about whether aid contributes directly to the development process but one of interests. In contrast to Pronk (2001), who contends that aid should not be selective and instead used as a catalyst for development through conditionalities, Petras and Veltmeyer (2002) argue that aid is more accurately considered a catalyst of regression and an aid to imperialism insofar as a realist approach informs us that it has historically been used by aspiring hegemonic states to conquer markets and promote the interests of their Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 146 Springer nomics before and separate from politics. Rather than recognizing the politically constructed character of all economic relations, neoliberal economics posits a distinct separation between the economy and politics, as though states and markets are diametrically opposed principles of social organization (Robison 2004). To interpret neoliberalism as nothing more than an economic reform agenda overlooks a critical element of its strength. It is also a political doctrine that prescribes a preferred social and political order, whereby the depoliticization of policymaking that neoliberalism envisages is a specific conception of how power should operate, and who should be exercising it (Rodan and Hewison 2004). This helps to explain why many Cambodian scholars, still preoccupied with the country’s communist past, have been slow to recognize the neoliberalization of the contemporary Cambodian state. Moreover, such partitioning misreads (or more accurately ignores) how power is actually operationalized in a capitalist system. Accordingly, the Cambodian government is frequently accused of cronyism in reference to the cozy relationships between politicians and the agents of capital (Dixon 2002). Yet, we can rightly ask when in any capitalist system have the agents of capital not been intimately connected with politicians? Indeed, it is this very hallmark of capitalism whose character is obfuscated by the orthodox neoliberal view. Speaking of the Cambodian context, Peang-Meth (1997, 290–91) comments on the pious meaning of democracy in U.S. foreign policy and the precedence order is given in contemporary geopolitics: Non-western states have continued to embrace stability and order as a first priority, but the west, notably the United States, which has preached individual rights, freedom and democracy, has declined to intervene in conflicts where order has been preserved at the expense of human rights and freedom. The United States has, by inference, sanctioned an international norm of conduct that prizes stability and preservation of the status quo when these would be threatened by aggressive advocacy and individual rights and freedom. capitalist classes against both other competitors and national socialist opponents (see also Escobar 1995; Leys 1996; Rist 1997). Because the neoliberal model provokes greater inequalities, decreases the share of labor, and increases the share of corporate (especially foreign) wealth in national incomes (Cox 2002; Rapley 2004), foreign aid, whether by selectivity or conditionality, simply hastens the introduction of policies responsible for the maldistribution of national income by promoting and ensuring the adoption of neoliberal reforms. Donors are biased in favor of rewarding pro-market and tradeoriented policies on the part of aid-receiving countries, thus clearly introducing ideological and political elements about the socioeconomic order into a seemingly technocratic discussion about the prerequisites of governance (Hout 2004). Whereas an idealist approach is content to view foreign aid as a disinterested policy, divorced from the interests of a capitalist class and thus geared exclusively toward humanitarian concerns, the historical-structural context demonstrates otherwise, as the social component of foreign aid has little, if any, effect in compensating for the loss of income shares and for the slashing of social allocations in national budgets (Petras and Veltmeyer 2002). The fact that throughout East Asia brutal authoritarian regimes such as Indonesia under Soeharto and South Korea under Syngman Rhee “were encouraged, so long as they promoted political stability, were anticommunist, and protected the development of economic systems that were broadly capitalist,” confirms that contra the rhetoric of western modernization, it was the threat to capitalism, not democracy, that was the principal driver of foreign policy in the region (Rodan and Hewison 2004, 386). In the end, like his East Asian counterparts, Hun Sen was not required to act democratically; all that mattered was that his government remained committed to further neoliberalization. Had the speculative notion of a Ranariddh “counter-coup” materialized (Kevin 2000; Roberts 2001), whether FUNCINPEC committed themselves to democratization or otherwise, this also would have been inconsequential, so long as a neoliberal outlook was maintained. The trampling of democratic norms, although publicly described as regrettable, is given implicit support as long as such subversions run parallel to the projects of stability and order. The periodic lamentations of donors represent a convenient political tool, as they encourage us to focus our view inward on Cambodia’s democratic shortcomings. Yet this is a priori an Orientalizing gaze (Said 2003), as we are never encouraged to pull the lens back to examine how donors themselves place eco- Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 Thus, instead of coming from democratic consolidation, a long-term project for which the juggernaut of global capitalism is not prepared to wait, stability in Cambodia came in the form of Hun Sen consolidating his grip on power. Even as the country’s transition to democracy lay in shambles by the end of 1997, the transition to free market economics was in fine form as the neoliberal agenda was preserved by a government committed to The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia its three basic tenets: privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. 147 Taking Space for Representation: The Democracy Square Movement and the Neoliberal Response With Ranariddh’s return in March 1998 after nine months in exile, Cambodia’s political leaders agreed to hold parliamentary elections again in July 1998 (Hughes 2003b). The donor community had focused foreign policy responses to the 1997 coup on the need for the 1998 elections to be “free and fair”; however, Ranariddh’s presence did little to improve the prospects of such conditions as the campaign was once again marred by intimidation and CPP domination of the media (Downie 2000). While coercion undoubtedly facilitated CPP’s electoral victory, the party failed to capture enough of the popular vote to form a majority government. Although a political stalemate ensued, the postelection period saw something remarkable occur. In a strong showing of solidarity, Cambodians began gathering by the thousands in Democracy Square on 24 August 1998 to protest the results of the election (Eckardt and Chea Sotheacheath 1998).8 Denying the from below spirit of the movement, the opposition parties claimed responsibility for the demonstrations that followed and many foreign diplomats uncritically accepted this claim (Grainger and Chaumeau 1998). Cambodia observer Caroline Hughes (2003b), who was on hand during the demonstrations and conducted numerous interviews with participants, suggests this was a spontaneous uprising as many of the demonstrators were refugees from the provinces who fled following rumors of retaliation against those who failed to vote for CPP. Rural surveillance was effected preelection primarily via the politics of gift giving, whereby villagers were inducted into the party at public ceremonies in exchange for token gifts or cash. Refusal to participate marked one as an outsider, making party loyalties well known in the community and increasing the likelihood of postelection retributive violence against those who declined gifts. Local authorities organized largesse, and those who did not partake could expect any current or future livelihood assistance to be curtailed. Although poll-watching agencies assured voters that party membership did not require one to vote for that particular party, during gift receiving ceremonies villagers were often required to swear Buddhist oaths of loyalty, placing traditional notions of merit and honor at stake. Widespread rumors that polling stations were monitored by satellite and that voting card numbers were being entered into computers that could track each vote further intensified villagers’ notions of CPP omniscience (Hughes 2006). The urban protest environment provided a sense of empowerment and solidarity, where the gaze of the international community and media was a virtual sanctuary in comparison to the panoptic conditions of the rural village where individuals were required to keep their views secret if they valued their physical and economic well-being. Hughes (2003b) suggests that many protesters came to express both dissatisfaction with the election results and dismay with the social and economic marginalization they faced in their daily existence. This finding places Willner’s (1972, 353) assertion that public protests are often “manifest expressions of deeper, broader, latent dissatisfactions” in the Cambodian context, where the disaffections expressed by participants were derived from the “sacrifices” made for development under the prescriptions of the neoliberal order; that is, the grinding poverty, pronounced inequality, and harrowing socioeconomic insecurity of their daily lives.9 In this context, Democracy Square became a liberatory space of self-discovery and self-exposure in which those normally subjected to the panoptic surveillance of the village could situate their embodiment by actively taking the spaces of the capital for public unmediated use. The protests continued for three weeks before taking a violent turn on 7 September 1998, when Hun Sen found pretext to move against the demonstrations following a grenade explosion near his home in Phnom Penh (Moorthy and Samreth Sopha 1998). The Prime Minister called for the arrest of opposition leaders, dispatching hundreds of riot police to destroy the protesters’ encampment and quell the movement. Although violence from below was minimal, violence from above was apparent as the crowds were broken up by armed forces using rifle butts and clubs to beat protesters into submission, resulting in one civilian death (“Democracy Square flattened” 1998). When this failed to clear out the park, the police returned two days later, this time using electric cattle prods, gunfire, and a bulldozer (“Democracy Square Flattened” 1998). Two monks were killed in the skirmishes with police, provoking public outrage (Pok Sokundara and Moorthy 1998). Hun Sen quickly moved to forbid monks from taking part in protests and then banned demonstrations altogether. Many Cambodians defied the ban, and the following day approximately 8,000 people again took to the streets in a march led by monks (Chea Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 148 Springer Strong states have appropriate capacity and can legitimize themselves without recourse to explicit violence by listening to and addressing citizens’ demands; that is, through the very practice of democracy (Welsh 2002). In contrast, as a weak state with a policy orientation that lacks interest in meeting the needs of the populace, RGC predictably takes an authoritarian stance, resorting to violence to regain its footing when citizens begin to make their demands known in the spaces of the public. In Migdal’s (1988) rendering, there are two facets to a weak state. The first concerns the relative distribution of power between state and society, in particular between the state and dominant interests in the private sector of the economy, thus the question of “state autonomy.” The second facet can be defined as “state capacity,” which draws heavily on the Weberian dichotomy of patrimonial and rational-bureaucratic polities. On this basis, Hutchison (2001, 56) contends that “a weak state is one in which relatively little distinction is made between the personal interests and official duties of decision-makers in the executive, legislature, and/or bureaucracy and, therefore, is one in which the policy-making process is constantly stymied by particularistic demands.” If we accept that neoliberalization is an elite-driven project as it so clearly seems to be,10 then neoliberalism appears more appropriate to the conditions that underline weak states, as the desires of the capitalist class coincide with, and indeed come to dominate the policy orientation, making “particularistic demands” a hallmark of the neoliberalized state. The striking similarities to Cambodia’s shadow state response outlined earlier should not go unnoticed here. Moreover, in contrast to the common misconception that authoritarian regimes constitute strong states, Jomo (2003) suggests that authoritarianism is actually indicative of weak states in the sense that they are unable to secure legitimacy among the population, thus requiring overtly repressive measures to maintain order. The lack of consultation with the general population as to the economic character of the state, coupled with reduced access to social provisions for the poor—who continue to constitute an overwhelming majority in most states of the global south—means that accountability has a lacunate quality in the neoliberal state. This ultimately works to further adhere neoliberalism to an authoritarian disposition as it seeks to fill the legitimacy vacuum with blatant violence, rather than its dormant implication (Canterbury 2005). Such a repressive pattern is observable in The Cambodia Daily headlines presented in Table 1,11 where violence from above is seen as a persistent feature of RGC’s attempt to govern the nation. Sotheacheath and Eckardt 1998). Responding to the specter of violence from above, some of the protesters reacted with the threat of violence from below, as several marchers armed themselves with sticks, stones, and guns (Peou 2000). The totalitarian armor of Cambodia’s deprivers of public space was starting to crack as their control over the public domain had become too intense. This dominance resulted not in the continued submissiveness of the population but from the perspective of those in power, the undesired effect of violent outbursts from below against the oppression of an exploitative social order. The government crackdown continued and eventually the protests subsided. During the demonstrations, twenty-six lives were lost (Peou 2000), and in the days following the crackdown another eighteen bodies were discovered lying in irrigation ditches, ponds, and rivers around Phnom Penh (Bou Saroeun 1998). As for the political deadlock, it was finally settled on 25 November 1998, when Ranariddh struck a deal with Hun Sen to form a new coalition government (Hayes 1998). The pandemonium that swelled in the postelection period can be viewed as consequential to a lack of what Taylor (1991, 167) calls “independence of action,” a situation that becomes acutely manifest during election periods in Cambodia given the predominance of voter intimidation. Such lack of freedom results from violence from above creating a virtual absence of public space, which “enable[s] and facilitate[s] the expression of extremes of violence [from below]” (Taylor 1991, 167). In this sense, the mobilization of the populace and the occasional manifestation of violence from below were insurrectionary acts against those in power. By contesting RGC’s visualizations and administrations of public spaces and remaking them as spaces for representation, Cambodians were actively rediscovering that the strongest source of power stems from their own solidarity. RGC’s use of violence from above and the crackdown on the demonstrations, although successful in the immediate sense, can only have alienated large segments of the population. Accordingly, this suggests a crisis of legitimacy for RGC, which, as a state made differently powerful via neoliberalization, cannot adequately address the demands of citizens to improve their living standards. This explains why Hughes (2003b) found that so many of the demonstrators she interviewed expressed other latent dissatisfactions. Constrained by neoliberal policy objectives, the violent response of RGC is akin to a caged animal, where “showing teeth” is but a last-ditch effort to maintain authority. Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia Table 1. Symptoms of a weak state Headline Rights group reports rise in political slayings Union leader found gagged, unconscious Groups say police beat protesting villagers Police accused of violence at Poipet eviction Garment workers report death threats Minister condemns stripping, beating of striking policemen Factory protest broken up by tear gas, force Police kill five Poipet protesters Sam Rainsy activist beaten to death Soldiers disperse factory strike with gunfire Source: The Cambodia Daily, compiled by author. Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 149 Date 18 June 2004 25 June 2004 10 August 2004 15 September 2004 8 October 2004 2 December 2004 23 February 2005 22 March 2005 4 April 2005 6 April 2005 Secured Hegemony or Forced Retreat? Demonstrations, Denial, and Democratic Awakening Between 1999 and 2002, the Hun Sen–led RGC began to ease up on its overt domination of Cambodian public space, as authorities repeatedly turned a blind eye to most demonstrations held during these years (Hughes 2003b). This retreat from public space coincided with the modified public persona of Hun Sen, who no longer portrayed himself as Cambodia’s strongman (Osborne 2000). Although Hun Sen’s withdrawal may appear to suggest that CPP was beginning to comply with international pressure to respect the country’s constitutional freedoms of expression and assembly given their position of aid dependency, the reality is much different. In the first instance, international pressure to conform to democratic norms was hardly acute, as illustrated earlier in the discussion of donor responses to the 1997 coup. Peou’s (2000) analysis provides an alternative interpretation, suggesting that CPP’s new approach is better explained in terms of the party’s renewed confidence following its 1998 electoral victory. The new coalition government was very much a one-sided affair, as FUNCINPEC was an internally divided party due to both its near breakup in the wake of the 1997 coup and the poor leadership skills of Prince Ranariddh, who many donors perceived as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt (Roberts 2001). The problem that the Khmer Rouge insurgency posed for the ruling party, which resumed in 1992 following their abrupt withdrawal from the UN peace process, had also evaporated after the defection of several high-ranking soldiers in 1997 and 1998 (Peou 1998). The guerrilla group disintegrated altogether following the death of Pol Pot in April 1998 (Sainsbury 1998). This all appears to suggest that the hegemony of CPP was relatively stable. With elections not set to occur again until 2003, public opinion and particularly demonstrations appeared, at least outwardly, to be of little consequence to the dominant party. The International Crisis Group (2000, 15) accordingly observed a marked decline in violence directed toward opposition members in 1999 but also warned that “this should not lead observers to conclude the government or the CPP has qualitatively changed its ways. Rather, the reverse is true: with one party clearly in charge of the country—and in possession of most of the weapons— few are willing to mount challenges.” Overt violence against opposition elements may have decreased, but Therefore, from the perspective of a weak government seeking to retain power, the attempt to create and enforce an orderly public space takes precedence over the allowance of democracy as public space. Weak governments fear unmediated public spaces, as penetrating criticisms will inevitably arise to an extent unseen in strong, accountable, democratic regimes. In spite of the massive resistance that followed the 1998 election, a movement that reflected a burgeoning of democratic empowerment from below, the international community was quick to declare the elections free and fair so that it could return to business as usual with the Cambodian government. This position represents an affront to the will of the Cambodian people, clearly illustrating the willingness of donors to lend support to an unpopular and authoritarian leader in the name of order and stability (read business interests and capital) over the potential for genuine democratic awakening.12 To some Cambodians, the donor community’s espousal of democracy now appeared as little more than a boldfaced lie: Some people in the international community just come to do business, and play with the prostitutes, so I don’t have any confidence in them. And also in 1998, a lot of Cambodian people [were] doing the demonstration about the election results in Phnom Penh, but the international community still recognize and support the election results. . . . I also want the international country stop betray[ing] the Cambodia people because I think that when they donate the aid to Cambodia, I think some countries also have their own interests [in mind]. (Interview, small business owner, male, age 47, 23 September 2004, Phnom Penh) 150 Springer demonstrations to make a meeting at the public spaces and . . . to discuss about politics in the public spaces. (Interview, monk, male, age 27, 3 November 2004, Pursat, conducted in English) It is very important for democracy [for people to be able to protest in public space] because the democracy means they need the many idea of the people, and [when people demonstrate] they think about the people as bigger than the government . . . and because the people can say everything, can speak altogether no problem. (Interview, high school teacher, male, age 25, 6 November 2004, Pursat) the notion that few were willing to mount challenges is erroneous. Phnom Penh has seen a significant increase in the number of public protests since the 1998 election. In reference to this emergent trend of social mobilization in the public spaces of the capital, Hughes (2003b, 183) comments that, “the upsurge in protest over the past few years appears to be linked to the perception, on the part of a range of discontented groups in the city, that a space for public expression has emerged.” It would seem that in contrast to the secured hegemony thesis, through the threat of violence from below, or at least what from above is a priori defined as illegitimate and threatening, RGC was pushed back on its heels and into the realization that it could no longer continue with such an overt strategy of spatial control. This was a forced retreat, and for the time being, Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city had been won in what was clearly a profound victory for the ongoing process of democracy. The lapse of overt CPP control over public space was, from the standpoint of absolute control, tactically risky for those in power. As the increasing frequency of demonstrations in Phnom Penh following the 1998 elections suggests, this relaxation by CPP allowed the democratic awakening fostered by the Democracy Square movement to grow considerably in the hearts and minds of Cambodians. Thus, although the Democracy Square movement may be viewed as unsuccessful inasmuch as authorities eventually dispersed it, the emerging protest trend is in fact indicative of the movement’s success. Cambodians clearly learned a number of valuable lessons from this movement. Most important, the public spectacle of this massive show of solidarity allowed Cambodians to take the space necessary to rediscover themselves as both individuals and as an empowered collective: I think [demonstrations] are a good way for Cambodian democracy because it can help people to speak their voice, to speak their ideas, yet before they don’t have these kind of rights to say about what they want, what they [are] feeling, but right now [during demonstrations], we can say, so that is good. (Interview, garment factory worker, female, age 24, 18 September 2004, Phnom Penh) [When] the people discuss [with] each other or gather in the public space, it means they can speak about their ideas. It means, sometimes they can give advice to the government, and sometimes the government can tell about the problems that they have . . . it means we can show the experience of the people to the government, and the government to the people. So I think it is very good for Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 The government’s response to this democratic awakening has been to deny its existence. RGC has publicly ignored demonstrations to the best of its ability, retreating from view when encountered by protesters and denying their calls for government accountability by simply not responding (Hughes 2003b). Thus, although it may have initially appeared as though public expression no longer mattered to a firmly entrenched party, the reality was that CPP surely realized, by virtue of the groundswell of protest that emerged in the immediate postelection context, just how tenuous its electoral victory was. Feeling threatened by potential upheaval, the ruling party did not want to push its luck by cracking down on an angry and mobilized population. Instead, they withdrew from view, ignoring the situation until it eventually lost some steam. Beautification and the War on Terror: Covert (Re)Productions of Space as CPP’s New Mode of Control The new public positioning of RGC betrays a covert strategy to (re)produce Phnom Penh’s public spaces, visually, administratively, and materially. The envisaged (re)production of space involves the expulsion of “unruly” elements of the population from the city and the replacement of unregulated squatter areas with both monuments to CPP authority (Hughes 2003a), and symbols of wealth, power, and modernity such as office buildings, high-rise apartments, and shopping complexes (Berthiaume and Nhem Chea Bunly 2005). Neoliberalism has produced conditions of globalized urban entrepreneurialism from which Phnom Penh is clearly not exempt. The (re)production of cultural spectacles, enterprise zones, waterfront development, and privatized forms of local governance reflects the powerful disciplinary effects of interurban competition as cities aggressively engage in mutually destructive place-marketing policies The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002). Through such promotion, cities actively facilitate and subsidize the very geographic mobility that initially rendered them vulnerable, also validating and reproducing extraneous rule systems as “capital is permitted to opt out from supporting local social production, and . . . the power of urban citizens to influence basic conditions of their everyday lives is increasingly undermined . . . [resulting in a] grim scenario of neoliberalized urban authoritarianism” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 376; see also Peck and Tickell 2002). As the vanguards of both after-welfarist statecraft and organized resistance to neoliberalization, cities represent key sites of governance failure, economic conflict, and social turmoil. For example, “Regressive welfare reforms and labor-market polarization . . . are leading to the (re)urbanization of (working and non-working) poverty, positioning cities at the bleeding edge of processes of punitive institution building, social surveillance, and authoritarian governance” (Peck and Tickell 2002, 395). Accordingly, as the newspaper headlines presented in Table 2 illustrate, it is no surprise that forced evictions, although contested, have become a common lived experience for the Cambodian poor. Former CPP municipal governor Chea Sophara, who in 1999 launched a beautification plan for Phnom Penh, spearheaded the city’s transformation (Hughes 2003a; Sodhy 2004). In Chea Sophara’s view, squatter settlements are detrimental to Phnom Penh’s social order, and their replacement with “parks full of flowers” marks “the turning of a new page towards a culture of peace and promotion of social morality,” free from the “violence . . . that has created insecurity and turmoil in 151 Table 2. Forced evictions Headline Squatters try to fend off relocation Villagers would rather die than give up land Apsara Authority moves to evict hundreds of squatters People evicted from floating community Police bulldoze homes to enforce court order Villagers facing eviction appeal to Annan Police bulldoze tents of evicted S’ville families 200 protest evictions in Banteay Meanchey Families facing eviction told development requires sacrifices Villagers’ homes razed while at land protest Source: The Cambodia Daily, compiled by author. Date 10 June 2004 30 July 2004 11 August 2004 19 August 2004 1 September 2004 8 March 2005 14 March 2005 26 March 2005 2 April 2005 25 May 2005 Cambodia for three decades” (Pen Khon 2000, 60). He also comments that squatter areas “are difficult to control and get access to. The area is like a barrier preventing fresh air from blowing into the city, instead of a foul stink,” and they “badly damage the beauty and well-managed social order of the capital” (Pen Khon 2000, 62–63). That Chea Sophara was popular among the propertied class of Phnom Penh is unsurprising. His actions increased their land value while simultaneously, in a long tradition of capitalist exclusions, pushing the “unsightly” and supposedly “violence prone” poor from public view.13 Sodhy (2004, 170), an apparent champion of the ordered vision of public space, has a favorable view of the beautification scheme, calling Chea Sophara “a force for modernity in Cambodia.” Indeed, Sodhy’s assertion is correct insofar as the beautification scheme cuts to the heart of modernization theory itself. Chea Sophara’s visualization and administration of space is representative of a colonial-inspired attitude that seeks to re-create so-called “backward” people into “properly” behaved citizens, which is nothing short of an erosion of the ability of the poor to define and take care of their own lives.14 Beautification is often a top-down approach to further the neoliberal agenda, effected in the name of aesthetics and profit, where “political activity is replaced in spaces like the mall, festival marketplace, or redesigned park . . . by a highly commodified spectacle designed to sell either goods or the city as a whole” (Mitchell 2003b, 138–39; see also Boyer 1992; Goss 1996). The overarching goal of neoliberal policy experiments such as beautification is “to mobilize city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 368). Thus, far from being concerned with the corporeal well-being of the citizenry, the beautification of Phnom Penh is little more than a sales pitch to potential investors. Beautification itself is neither necessarily conducive nor unfavorable to an open and democratic space; rather, it is the way in which beautification is implemented that makes it problematic. Speaking to “neoliberalism with Cambodian characteristics,” beautification has been used as a tool of exclusion. In RGC’s view, the beautification of Cambodia’s cities has as much to do with the removal of the poor and the homeless as it does the planting of shrubs and grass. This (re)criminalization of the poor and the homeless represents a defilement of the logic of representation, which must form the basis of any democratic system (Mitchell 2003b). Public space must allow unique individuals to Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 152 Springer The relationship between RGC’s authoritarian behavior and the neoliberal concern with order is clearly illustrated by the routine roundup and exile of the homeless from Phnom Penh (Botumroath Lebun 2004; Kuch Naren and Pyne 2004) and the tourist mecca of Siem Reap, home to Angkor Wat (Thet Sambath 2004). Although the practice is denied by authorities, homeless people and orphaned children are regularly gathered up by the military and shipped by truck out to the provinces, where they are dumped and told not to return to the city (Botumroath Lebun 2004; Kuch Naren and Pyne 2004). RGC’s roundup practice is ongoing, as most of the “disposables” eventually make their way back to Phnom Penh, indicating that the poor are willing to mount challenges to authorities’ (re)productions of public spaces and demand their right to the city. This resistance does not go unnoticed by RGC, and the (re)criminalization of the poor is increasingly seen in Cambodia, where street people often complain of being arbitrarily arrested and beaten by police for loitering (Reynolds and Yun Samean 2004). The homeless have no sanctuary to return to at the end of the day, and accordingly overt violence from above has become yet another facet of the many injustices that street people must negotiate in their daily lives. Ultimately, because city-level neoliberalism is premised on competitive interspatial place-marketing to attract potential tourism and investment, and the doctrine of neoliberalism itself hinges on the illusion of widespread prosperity, the visible presence of poor and homeless people in urban public space is seen as unwelcome and promotionally disadvantageous inasmuch as they reveal such utopianism to be false (Coleman 2004; Hubbard 2004). The contestation of public space between those who have been relegated to a life of abject poverty by way of their state’s adherence to market ideology and the manifestation of authoritarian government responses concomitant to such neoliberal preoccupation can be seen in the newspaper headlines collected in Table 3. The government’s unspoken policy of dealing with the homeless was also evident both during and in the days leading up to the weeklong Inter-Parliamentarian ASEAN summit held in Phnom Penh from 13 to 19 September 2004. Along with banishing the homeless from the capital’s streets, RGC imposed a strict social order during the day of the meeting by forcing the removal of all visible signs of informal economic activity, such as street-stall vendors and impromptu roadside gas stations.15 Presumably, RGC took these measures to project to ASEAN delegates an image of Cambodia as a modern, ordered society, and hence an economically join in collaborative efforts and still maintain their distinct voices (Staeheli and Thompson 1997), so that representation itself, whether of oneself or a group, may demand a physical space (Mitchell 2003b). The logic of representation concentrates on the right of individuals and groups to make their desires and needs known and represent themselves as legitimate claimants to public considerations. Beautification, although popular among the property-holding class in Cambodia, actually tramples over the concerns of the poor by failing to consider them as rightful petitioners to public interests and through negating their ownership of long-held possessions because they lack the “proper” (read Westernstyle) documentation that confers legitimacy on property. This amounts to accumulation by dispossession and is at base a violent endeavor, made quite clear in the Cambodian context by the use of military force to buttress beautification’s ongoing removal of “criminal” squatter camps. Such a typical conception of poverty as crime, used by Phnom Penh elites to sell their agenda to the population, should be juxtaposed against the “violences of property” (Blomley 2000, 2003), where the erasure of the originary violence on which property is based (the original moment of accumulation by dispossession, or “primitive accumulation”) serves to legitimize the exclusionary claims of the landowning elite vis-` -vis the homeless. Thus, it is imperative a to recognize the violent legal geographies of property rights that entail violent “acts” of dispossession at the founding moment, as well as enduring violent “deeds” (which need not be physicalized to be operative, as self-policing becomes reflexive) that (re)enforce the exclusionary basis of private property (Blomley 2000, 2003). It is in this way that beautification can be viewed as a problematic enterprise, entangled in the violences of capital, where the rapid urbanization that precipitated the numerous squatter settlements of Phnom Penh’s perimeter represents one of the many undesired effects of free market economics. Thus, although CPP’s violent response to this problem is typically read as the manifestation of a supposed cultural proclivity for authoritarianism (see Peang-Meth 1991; Roberts 2001), such accounts fail to tell the whole story. Instead, a culturally sensitive critical political economy alerts us to the power geometries at play (Hart 2002), so that although violent expulsions may be culturally informed, they are equally enmeshed in the machinery of capital to ensure the enforcement of property regimes in toeing the neoliberal line (Canterbury 2005). Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia Table 3. The battle of homelessness and poverty Headline Authorities round up, detox street children Nongovernmetnal organizations chastise city for mass arrest of addicts Street children shipped to Banteay Meanchey Detentions are common, street children say Spiriting away the homeless Hungry farmers stage march through city Police remove beggars from Siem Reap streets Rights groups protest illegal roundups of city homeless Government says begging villagers should go home Hungry villagers travel to capital despite ban Source: The Cambodia Daily, compiled by author. 153 Date 10 July 2004 12 July 2004 13 July 2004 15 July 2004 7 August 2004 10 September 2004 20 September 2004 22 November 2004 29 November 2004 10 December 2004 Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 vigorous one. At the same time, a car bomb attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta just days earlier served as an ideal pretext for removing the marginalized from public space, as RGC cited “security precautions” to effectively silence those critical of their ordered approach (Lor Chandara 2004). RGC’s tendency to suggest a concern with security as both a rationale and excuse for its own authoritarian behaviors has become commonplace in recent years. This strategy appeals to the notion of securing market principles,16 while also taking advantage of the growing tolerance and support of authoritarian regimes by the United States in its global war on terror (Rodan and Hewison 2004). Un and Ledgerwood (2002, 102) warn that there is “widespread concern that the government is using the global fear of terrorism, in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States, as a pretext to silence opposition parties.” This concern became particularly manifest following a string of some sixty arrests after 9/11, when CPP began accusing members of the Sam Rainsy Party and FUNCINPEC of belonging to the Cambodian Freedom Fighters (CFF), an insurgent group led by Khmer-Americans based out of California (Sodhy 2004). The group had vowed to take down the Hun Sen government, and in November 2000, Cambodia witnessed a rare showing of marked violence from below when the heavily armed CFF attacked government buildings in Phnom Penh (Langran 2001; Marston 2002). Although labelled as terrorists by RGC, CFF maintains it is a lawful group with 50,000 supporters in Cambodia (Sodhy 2004). Many Cambodians are unconvinced, but far from siding with the government, they believe CPP staged the CFF attack to smoke out opposition to Hun Sen (Marston 2002). Langran (2001, 156) suggests that the insurgency serves as “a reminder of the recent and fragile nature of Cambodia’s democracy.” If CFF is in fact a genuine opposition group and not a CPP ruse, the counterpoint to Langran could also be argued. The attack could be viewed as evidence of democracy’s functioning, as the paradox of democracy identified by Le Vine (2001) demonstrates that violence from below is often necessary for democratic renewal. Nevertheless, the fact that accusations of terrorism can now be extended at will toward any political movement that may challenge CPP authority, and can be further deployed against official opposition parties, has detrimental implications for Cambodian public space. Such use of subterfuge is a blatant attempt to restrict Mitchell’s (1995, 115) notion of public space as “an unconstrained space within which political movements can organize and expand into wider arenas.”17 As if RGC’s calls for an orderly and stable public space were not justified enough in the eyes of neoliberal donors, as “[w]ithout order [and stability], the argument goes, liberty is simply impossible. And that order must be explicitly geographic, it centers on the control of the streets and the question of just who has the right to the city” (Mitchell 2003b, 17, emphasis in original), even cynics within the donor community would now be prone to accepting such claims in the post–9/11 world. Hence, order and stability conceived as such represent veritable threats to the democratic ideal of public space. Undermining the Public Trust: The Anti-Thai Riots and RGC’s Renewed Crackdown on Demonstrations CPP’s overt control of public space returned in 2003, as the year began with mob chaos in the streets of Phnom Penh. The violence erupted on 29 January 2003, when rumors began to circulate that Suvanan Kongying, a Thai actress popular in Cambodia, had allegedly claimed on Thai radio that Angkor Wat rightfully belonged to Thailand and should be repatriated (Hinton 2006). Some Cambodians responded by protesting in front of the Thai Embassy, which they subsequently burned to the ground, while others looted several Thaiowned businesses located in the capital (“Mobs Go Berserk” 2003).18 Although law enforcement was conspicuously absent for hours as the protest raged (Tin 154 Springer Table 4. Freedom of assembly under fire Headline Students to sue governor for stopping protest Protesters defy ban, deliver royal petition Police stall gas protest by detaining leader Groups say police beat protesting villagers Nongovernmental organization leader plans protest despite police presence Officials go too far, violate right of peaceful assembly Law curtailing public demonstrations upheld Top monk bans nongovernmental organization meetings in pagodas Police break up opposition meeting City denies student group permission to stage rally Source: The Cambodia Daily, compiled by author. Maung Maung Than 2004), the government response since has been to crack down on virtually all demonstrations in the name of order and stability (ADHOC 2004). The Ministry of Interior, responsible for granting licenses to hold public demonstrations, responded to the ban in a letter dated 8 April 2005, where spokesperson Khieu Sopheak directly addressed union leaders and human rights groups who complain that RGC has refused to grant permits for all demonstrations held since the anti-Thai riots and has used violence against those that do arise: Organisers did not fill out forms or abide by the Law in Demonstrations, and some demonstrations did not notify the authorities. . . . Participants always caused serious impacts to security and public order, which create opportunity for gangs, and other offenders to steal, snatch or commit other acts which cause damage to public and private property. (Pin Sisovann 2005, 12) Date 3 June 2004 23 June 2004 5 August 2004 10 August 2004 19 August 2004 22 September 2004 2 December 2004 17 February 2005 16 March 2005 6 June 2005 Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 Khieu Sopheak continued by blasting human rights workers and the critical reports they have written in response to the government ban, stating, “[They] earn for their boss only, not for the interests of the Cambodian people. Their job is to criticize . . . if they do not write such reports their work would be finished” (Pin Sisovann 2005, 12). RGC’s response appears to be little more than a ploy to strip people of their constitutional rights, most prominently freedom of assembly, via denying access to public space. Indeed, if “Cambodian people are the masters of their own country” and “[a]ll powers belong to the people,” as Article 51 of the Cambodian constitution states (Jennar 1995, 16), then RGC’s banning of public protests—an activity that manifests people’s empowerment—is emphatically a denial of such rights. There is some evidence that the anti-Thai riots may have been fomented by CPP elements as a stratagem for RGC’s renewed crackdown on public space. The unsubstantiated rumors concerning Suvanan Kongying’s supposed accusations first surfaced in the pro-CPP newspaper Rasmei Angkor on 18 January 2003 (Hinton 2006). Hun Sen appears to have inflamed the incident by declaring the Thai television star to be “not even worth a clump of grass at Angkor Wat” during the inauguration of a new school in Kompong Cham province just two days before the riot in Phnom Penh erupted (quoted in Tin Maung Maung Than 2004, 82). Finally, the Pagoda Boys, a pro-Hun Sen group of former monks often used to “counterattack” public demonstrations, were identified by a confidential U.S. State Department report as the leaders of the anti-Thai riots (Vong Sokheng 2003). Speculation aside, the revived clampdown on public space has been tenacious. The newspaper headlines shown in Table 4 illustrate a protracted campaign by RGC to deny freedom of assembly and subvert the potential of spaces for representation to emerge. Many Cambodians I interviewed expressed disdain for both the government and the armed forces for stopping demonstrations: I am worried that when they [are] doing the demonstrations, and the policeman and the security they come to do, to use political violence on the demonstrators, and for me, I want the policemen to help the demonstrators instead of using political violence toward the demonstrator. (Interview, cook, female, age 33, 17 September 2004, Phnom Penh) For me I feel very painful and angry to the police and the armed forces who do something that only serve their leader. They are not afraid to fight or kill the demonstrators. They’re not serving the people, they’re serving their leader, their group leader. (Interview, market stall owner, female, age 29, 20 September 2004, Phnom Penh) I think they are wrong, they should not do like this [stop demonstrations] because their duty is [to provide] security to demonstrators . . . if they disperse demonstrators, that may lead to violence, some people may get killed, some people may get angry. (Interview, monk, male, age 33, 28 September 2004, Phnom Penh) I think about this and get very angry at the police that disperse the demonstrators . . . because the people, they want to get something to go down [like the gas prices, and] to have the democracy, so when the police stop like this, [it’s] not good, it’s very unfair. (Interview, vegetable seller, female, age 30, 3 November 2004, Pursat) The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia It’s not suitable for the police to come to disperse, to hit, [and] to break up the demonstrations and protests. Difficult, because when the people do like this, they need to complain to solve the problem, [so they] make the demonstration. It’s not good for the police to come to disperse, or stop, or break up the demonstration. (Interview, market stall owner, female, age 49, 7 November 2004, Pursat) I feel angry at the police because the police hit the people, some people they don’t know anything [about their rights], so the police they hit, [and] use violence against the people. It’s the police duty to protect the people or don’t use violence [against] the people, only protect the people and allow the people to do the demonstration. (Interview, nurse, female, age 38, 8 November 2004, Pursat) Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 155 These sentiments indicate that among some Cambodians, there is an unwillingness to accept the rhetoric of the ordered view and a desire for the freedom of expression and open dialogue that a democratic public space may offer. Conclusions By drawing the scalar focus progressively inward from the macro down to the micro, this article has demonstrated how the promotion of neoliberalism at the global scale may be internalized by local elites and reified in ways that are more conducive to authoritarianism than they are to democracy. In the Cambodian context this has played itself out geographically, where an analysis of Phnom Penh’s public space has exposed the rhetoric of order and stability, commonly presumed as worthwhile goals that serve the interest of the populace, as in fact subversive to democratic interests. On the one hand, donors insist on order and stability to maintain a viable market economy; on the other, when states have been transformed by donor-imposed reforms such as SAPs, order and stability can only be achieved through the rollout of violence from above. In Cambodia, as the neoliberalizing state is engaged in an ongoing roll-back from the workings of the economy, it effectively undermines its own institutional capacity to respond to the demands of the citizenry in meaningful and nonviolent ways. Neoliberalism is premised on heightened exposure to economic insecurity by engaging in short-term forms of interspatial competition, place-marketing projects such as beautification, and regulatory undercutting to attract investments and jobs. Accordingly, long-term notions of stability that democracy may foster are overlooked (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Jayasuriya 2000). Sta- bility in the neoliberal sense is not at all concerned with the well-being of the general citizenry. Instead, it has everything to do with ensuring market discipline and dominance through a variety of regulatory, surveillance, and policing mechanisms whereby neoliberal reforms are instituted and “locked in,” despite what the population might desire (Gill 1995; Sparke 2004). Such a disciplinary regime entails an obvious erosion of democratic control and accountability, as through a variety of legal and constitutional devices, and violence from above, the economic model is insulated from popular scrutiny and demands (Overbeek 2000; Canterbury 2005). This ordered vision of public space takes precedence over the method used to enforce such an order, explaining why authoritarian governments, as long as they adhere to free market economics, are so complacently accepted by donors who subscribe to a neoliberal agenda. Empowering the people entails the simultaneous disempowerment of those who currently occupy a privileged position in society and, as such, powerful elites will try to impede any movement toward a from below vision of democracy and development, a view that is captured by and made possible through the unmediated conception of public space. The neoliberal order pivots around the extraction of economic surplus from countries incorporated into the global capitalist system and necessitates local authoritarian regimes to ensure its functionality (Canterbury 2005). Elections are held to confer a semblance of legitimacy, but democratic empowerment through processes such as policy orientation and decision making in the allocation of resources is never advanced. Unlike the long-term vision of social stability that democracy as public space offers by allowing endless popular (re)vision, (re)conceptualization, and (re)materialization, the neoliberal order has no such agenda in mind. Instead, it creates opportunities for elite groups with strong commercial interest to influence political development away from democracy (J¨ nsson o 2002), as indigenous elites endorse neoliberalization as an opportunity to rapidly line their own pockets through shadow state mechanisms that enable informal control over the privatization process (Reno 1995; Le Billon and Springer 2007). Meanwhile, extraneous capitalists concern themselves only with the economic bottom line or the assurance that natural resources and cheap goods continue to flow regardless of the localized environmental damage and repressive labor conditions, which are treated econometrically as mere externalities. This explains why RGC’s crackdown on public space, which this article has shown to be a predominant feature 156 Springer skepticism (Massey 2005). Through the contestation of public space, a public may begin to carve out and establish new alternative kinds of stability and order, built not on the fears of the rich, “but on the needs of the poorest and most marginalized residents” (Mitchell 2003b, 9). It is this (re)conceptualization of order and stability that this article has shown some Cambodians to be deeply committed to, and it is this vision that they will continue to struggle toward as their own democracy as public space: Even though every time when we do the demonstration we are hit, [RGC] crackdown, and we are killed by the army . . . our people still do the demonstration. That is our hope, that in the future we will win, we will get our demands. (Interview, small business owner, male, age 47, 23 September 2004, Phnom Penh) of Cambodia’s transitional period, has not received lasting scorn from bilateral and multilateral donors. Firmly entrenched in the neoliberal camp, the donor community views authoritarian action taken by Hun Sen and the ruling CPP as conducive to maintaining their own interests, although this remains unspoken and hidden behind rhetorical appeals for greater democracy. Although protest is at times accompanied by violence from below, as those who champion the ordered view of public space are quick to point out, this is certainly not always or necessarily the case. When a state shows a clear and defiant position of not listening to the demands of the people it is meant to represent, or maintains a policy orientation that is unsuited to respond to such demands (i.e., it exhibits all the telltale characteristics of a state made differently powerful through neoliberalization), then violence from below is certain to erupt as the frustrations of the general populace will assuredly boil over. Violent repression that eventually begets the destabilization of a local regime is of course an inconvenience (the price of doing business perhaps), but ultimately of little consequence to globalized neoliberalism. Capital accumulation can temporarily be focused elsewhere while conflict ensues in one location, only to return at a later date once the policy conditions are reconfigured along favorable lines, as happened in Cambodia under UNTAC. In any event, as the adage “when there is blood on the streets, buy property” reminds us, such creative destruction of political-economic space is the very lifeblood of capitalism (Harvey 2007). The resultant contestation represents a move toward the collective empowerment of the people themselves and such destabilization, apart from a lamentable propensity for violence, is to be welcomed. If there were continual stability, Derrida (1996, 84) argues, “there would be no need for politics, and it is to the extent that stability is not natural essential, or substantial that politics exists and ethics is possible. Chaos is at once a risk and a chance.” It is precisely because neoliberalism presents itself as the only alternative, an inexorable process, and thus outside of the political, that its corollary has become stability. The neoliberal vision does not acknowledge the possibility and promise of chance, the mercurial horizons of space-to-come, thus contradicting both the very logic of space–time itself, and such values as randomness, messiness, and openness that constitute democracy. It is precisely because public space embodies the elements of chaos, proteanism, and uncertainty that it is potentially a creative crucible for democracy, and calls for order should always be treated with deep Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 Acknowledgements Fieldwork was undertaken while the author was an MA candidate in the Department of Geography at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. The wisdom, guidance, and support of Barry Riddell were instrumental to this article’s construction. Philippe Le Billon, Jim Glassman, Sorpong Peou, Anne Godlewska, Villia Jefremovas, Catherine Nolin, and three anonymous referees all offered insightful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this article or important parts of its argument. Audrey Kobayashi’s editorial encouragement was exceptional. Oun Rithy, Seang Sopheak, and Marni Springer contributed crucial research assistance. Finally, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) provided financial support in the form of a CGS Doctoral Scholarship. All the usual disclaimers apply. Notes 1. As a plural set of ideas emanating from both everywhere and nowhere within diffused loci of power (Plehwe and Walpen 2006), neoliberalism is a notoriously difficult concept to define. In spite of variance in doses among regions, states, and cities, the basic neoliberal policy treatment is underpinned by a vision of naturalized market relations that seeks to eradicate obstacles to the operation of free markets; hold back all forms of collective initiative and public expenditure primarily via the privatization of common assets and the imposition of user fees; advocate individualism, competitiveness, and economic self-sufficiency as fundamental virtues; attenuate or nullify social protections and transfer programs; and actively “recruit” the poor and marginalized into a flexible labor market regime of precarious work and low-wage employment (Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002). The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia 2. Some readers may question the theoretical application of public space to the context of global south, and particularly Cambodian cities, as the existing literature focuses primarily on the experiences of the global north (for some notable exceptions see Low 1996; Yeoh and Huang 1998; Drummond 2000; Avritzer 2002; Moghadam 2002; Arefi and Meyers 2003). There should, however, now be a single urban discourse, which is not to deny that global south cities have particular distinctive elements, such as expansive slum housing and a more recognizable informal economy. Rather, it is the acknowledgment that since the late colonial period global south cities were already becoming more like Western cities, a process of convergence that has intensified since the early 1980s under neoliberalism (Dick and Rimmer 1998). 3. I refer to violence as originating from “below” and “above” in favor of the terms “political violence” and “state violence,” respectively, as all violence can be conceived of as having a political dimension, and the internationalized and internationalizing character of the contemporary state (Glassman 1999) should alert us to the complexity and ambiguity that underpins contemporary expressions of so-called state-sponsored violence. In short, the chosen terms more accurately reflect where violence is impelled from within the local-cum-global socioeconomic hierarchy. 4. In the political fallout since 11 September 2001 (hereinafter 9/11), the tendency to confuse explanation with advocation has unfortunately become more frequent. Likewise, the reader would be mistaken to interpret my arguments as a celebration of violence or its sanction when expressed in certain forms or under particular circumstances. All violence is deplorable. I simply wish to acknowledge how subordinate groups will at times use violence in their attempts at democratic empowerment. Accordingly, democratization should not to be viewed as a social or political panacea. Democracy still comes with its own frailties, where the occasional tendency for violence, just as lamentable when expressed from below as it is in all its forms, can be understood as one such weakness. 5. The ideology behind the Cambodian autogenocide can be largely summed up with the xenophobic Khmer Rouge maxim “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds” (Kiernan 1996). The systematic social distrust that arose in the madness of the Pol Pot time is an ongoing affliction infecting Cambodia’s contemporary social fabric. This had implications for my fieldwork encounter, as my “outsider” status enabled participants to express themselves openly and without fear of persecution, a view repeatedly confirmed by participants. My experience in this regard follows closely to that which is described by Tuhiwai Smith (1999), who suggests that informants may fear that “insider” researchers have hidden agendas or are more likely to reveal confidences within their own communities. Likewise, participants viewed my Cambodian interpreters as unthreatening because of their association with myself as a visible foreigner. Nonetheless, my “otherness” visibly revealed the asymmetrical power that underpins all social science research (Katz 1994). Although “we cannot escape the unfortunate irony that political action meant to shift the social balance begins 157 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. from a position of differential power” (Kobayashi 1994, 76), I have nonetheless employed a persistent, scrutinizing, and self-conscious critical reflexivity throughout the research process to avoid “colonizing the field” (Rose 1997). Since UNTAC, Cambodia has been subjected to a number of enhanced structural adjustment facilities (ESAFs) under the auspices of the IMF and structural adjustment credits (SACs) from the WB. ESAFs, with disbursement beginning in 1992 to coincide with UNTAC, continued right up to 1999, when the IMF changed the language of SAPs to Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF; IMF 2007). Because the imperatives of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation remain unchanged, PRGFs are quite simply SAPs under a new name. The IMF has continued to employ PRGFs as a primary component of its funding to Cambodia, announcing in May 2006 that a new PRGF worth US$70 million had been approved conditional on the Cambodian government rescheduling its outstanding debts (McLaren 2006). The WB has implemented SACs under various names since 1993, with a recent dispersal of US$36.25 million approved on 26 July 2007 in the form of a “Rural Investment and Local Governance Additional Financing” project (WB 2008). Ung Huot was an illegitimate replacement on the basis of his recent dismissal from FUNCINPEC by Ranariddh, who had the right to do so as party president under Provision 36 of party by-laws, and also because those FUNCINPEC members who voted for Ung Huot lacked a quorum and thus the authority to nominate him (Peou 2000). Democracy Square is a park adjacent to the old National Assembly. It was given its moniker by opposition leader Sam Rainsy following a bloody grenade attack on a demonstration he led against judicial bias on 17 March 1997. The assault was meant to take his life but instead claimed those of sixteen protesters and seriously injured more than 100 others. Although significant evidence exists to indicate that Prime Minister Hun Sen was behind the bloodshed, including—because of the injuries sustained by an American citizen—a classified FBI report that was leaked to the press, no one has ever been arrested in connection with the incident (Hayman 2007). On the importance of recognizing poverty and inequality, along with their parallel geographies of violence, as outcomes of neoliberalization, see Springer (forthcoming b). Harvey (2005) contends that neoliberalization’s foremost substantive achievement has been the ability to distribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income, or the very continuation of accumulation by dispossession. His skepticism compels him to view neoliberalism as a project driven primarily by transnational elites, who are above all concerned with the reconstitution of class power where it exists and its creation where currently absent. This view is increasingly held by a number of critical scholars (Overbeek 2000; Cox 2002; Riddell 2003; Dum´ nil and L´ vy 2004; Rapley 2004; Sparke 2004; Plee e hwe and Walpen 2006; compare Amoore and Langley 2002, who view neoliberalism as a practice of the elite, but closer to a Foucauldian notion of governmentality). Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:41 23 December 2008 158 Springer In defending his position, Harvey (2005) points to the persistent rise in social inequality under neoliberalism, which he regards as structural to the entire project, a claim lent significant credibility by Wade’s (2004) critical quantitative analysis of global statistics. The Cambodia Daily was chosen over other newspapers because it represents the only local daily Englishlanguage newspaper in Cambodia. The only other English-language newspaper, the Phnom Penh Post, is available on a biweekly basis. The newspaper headlines collected for this study are not intended to be exhaustive on Cambodia’s political issues. Instead, they have been purposefully selected to illustrate Cambodia’s marked contestation of public space, ongoing processes of neoliberalization, protracted geographies of violence, and finally to corroborate the anger and distress voiced by participants. Any claim that CPP is “popular” should immediately be dismissed as fanciful. Straining his credibility, Roberts (2001, 187) alleges, “The external perception of the CPP and Hun Sen was that they were unpopular. This is clearly at odds with the vote outcome.” The reality was that CPP had not won a majority of the votes, but rather 42.4 percent. Furthermore, the findings of a Canadian assessment mission to Cambodia, dispatched prior to the 1998 elections, indicated that that Hun Sen’s lack of popularity was apparent (Bosley, Owen, and Armstrong 1997), a position the subsequent protests clearly confirm. The fact that Chea Sophara was fired following the antiThai riots of 2003 (discussed later) does not negate the general thesis forwarded here, as Phnom Penh’s beautification plan continued in spite of him losing his job. For overviews of the history and application of modernization theory, see Escobar (1995), Leys (1996), and Rist (1997). Briefly, modernization is premised on Orientalism-cum-paternalism, where so-called backward peoples, conceived as having no agency, must be cared for by the West. Under such trusteeship, which comes largely in the form of foreign aid, backward peoples will modernize to become like “us,” and thus development and democracy will follow, as “they” are recreated in “our” image. Participant observation, 13–19 September 2004, Phnom Penh. Elsewhere I have argued that security itself, in both conceptualization and implementation, has been neoliberalized in the Cambodian context. Specifically, notions of human security have been assimilated by neoliberal objectives and transformed into rhetorical pretext for the acceptance and promotion of the political-economic status quo (Springer forthcoming a). The “security” card is played repeatedly by RGC. For example, in November 2005, they likened their silencing and imprisonment of public figures critical of the signing of a border resolution with Vietnam to the United States’s passing of the Patriot Act (Lor Chandara and Wasson 2005). The violence that erupted in Phnom Penh can be understood in terms of the profound role Angkor Wat plays in contemporary Cambodian identity, through Cambodia’s historical geography of vulnerability stemming from centuries of conflict with hostile neighbors and foreign aggressors since the decline of the Angkorean era, and via the discursive construction of Thai “otherness” (Hinton 2006). References Abrahamsen, R. 2000. 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