Cambodia Reborn

This book is a vivid first-hand account of the career of one of the 20th century's great guerrilla commanders, Samdech Heng Samrin, who after his years as a soldier played an important role in the political and economic rebirth of Cambodia. Born into a rural village community, and working as a farmer, Heng Samrin fought for the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party. He describes the schisms that arose within the revolutionary movement, and how he, his Cambodian comrades and his Vietnamese allies ended up fighting, and defeating, the forces of Pol Pot and what had become a viciously cruel Khmer Rouge régime.

When United Nations sponsored elections were held in 1993, there were high hopes that Cambodia would finally be able to escape the nightmare of war, the killing fields, famine, and economic turmoil that its people had endured since 1970. Large amounts of international development assistance, a rapidly expanding NGO sector, and a pragmatic power-sharing arrangement between former adversaries, seemed to bode well for the future. Yet, as the country was once again preparing for elections in 1998, serious tensions and conflicts continued to undermine the transition process. This book examines Cambodia's uneasy renaissance from years of conflict, isolation and authoritarian rule. It assesses, in particular, the efforts of the government, NGOs, and the international community to facilitate Cambodia's various transitions to peace, democracy, and a market economy, as well as the strengthening of civil society. Copublished with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development

A critical assessment of current liberal approaches to post-conflict statebuilding with constructive suggestions as to where improvements might be made. Newly available in paperback.

The course of economic change in twentieth century Cambodia was marked by a series of deliberate ""conscious human efforts"" that were typically extreme and ideologically driven. While colonization, protracted war and violent revolution are commonly blamed for Cambodia's failure to modernize its economy in the twentieth century, Margaret Slocomb's Economic History of Cambodia in the Twentieth Century questions whether these circumstances changed the underlying structures and relations of production. She also asks whether economic factors in some way instigated war and revolution. In exploring these issues, the book tracks the erratic path taken by Cambodia's political elite and earlier colonial rulers to develop a national economy. The book closes around 2005, by which time Cambodia had be reintegrated into both the regional and into the global economy as a fully-fledged member of the World Trade Organization. To document Cambodia's path towards a modern economy, the author draws on resources from the State Archives of Cambodia not previously referenced in scholarly texts. The book provides information that is academically important but is also relevant to investors, aid workers and development specialists seeking to understand the shift from a traditional to a modern market economy.

This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia and raises a critical challenge to the assumptions underpinning key tenets of the 'Liberal Project' as a mechanism for resolving complex, severe struggles for elite political power in developing countries. The book highlights the limitations of externally imposed power-sharing. In the case of Cambodia, the imagined effect was a coalition that would share power democratically. However, this approach was appropriate only for resolving the superpower conflict that had created Cambodia's war. Rather than bringing long-term peace to Cambodia, Roberts argues, it created the temporary illusion of a democratic system that in fact recreated the military conflict and housed it in a superficial coalition. The book challenges assumptions regarding the inevitability of the globalization of liberalism as a means of ordering non-western societies. It explains the failure of democratic transition in terms of the impropriety and weakness of the plan which preceded it, and in terms of the elite's traditional reliance on absolutism and resistance to the concept of 'Opposition'.

In prehistoric times, Southeast Asian women enjoyed high status. When, how and why did that change? This book explores the history of gender relations through economics, politics, art and literature. This title is a narrative and visual tour de force, of interest to scholars and the general public.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

In the 20 years since the Paris accords of 1991 brought peace to Cambodia, the country has undergone what can only be described as astounding change. From apolity where the entire fabric of society had been rent asunder through years of war and genocide, contemporary Cambodia is fast becoming a vibrant stateand assuming a new position in the Asia-Pacific region. The contributions to this volume - many by prominent figures who were intimately connected with the process - describe the diverse strands of mediation and peace-building which went into the creation of the 1991 accords. The subsequent role of UNTAC and the 1993 general elections in the process of Cambodian revival and social rebuilding are also described. While not denying that obstacles and difficulties remain, the contributions outline the evolving economic, political, religious and human resource situations within Cambodia, while also examining the country's contemporary international relations. This book constitutes a particularly fitting testament to the 20 years of Cambodian reconstruction which have followed the 1991 peace accords.