Suchergebnisse

The regime in Cambodia has been increasingly described as personalist, with power centralized in the hands of its long-serving leader, Prime Minister Hun Sen. Recent scholarship has described the ways he has, over time, concentrated power in key institutions for his political survival. The prime minister's advancing age, however, has raised questions over the future of the regime without him at the helm. This article analyses the process of regime management and the ongoing succession planning in Cambodia, thereby providing a nuanced account of a leader who is not unassailable or unresponsive to the needs of other elites but must continue to manage factional and other interests within his ruling coalition to an extent not captured in the current personalist literature on Cambodia. The evidence for this may be observed in Hun Sen's attempts to manage a dynastic transition on two fronts: to ensure the pre-eminence of his family among Cambodia's elites, while maintaining a regime organized against the broader interests outside his coalition. This exemplifies the twin pressures facing all autocrats, and in Cambodia it exposes the state-society schism embedded in the process of state and regime-making since 1979 that continues to shape its politics. (Contemp Southeast Asia/GIGA)

The dominant literature on Cambodian politics over the past two decades suggested that a mixture of elite and mass clientelism had enabled the hegemonic Cambodian People's Party (CPP) to rule via competitive but authoritarian elections, while lessening its previous reliance on repression and violence. Such explanations did not predict the upswing in contestation in the country in 2013 and thereafter. Neither do they account for the crackdown that followed. Following literature that draws attention to the tensions in building and maintaining political coalitions under authoritarianism, and demonstrating the difficulties in maintaining competitive authoritarianism over time, this article draws attention to structural, institutional, and distributional impediments to the CPP leadership in building and maintaining effective reciprocal relations with electoral clients while simultaneously balancing the interests of the military and other elites at the core of the regime. To make its argument, the article compares weaknesses in the CPP's electoral clientelism with the effectiveness of patronage within the security forces, seen through the lens of Cambodia's experience of land dispossession. It shows that an extractive and exclusive political economy privileged the interests of regime insiders over potential mass electoral clients precisely during the same period the CPP was supposed to be securing its hold on power via mass electoral clientelism. This further explains why the regime fell back on repression over reform in response to the upswing in contestation manifest from 2013, and why, despite the failings of its mass patronage project, repression has nevertheless been successful as a strategy for regime survival during a period of heightened popular contestation. (Pac Aff/GIGA)