In the thirty years after the Second World War, Cambodia witnessed the reassertion of colonial power, the spread of nationalism, the birth and growth of a communist party, the achievement of independence, the stifling reform during the decade of peace, the rise of an armed domestic insurgency, the encroachment of an international war, massive bombardment and civilian casualties, pogroms and ethnic ‘cleansing’ of religious minorities. From 1975 to 1979, genocide took another 1.7 million lives. Then, after liberation from the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia survived a decade of foreign occupation, international isolation, and guerrilla terror and harassment. UN intervention and democratic transition were followed by Cambodia’s defeat of the Khmer Rouge in 1999 amid continuing internal tension and political confrontation. Against this backdrop of more than thirty years of conflict in Cambodia, Conflict and Change in Cambodia brings together primary documents and secondary analyses that offer fresh and informed insights into Cambodia’s political and environmental history. This book was previously published as a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

The political economy of emerging mechanisms of global governance entails the imposition of specific models of conflict resolution in peripheral regions. This has led to international peace initiatives which often lack resonance in the complex of institutions and practices at the centre of long-standing conflicts in these regions.

This title was first published in 2001. This text offers a comprehensive view of controversial issues surrounding Cambodia's past, present and possible future development. It brings together a selection of journal articles about the wartorn country to examine critical issues concerning change and continuity in contemporary Cambodian politics. The book covers violence, war and peace, the Constitution, human rights and the pursuit of justice, democratic development and dilemmas, gender and ethnic relations and economic development and problems. These themes should be instructive for scholars, policymakers and interested individuals dealing with what has been termed "triple transition": from armed conflict to the end of violent hostility, from political authoritarianism to liberal democracy and from socialist economic systems to market-driven or capitalist ones. The book shows that the trajectory towards peace, democracy and sustainable development is complex, full of dangers and in need of careful management.

Millions of children around the world are affected by conflict, and the enduring aftermath of war in post-conflict societies. This book reflects on the implications of children’s insecurity for governments and the international humanitarian community by drawing on original field research in post-conflict Cambodia and in Burma’s eastern conflict zones. The book examines the way that politics and discourses of security and child protection have further marginalised rather than enhanced the protection of children. In Cambodia, threats from trafficking, exploitative labour, and high levels of domestic and social violence challenge the government and the international humanitarian community to respond to the new human security terrain that is the legacy of three decades of political violence. Burma has endured over 60 years of insurgency and civil conflict in ethnic minority states, significantly affecting children who are recruited into armies, killed, maimed or tortured, and displaced. Analysing the theoretical and practical challenges faced in addressing children’s security in global politics, the book offers a novel framework for responding to the politics of protection that is at the heart of this crucial issue. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Politics and International Relations and Security.

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - Region: Far East, grade: 14 points, University of Marburg (Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie), language: English, abstract: Cambodia has accumulated hundreds of years of repressions, supervision by foreign countries, territorial partitions, insecurities, and conflicts. The last 5 decades, Cambodia has suffered extensive military or ideological wars, undergoing changing political regimes that were neither stable nor legitimately recognized. These passed from absolute monarchy, to communism attached to Maoism, to socialism after Marx and Lenin, to capitalism, and finally to constitutional monarchy based on parliamentary system, (Vannath 2003:49) which have influenced significantly all state institutions from complete destruction to reconstruction based on ideological, geo-strategic interest or political cupidity. Ironically, the country’s experience has remained internationally rather unnoticed, succeeding eventually in the past years to acquire political attention due to the substantial international financial and technical efforts in post-war reconstruction and peace building. (Heijmans 2004:331). With this support, Cambodia is trying to redefine itself and to open itself to the world as a regional equilibrating partner, a corner of cultural and architectural treasures, but also as a traumatized nation in need of foreign aid. In this process, the country has formulated diverse narratives to represent it on the international and domestic scene and to help people go on with a hope for peace and prosperity. Given being this evolution, the thesis ascertains the contribution of the new Cambodian founding myths in the country’s peace building after having emerged from destabilizing rules, especially the Khmer Rouge regime. In the wake of democratization, Cambodia has started to set a new beginning, this paper searching to understand if these transitional definitions of the nation play a constructive part in the promotion of sustainable peace and security. The issue is still in the process of becoming, since only the end of the Vietnamese administration in September 1989 has opened the way for Cambodia to make justice and recover from the pernicious times. For this reason the victim narratives still claim justice, turning into full founding myths when they would have lost there appellative function. (Münkler 2008:2) Consequently, Cambodia slightly adopted some measures to improve its situation, among which the formulation of new narratives representing the nation’s position in dealing with its trauma in the face of the new international support and its own reckoning with its past.

On October 23, 1991, four Cambodian factions and many external powers signed a UN Permanent Five-initiated peace agreement to end the Cambodian conflict. This book explains the UN role in turning the Cambodian battlefield into a ballot box.