Drawing on data from three different insurgent groups within the Cambodian conflict, the book shows how the social backgrounds of combatants and commanders cause them to pursue different strategies during a decade-long transition into various postconflict settings, thereby creating different “pathways to peace.” By highlighting different vertical and horizontal ranks within the insurgent groups and the role of belligerents’ resources and networks, this qualitative study tackles an imbalance in the current research on Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR), which tends to focus on top-down planning and the technicalities of reintegration programs. It helps explain why conflict dynamics and path-dependencies differ among various social groups within the field of insurgency. By analyzing the social position, life courses and postconflict trajectories of various groups within the insurgency, the book emphasizes the diversity of transitions to peace and “brings the social back in.” The study is grounded in in-depth fieldwork conducted in Cambodia and its diaspora, including 168 firsthand interviews with ex-combatants from groups as diverse as Buddhist monks and Christian converts, intellectuals, powerful warlords, civil servants, and female communist soldiers. Using these details, the book not only builds a theory of the social structure and internal logic of armed groups, but also emphasizes the crucial importance of fighters’ own narratives about their roles in society. Therefore, in addition to advancing a sociological perspective on post-conflict transitions, the study also provides the most detailed treatment to date of the social fields of the insurgents who fought in the civil war that followed the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. These social fields continue to have a profound influence on Cambodian politics, even today.

This book examines the nature of everyday peace mobilised in post-conflict settings. It specifically aims to examine the reconstruction of relationships between local communities and former Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, using social reconciliation as an indicator of peace. Based on the empirical examination, this study will reveal key features of everyday peace like plurality, connectivity and subtlety, and local communities’ agency for peacebuilding. Research questions that will be examined include what does everyday peace look like? What forms of everyday practice have community members developed and utilised? How is the local process for relationship building related to the wider peacebuilding and governance contexts in the country? And how have community members handled and destabilised the mainstream narratives related to the Khmer Rouge in the process? The volume will present new conceptual and theoretical innovations relevant to the central debates on everyday peace, with an empirical examination of Cambodia.

Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South. Each social collective comprises an interpretation of itself – including the meaning of life, the concept of a human person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various social collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies. The volume is aimed at academics, students and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to social collectives in the global South.

This book shows that political narratives can promote or thwart the prospects for international cooperation and are major factors in international negotiation processes in the 21st century. In a world that is experiencing waves of right-wing and left-wing populism, international cooperation has become increasingly difficult. This volume focuses on how the intersubjective identities of political parties and narratives shape their respective values, interests and negotiating behaviors and strategies. Through a series of comparative case studies, the book explains how and why narratives contribute to negotiation failure or deadlock in some circumstances and why, in others, they do not because a new narrative that garners public and political support has emerged through the process of negotiation. The book also examines how narratives interact with negotiation principles, and alter the bargaining range of a negotiation, including the ability to make concessions. This book will be of much interest to students of international negotiation, economics, security studies and international relations.

"From 1975 to 1979, while Cambodia was ruled by the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime, torture, starvation, rape, and forced labor contributed to the death of at least a fifth of the country's population. Despite the severity of these abuses, civil war and international interference prevented investigation until 2004, when protracted negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations resulted in the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or Khmer Rouge tribunal. The resulting trials have been well scrutinized, with many scholars seeking to weigh the results of the tribunal against the extent of the offenses. Here, Bernath instead deliberately decenters the trials in an effort to understand the ECCC in its particular context-and the degree to which notions of transitional justice generally must be understood in particular social, cultural, and political contexts. She focuses on "sites of resistance" to the ECCC, including not only members of the elite political class but also citizens who do not, for a variety of tangled reasons, participate in the tribunal-and even resistance from victims of the regime and participants in the trials. Bernath demonstrates that the ECCC both shapes and is shaped by long-term contestation over Cambodia's social, economic, and political transformations, and thereby argues that transitional justice must be understood locally rather than as a homogenous good that can be implanted by international actors"--

This book studies the Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat and related media practices, and, building on that, assesses mediatization processes, meaning the potential influence of technology-based media practices. Pencak Silat represents a cultural system of values and beliefs, with hierarchical structures and relations, and social advancement being mediated in embodied social learning. The study contributes to martial arts studies and media studies, demonstrating potentials and limitations of media technologies and their (dis-)embodiment – their extension or reduction of the body as medium, and their embeddedness in or detachment from a given socio-cultural context. With Pencak Silat being practiced all over Indonesia, by a large part of the population, the thesis also represents a contribution to Indonesian studies. Based on extensive fieldwork (between 2008 and 2016), the study analyzes martial arts and/as media in Indonesia, and presents an ethnography of Pencak Silat and mediatization.

This edited volume examines the many facets of contemporary Malaysia-India bilateral relations. The contributors provide analysis from the perspectives of trade and economic relations, people-to-people connections, tourism, security cooperation, ethnic identities, comparative religiosity, and revisiting the historical links between these countries.