Research Aims

The project’s primary aim was to explore Cambodian customary processes of justice and arbitration and examine how elements of these may have persisted over time. This inquiry was prompted by an interest in better understanding how international efforts to orchestrate social healing in Cambodia by sponsoring a war crimes tribunal, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT), interplayed with long-standing Cambodian notions of moral order. I noted in my earlier research the complex relationship between externally imposed notions of social repair and indigenous models of harmony and how it was influenced by the positions of the involved actors and changing historical conditions.
I wished to explore how Cambodians were using or refashioning traditional notions of order in response to a new political economy that is generating unprecedented forms and sources of conflict.

Methods

This project set out initially to use materials from the French overseas archives in Aix-en-Provence (Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, ANOM) as well as archival materials at the National Library of Phnom Penh as a major source of data. However, it soon became clear that these materials would be problematic for addressing the research questions. ANOM has yet to classify and make available a large proportion of its Cambodia collection. And among the materials sourced in Phnom Penh, I found few cases that were adequate for my purposes.
At the mid-term review with RJ in October 2014, it was therefore agreed that I continue the project using classical anthropological methodology of observation, interviews and participation.
However, by this time, the situation in Cambodia was undergoing major shifts following the 2013 elections and subsequent protests. As has long been the strategy of anthropological researchers, I allowed the key themes of interviews to evolve by responding to issues that my informants most keenly wished to discuss.
I held discussions with Cambodians I have known for many years: students, academics, NGO workers, monastics, officials, lawyers, entrepreneurs and farmers. I also conducted interviews with people who had participated in the post-election protests and with those protesting against evictions. I spoke with Cambodian and foreign journalists, who had followed the events, and with Cambodian lawyers who had experience of working at the KRT as well as in the domestic courts. These interviews included both individual semi-structured forms and spontaneous group discussions as well as more formal interviews with individuals representing organizations.
I soon found that my inquiries into local memories and aspirations for justice and conciliation almost without exception evoked broad commentaries on the evolving contemporary situation. In particular, both older and younger informants shared an acute concern with the deep injustices they perceived in the destruction of their country’s natural environment, the brutalization of those who protested or exposed what was happening and the disruption to both cosmological and social harmony that all of this foretold.
This competition over land and resources arises out of the global shifts towards the commodification of land and it marks an entirely new situation for Cambodians from all walks of life.
Since tensions throughout the country were now becoming so concentrated upon the forest frontier, I visited the highland Province of Mondulkiri, where forest-dwellers have been rapidly losing ground to illegal deforestation or to government-endorsed land concessions to large agro-industrial companies. I also included a brief trip to Koh Kong Province in southwestern Cambodia and Kampot, in the Southeast.

Contributions to international research

This project has generated important, novel understandings of the relationship between long-standing notions of socio-cosmological order and the pressures of a rapidly changing geopolitical reality. It has revealed how the Cambodian Buddhist clergy is becoming increasingly entrenched into the politics of entirely new contests over property and resources. Border and highland regions, which are home to ethnic minorities throughout Southeast Asia, are becoming the focal points of often brutal contestations.  Insights into these changes are readily comparable with other Asian Theravada Buddhist contexts, such as Myanmar and Laos. This study also shows the complexity of the relationship between the ‘word of the law’ and the pragmatic ‘practices of justice’ in a context in which a powerful elite is subject to previously unknown incentives – incentives emanating largely from Chinese interests and the global strengthening of consumer culture. This is relevant for both academics and practitioners who work with transitional justice in emerging democracies where the commodification of land and resources is also taking place. It is relevant to understandings of how current global geopolitical changes are being played out in micro-contexts. The project also yields insights into the mechanisms of cultural change that occur when people try to find continuities between familiar moral schemes and unfamiliar socio-economic imperatives.

New Research Questions
The most pressing question that the study has generated dovetails with questions currently arising in many other disciplines at this historical juncture. This concerns the pace and consequences of environmental change and our collective ability to halt or even reverse potentially devastating changes to the planet and climate. Case studies like this one reveal in detail how population pressures, geopolitics and the unfettered spread of capitalist values play out at the level of local struggles over how to relate to the environment. This brings to our attention the need to better understand how values, dialogue and decision-making processes filter both up and down from international, through national to local levels.
Research is urgently required into the negotiations and experiences that take place at every level on these topics, and this needs to be contextualized against the backdrop of global and local changes. The study also raises questions about the mechanisms by which genuine shifts in power may occur. The struggles on which this study came to focus have resulted in imprisonment and assassinations of activists, journalists and opposition party members. Yet, it has also noted cases in which villagers have gained concessions from officials and the elite by using violent resistance. There is therefore a great need for knowledge about the factors that determine outcomes in such situations of conflict. We need a deeper understanding of how not only material conditions but elements of cultural schemes may be used to persuade power holders to provide protection for the most vulnerable.
In an age in which there is such broad awareness of the fact that human freedom and security become devoid of all meaning if we fail to attend to pressing threats to the environment, this project underlines the need for further interdisciplinary dialogue and highly creative visions for the future.

International Contacts

While conducting this project I had the privilege of establishing a number of key new research contacts. Firstly, I would like to mention the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace (CICP) and its Deputy Director of Research, Mr Pou Sovachana. Mr Pou provided me with an outstanding in-country academic base at which to engage in regular discussion with other local and international scholars. Among others at CICP with whom I continue to have fruitful exchanges are Dr Courtney Work and Dr Alice Beban, both of whom have extensive experience of working on land conflict issues in Cambodia.
I have also had regular contact with members of Pen International, both Cambodian and Swedish, as well as with Prof. Katharine Adeney, Director of the Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies (IAPS) and the editor of IAPS Dialogue, University of Nottingham, and I have contributed to their online publications. Contacts that were established earlier in my research career in Cambodia have become further consolidated. Dr of Geography Katharine Brickell, Royal Holloway University, London and Dr of Geography Simon Springer, University of Victoria, Canada, invited me to contribute to their recent volume, Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia. I have also had ongoing contact with Dr of Anthropology Erik Davis, Macalester University and Associate Professor of Religious Studies Jason Carbine, Whittier College, regarding my contribution to their anthology on religious boundaries. I continue to maintain contact with Cambodian contacts at Legal Aid Cambodia, a Cambodian NGO that provides legal aid to indigent plaintiffs.
Regrettably, health problems have recently made it difficult for me to perform in public speaking, and I have therefore had to cancel a number of planned events to deliver public presentations in popular forums. I have therefore decided that the best way to make my materials available to a broad, non-academic audience is to publish a compilation of my findings over the years, in a format designed to appeal to the non-specialist. I have been working piecemeal on this project for the past two years and the subject matter from the project upon which I am now reporting will likely account for about a quarter of the final product. The draft needs further elaboration before editing can begin in earnest, but it is my intention to have a manuscript ready for publication as soon as possible. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond has been a generous, major sponsor of the research I have been conducting in Cambodia since 2002. It is with sincere gratitude that I submit this report and undertake to continue making the results available to not only other scholars, but a non-academic readership. It is my hope that popular opinion may help spur debate about what constitutes a just world - human as well as non-human. In this, I believe Cambodia has much to teach us.