Intensifying Political Geographies of Authoritarianism: Toward an Anti-geopolitics of Garment Worker Struggles in Neoliberal Cambodia

Abstract

Cambodia’s recent crackdown on freedoms of expression, association, and assembly coincides with the wider geopolitical ascent of illiberal democracy. Scholarly and public discourse suggests that we are now witnessing a global authoritarian turn, possibly linked to the current conditions of late neoliberal capitalist development where deprivations linked to state rollback have engendered a corrective state rollout. The language of the global authoritarian turn, however, echoes earlier unhelpful and totalizing readings of neoliberal expansion as a process of top-down diffusion. To counter this, this article argues for a recentering of local geographies in understanding authoritarian neoliberalism and a renewed focus on the bottom-up dynamics of its articulation in specific contexts. Drawing from a detailed study of garment worker activism, this article unravels the two-way relationship that unfolds between the intensified experiences of capital and resistance in Cambodia and the intensifying political geography of authoritarianism that reverberates as a result. Forwarding an antigeopolitical reading of authoritarian neoliberalism in Cambodia, the article recasts the current crisis underway in Cambodia, disrupting the notion of an authoritarian turn. Rather than the top-down imposition of a new model of autocratic government, the crackdown is shown to represent an intensification of existing authoritarian neoliberalism provoked by geopolitics from below. Here, intensification reflects a demographic and spatial shift in the concentration of authoritarian strategies toward Cambodia’s garment workers. Key Words: anti-geopolitics, authoritarianism, Cambodia, neoliberalism, resistance.