Khmer Land, Khmer Soul: Sam Rainsy, Populism, and the Problem of Seeing Cambodia

Abstract

Focusing on the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, this paper locates a re-emergence of populism in the democratizing Cambodia of the 1990s, and tracks the continued influence of two major themes – a (re-)produced thinness in state–society relations, and a continued emphasis on international practices as a simultaneous source of threat and protection – on current political debate. The paper suggests that the nature of the party's appeal to the people is strongly influenced by embedded conceptions of the political, transposed into an environment in which a concomitant popular response is severely constrained. The ways in which the party has attempted to promote itself as the representative of the oppressed nation in both local and international circles, and the limits to the party's effectiveness in terms of the newly constructed political processes of post-conflict democratization, reflect the impotence of the efforts to adapt customary formulations of the political to a reforming and supposedly liberating institutional and international framework.