New constitutional rites: indigeneity, legal pluralism and the international finance corporation’s performance standards in Cambodia

Abstract

Globalisation is radically reconfiguring traditional understandings of constitutional law. A prime example of this trend would be the International Finance Corporation, whose Performance Standards have been described as a private-law Bill of Rights. Focusing on a complaint brought to the IFC’s Compliance Assessment Ombudsman by 17 villages in northeastern Cambodia, this article investigates how supranational frameworks interact with local identities and normative orders by highlighting how the IFC’s Performance Standard 7 on Indigenous Peoples has allowed certain communities to assert identities and associated rights that are not explicitly provided for in the national Constitution. In the process, I ask whether the IFC can be understood as having played the traditionally constitutional role of constituting a people, albeit at a subnational level, or recognizing an identity with specific legal privileges in Cambodia. Similarly, in discussing ongoing attempts to broker a settlement between the parties, the paper explains how the IFC’s engagement with the normative (legal) orders of the communities has pushed the dispute into a different ­ontological realm. The result is a pluralistic picture of transnational law in Cambodia, in which we can better see the way in which nation-states and their constitutions are at times being superseded by transnational actors.