The Politics of Coercion: State and regime making in Cambodia

In The Politics of Coercion, Neil Loughlin explains the persistence of Cambodia's authoritarian regime for more than four decades. 

The book provides a historically grounded investigation of the country's ruling coalition: political elites, many drawn from within the state's coercive apparatus, who, in coordination with state-dependent tycoons, have come to control Cambodia's politics and its economy. Loughlin presents new empirical data foregrounding the coercive underpinnings of the modern Cambodian state and its party, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).

The focus on coercion reflects the regime's conflict and postconflict evolution and extractive political economy as the ruling coalition failed to channel popular interests through its political institutions, thus resorting either to low-intensity forms of coercion such as intimidation and surveillance or to high-intensity coercion such as violent crackdowns and extrajudicial killings.

Through a critical reevaluation of the regime's origins and evolution in its relationship with citizens, The Politics of Coercion reconceptualizes the CPP to emphasize the obstacles—structural, institutional, and distributional—to building a mass-based clientelist or developmentally legitimate authoritarian party.

About the speaker

Neil Loughlin is Senior Lecturer in comparative politics at City St Georges, University of London. Neil’s research focuses on comparative authoritarian politics and the political economy of development, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. 

Registration

This event free, open to the public, and held in person only. If you would like to attend, please register using the link above.

• Organiser: SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies
• Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk 

Image credit: allPhoto Bangkok