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.

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. 

Moderator
David Kloos is a historian and anthropologist with a focus on Southeast Asia (particularly Indonesia and Malaysia). His main interests are religion (particularly Islam), gender, the politics of knowledge formation, visual methods, and the study of the social, political, and cultural aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue
This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Tuesday 4 March from 15.00 – 16.30 PM (Dutch time).

Registration
If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: kitlv@kitlv.nl

If you wish to join this seminar online, please register here

Image
Book cover The politics of coercion.