This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalization in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice.

Violent Neoliberalism explores the complex unfolding relationship between neoliberalism and violence. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues on development, discourse and dispossession Cambodia, this study sheds significant empirical light on the vicious implications of free market ideology and practice.

Housing problems have become increasingly complex in the Global South. An increased pressure to upgrade older stock, to provide adequate infrastructure, and bring city amenities to urban peripheries compounds the continued need for new housing of a decent standard. This comprehensive volume spans nine countries, simultaneously analyzing innovative housing policies and questioning the idea of innovation in this arena. The authors describe three persistent, global challenges to contemporary policy: the inherent difficulty in mass-producing housing of decent quality with access to the city; the challenge of community-based upgrading programmes, which often fail to benefit those who are worst off; and the political root of housing policies, which don’t always consider the diverse needs of populations at the expense of the least powerful. This volume raises questions about what many consider the two most successful areas of housing policy in the Global South: the community-based land sharing programmes for redevelopment in South-East Asia and the finance-driven social housing programmes in Latin America. The authors examine mass housing production programmes, incremental development processes, community-based urban upgrading, the legal structure of condominiums, and land-sharing policies, while also highlighting challenges to policy learning across contexts. This book will be of great interest to students, researchers and those involved with contemporary housing policies, particularly in the Global South. It was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Housing Policy.

In terms of magnitude of impact, the global financial and economic downturn was the worst of the three crises. That it caused the first ever growth contraction in the post-conflict period was sufficient rationale for the series of studies that substantiate this book. Like the two shocks that preceded it however, the way it impacted on Cambodia cannot be understood in isolation from the overall post-conflict milieu. The thesis here is not that endogenous factors caused the crisis. It is simply that endogenous factors shaped the impact of the crisis and a historical, as opposed to a static, analysis better illuminates the nature of the impact. This book is an in-depth comprehensive examination of the impact of the global financial and economic crisis on Cambodia. It probes into the effects of the shock at macro, sectoral and micro levels using qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Offering a comprehensive overview of the current situation in the country, The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia provides a broad coverage of social, cultural, political and economic development within both rural and urban contexts during the last decade. A detailed introduction places Cambodia within its global and regional frame, and the handbook is then divided into five thematic sections: Political and Economic Tensions Rural Developments Urban Conflicts Social Processes Cultural Currents The first section looks at the major political implications and tensions that have occurred in Cambodia, as well as the changing parameters of its economic profile. The handbook then highlights the major developments that are unfolding within the rural sphere, before moving on to consider how cities in Cambodia, and particularly Phnom Penh, have become primary sites of change. The fourth section covers the major processes that have shaped social understandings of the country, and how Cambodians have come to understand themselves in relation to each other and the outside world. Section five analyses the cultural dimensions of Cambodia’s current experience, and how identity comes into contact with and responds to other cultural themes. Bringing together a team of leading scholars on Cambodia, the handbook presents an understanding of how sociocultural and political economic processes in the country have evolved. It is a cutting edge and interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as policymakers, sociologists and political scientists with an interest in contemporary Cambodia.

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect. It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

This book aims to understand the processes and outcomes that arise from frictional encounters in peacebuilding, when global and local forces meet. Building a sustainable peace after violent conflict is a process that entails competing ideas, political contestation and transformation of power relations. This volume develops the concept of ‘friction’ to better analyse the interplay between global ideas, actors, and practices, and their local counterparts. The chapters examine efforts undertaken to promote sustainable peace in a variety of locations, such as Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone. These case analyses provide a nuanced understanding not simply of local processes, or of the hybrid or mixed agencies, ideas, and processes that are generated, but of the complex interactions that unfold between all of these elements in the context of peacebuilding intervention. The analyses demonstrate how the ambivalent relationship between global and local actors leads to unintended and sometimes counterproductive results of peacebuilding interventions. The approach of this book, with its focus on friction as a conceptual tool, advances the peacebuilding research agenda and adds to two ongoing debates in the peacebuilding field; the debate on hybridity, and the debate on local agency and local ownership. In analysing frictional encounters this volume prepares the ground for a better understanding of the mixed impact peace initiatives have on post-conflict societies. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies, and international relations in general.

Western struggles—and failures—to create functioning states in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan have inspired questions about whether statebuilding projects are at all viable, or whether they make the lives of their intended beneficiaries better or worse. In this groundbreaking book, Oliver Richmond asks why statebuilding has been so hard to achieve, and argues that a large part of the problem has been Westerners’ failure to understand or engage with what local peoples actually want and need. He interrogates the liberal peacebuilding industry, asking what it assumes, what it is getting wrong, and how it could be more effective.

In recent decades neoliberalism has emerged as the ruling economic, political and cultural ideology of our time. Originally construed as an economic philosophy, neoliberalism is better understood today as a broad world view that emphasises free-market policies, deregulation, individualism, self-management and personal resilience at the expense of more collective, social-democratic policies and principles. Neoliberalism is a pervasive ideology that has shaped our lives for more than 40 years, from the wide-ranging organisational structures of our global economy to our most intimate bodily practices. In this engaging and accessible volume, Jonathon Louth and Martin Potter bring together researchers working in and across Europe, Asia, Australia and North America to elucidate on the manifold ways in which neoliberalism produces our subjectivities. Taking in nations and citizenship, urban transformation, gender, work, (dis)ability, sexual performance and cognitive function, this volume demonstrates the astonishing scope of neoliberalism to inform and delimit our identities on both macro and micro levels of social and personal life. Combining thoughtful theoretical accounts with fascinating fieldwork and spanning areas of inquiry including the UK, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Pakistan, Cambodia, Japan and Australia, Edges of Identity provides a remarkable collection of global perspectives on the impact of neoliberalism in contemporary international contexts. This tenth volume in the Issues in the Social Sciences series is an absorbing introduction to the practical affects and lived realities of neoliberal ideology that will appeal both to readers encountering neoliberalism for the first time and expert scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

This book offers a theoretical intervention into the normative ideals of public space that are deeply rooted in Western urbanism. It disrupts the binaries of presence/absence, inclusion/exclusion by presenting a series of case studies that vividly convey the complexity and vicissitude of grassroots spatial practices. It engages powerfully with the question of what constitutes the “urban public” in our everyday cities. Moreover, it provides a fresh perspective on the proliferating scholarship on Chinese urbanism in the reform era by seriously considering the ways in which ordinary urban inhabitants respond to and negotiate the impacts of rapid social change and the reshuffling of the systems of values and ideologies. The urban public, therefore, is analyzed as an important field in which identities and cultural differences are formed and performed. This book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in theories of urban public space in general or urban transformation of post-reform China in particular.