Global Norms in Domestic Politics: Environmental Norm Contestation in Cambodia’s Hydropower Sector

This paper studies environmental norm contestation in Cambodia's hydropower sector, exemplified by the Kamchay Dam. In Cambodia we can observe different discourses in relation to hydropower. These stem directly from a local contest over the path of Cambodia's development, but use global norms as reference points: one emphasizes environmental protection, using environmental impact assessment (EIA) as point of reference; and one emphasizes the utility of the clean development mechanism (CDM) to attract large-scale investment into the energy sector while downplaying the need for environmental protection. While EIA and CDM are complementary, key actors present them as contradictory. This produces a normative fragmentation of the field of environmental protection. The paper argues that the norm diffusion literature, by presenting norm conflicts as hierarchical local–global conflicts, has paid insufficient attention to the fact that local actors actively draw on global norms to justify domestic development policies. More emphasis on this phenomenon will lead to a better understanding of the role of global norms in domestic politics and will enhance our knowledge of how domestic development policies are contested

Intensifying Political Geographies of Authoritarianism:Toward an Anti-geopolitics of Garment Worker Struggles in Neoliberal Cambodia

Cambodia’s recent crackdown on freedoms of expression, association, and assembly coincides with the wider geopolitical ascent of illiberal democracy. Scholarly and public discourse suggests that we are now witnessing a global authoritarian turn, possibly linked to the current conditions of late neoliberal capitalist development where deprivations linked to state rollback have engendered a corrective state rollout. The language of the global authoritarian turn, however, echoes earlier unhelpful and totalizing readings of neoliberal expansion as a process of top-down diffusion. To counter this, this article argues for a recentering of local geographies in understanding authoritarian neoliberalism and a renewed focus on the bottom-up dynamics of its articulation in specific contexts. Drawing from a detailed study of garment worker activism, this article unravels the two-way relationship that unfolds between the intensified experiences of capital and resistance in Cambodia and the intensifying political geography of authoritarianism that reverberates as a result. Forwarding an antigeopolitical reading of authoritarian neoliberalism in Cambodia, the article recasts the current crisis underway in Cambodia, disrupting the notion of an authoritarian turn. Rather than the top-down imposition of a new model of autocratic government, the crackdown is shown to represent an intensification of existing authoritarian neoliberalism provoked by geopolitics from below. Here, intensification reflects a demographic and spatial shift in the concentration of authoritarian strategies toward Cambodia’s garment workers. Key Words: anti-geopolitics, authoritarianism, Cambodia, neoliberalism, resistance