Theorising ‘Peace-building’ resistance: constructions of time and different temporalities at play in the Preah Vihear Temple conflict

ABSTRACT

This paper explores civil-society mobilisations around the Preah Vihear Temple, today a world heritage site located in Cambodia, on the border with Thailand. More specifically, the paper seeks to increase our understanding of the ‘peace-building’ resistance that is played out by different civil-society actors with regard to the Temple. This case displays how both the governments and civil societies in each of the two countries bend relationships between the ‘past’, the ‘present’, and the ‘future’ in general, and in relation to ‘identity’ in particular, in order to construct narratives of nation-building. The Temple has been used in discursive constructions of national collective identity in Cambodia and Thailand, respectively; constructions that, among other things, embrace shifting notions of time and temporality. Whereas much analysis of peace-building resistance concentrates on larger-scale actions, this paper adds to previous research by giving priority to more subtle forms of resistance and describing how civil-society actors resist by ‘bending’ prevailing conceptions of time and temporality.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace-building resistance
• time and temporality
• civil society
• Preah Vihear Temple
• Cambodia
• Thailand

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Niclas Lantz for conducting the interviews in Cambodia and Katrina Hirvonen for providing valuable input to the project. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers appointed by the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology for their detailed and very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See http://www.camnews.org.

2. See http://bksn.wordpress.com.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swedish Research Council, which has helped us to undertake research on a project entitled A Paradoxical Conflict over World Heritage at the Border between Cambodia and Thailand – Civil Society Resistance and The Preah Vihear Temple [Grant Number 2011–6721]. This article is part of this project.