Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: what the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia^*

* Editorial Note: This paper is part of the ‘JPS Forum on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, framed and introduced by Ian Scoones and colleagues in their joint paper, ‘Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism’, published in JPS in January 2018. The contributions to this forum will be published separately and in clusters in 2018 and 2019. This forum is one of the initial outcomes of the activities of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi).

ABSTRACT

Cambodia’s ruling party cracked down on the press, civil society, and opposition in the lead up to the 2018 national elections. Drawing on interviews with Cambodian journalists who lost their jobs, as well as long-standing research on rural struggles in Cambodia, we argue that the Cambodian state’s crackdown on media is part of an ongoing transformation of authoritarian populism that has reduced the space for rural collective action. The state’s repression and co-optation of media also signals a change in the ruling party’s brand of populist authoritarianism: from simultaneously courting and spreading fear amongst rural voters, to casting rural people aside. The media is a space of both emancipatory and authoritarian potential, and for the journalists who saw themselves as building the post-conflict democratic state, the crackdown signals the loss of a more emancipatory, democratic imaginary. This study contributes to analyses of authoritarianism as practice by drawing attention to the various scales and spaces in which it is produced, enacted, and imagined.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian populism
• press freedom
• rural social movements
• media activism
• Cambodia
• closed contexts

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the hard-working and dedicated RA in this project and all the professional journalists who shared their rich stories, knowledge, and energy with the research team. This research was made possible by an Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative Small Grant and benefitted from feedback at the 2018 International Conference Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World. We would like to thank Wendy Wolford for her constructive feedback and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Alice Beban http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9618-9669

Laura Schoenberger http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7781-9485

Vanessa Lamb http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1717-6777

Notes

* Editorial Note: This paper is part of the ‘JPS Forum on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, framed and introduced by Ian Scoones and colleagues in their joint paper, ‘Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism’, published in JPS in January 2018. The contributions to this forum will be published separately and in clusters in 2018 and 2019. This forum is one of the initial outcomes of the activities of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi).

1 The team had an intensive consultation process with the research assistant and other interlocutors in the profession, as well as our colleagues. The research went through an extensive ethics review process at Massey University, New Zealand, including a full hearing with the ethics committee, which one of us attended, and received ethics clearance.

2 However, these rationales were not necessarily widely accepted by Cambodian officials, as one interviewee explained, ‘when I interviewed [senior CPP officials], they accused me of serving a foreign radio, the opposition party, or “rebel radio”. They said that what we reported opposed the government, that the news was inaccurate and was more about supporting foreign interests and getting aid from the US’.

3 Interviewees have been given numbered codes, shortened as ‘#X’. We use the gender neutral ‘they’ to contribute to maintaining anonymity of participants.

4 Ou Virak, presentation at the Entrenched Illiberalism conference, Australian National University, Canberra, April 9th, 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative Small Grant.

Notes on contributors

Alice Beban

Alice Beban is a Lecturer in Sociology at Massey University in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersections between land rights, agricultural production, state formation and gender concerns to understand rural people’s changing relationships with land. She has published widely on transnational land acquisitions, political processes, feminist epistemology, and land reform in Cambodia, and has worked with Cambodian non-governmental organisations, aid agencies and activist groups. Email: [email protected].

Laura Schoenberger

Laura Schoenberger is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. Her research interests are in political ecology, state power, land and property relations, and feminist epistemology. Email: [email protected].

Vanessa Lamb

Vanessa Lamb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. In research and teaching, she focuses on human-environment geographies and political ecology of Southeast Asia. Dr. Lamb completed her dissertation, Ecologies of Rule and Resistance, focused on the politics of ecological knowledge and development of the Salween River at York University’s Department of Geography in 2014. Email: [email protected].