![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
Elite corruption may have a significant role in ending conflicts and shaping post-conflict development. This article enquires into the legitimacy accorded to such corruption. It reviews literature on post-conflict Cambodia, seeking evidence that academic commentaries, public opinion or elites themselves regard elite corruption as a legitimate Machiavellian tool for achieving other ends. Corruption has been an element of the style of government adopted by the dominant party in Cambodia, shaping both the achievement of peace and the uneven economic development that followed. Academic commentaries provide some implicit and explicit legitimation of corruption as a means to secure peace and to resist neoliberal policy settings by affording government discretionary resources and power. Meanwhile, public dissatisfaction with elite corruption appears to the most likely source of renewed violent conflict in Cambodia. How elite actors rationalise and legitimise corrupt behaviour remains poorly understood, and is deserving of more attention.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to fellow contributors for comments on an early draft, to the editors for patient support and insightful comments, to Pak Kimchoeun, Andrew Cock and Alix Kent for enlightening discussions, and especially to two anonymous reviewers for incisive and constructive comments.
Notes
1. Machiavelli, The Prince, 51–52.
2. Cheng & Zaum, “Selling the Peace.”
3. Brinkerhoff, “Rebuilding Governance.”
4. Hughes and Pupavac, “Framing Post-conflict Societies.”
5. Collier et al., “Post-conflict Risks.”
6. Themnér and Ohlson, “Legitimate Peace,” 77.
7. Barma, “Peace-building,” 274.
8. Le Billon, “Buying Peace or Fuelling War,” 416.
9. Gilley, “The Determinants of State Legitimacy,” 48.
10. Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat.
11. Ear, Aid Dependence in Cambodia; Hughes, Dependent Communities, 163; and Pak, “A Dominant Party in a Weak State,” 190.
12. Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat.
13. Cheng and Zaum, “Selling the Peace.”
14. Olivier de Sardan, “A Moral Economy of Corruption?”
15. Karklins, The System Made Me Do It.
16. Osborne, Before Kampuchea, 17.
17. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 252.
18. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime.
19. Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia.
20. Springer, “Articulated Neoliberalism.”
21. Le Billon, “Logging in Muddy Waters.”
22. In 1994 I was working in Siem Reap province, where I had close contact with both funcipec and cpp officials, both civilian and military. The funcipec governor, the popular and charismatic General Toan Chhay, told me of trips that he had taken to Thailand with Prime Minister Hun Sen in order to enable the latter to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge and give them the option of defecting to the government but continuing to exploit forest and mineral resources in their areas. By 1995 this defection policy was beginning to work as Khmer Rouge units gave themselves up and were accepted into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Toan Chhay hoped to be rewarded with the position of Minister of Interior. In practice, having served his purpose, he received no further advancement.
23. Brown & Zasloff, Cambodia Confounds the Peacemakers, 224.
24. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 290.
25. Sjöberg & Sjöholm, “The Cambodian Economy.”
26. Narine, “State Sovereignty, Political Legitimacy,” 431–433.
27. Hughes, Dependent Communities.
28. Cock, “External Actors”; Global Witness, Cambodia’s Family Trees; Le Billon and Springer, “Between War and Peace.”
29. Le Billon, “Logging in Muddy Waters.”
30. Subedi, “A Human Rights Analysis.”
31. Global Witness, Country for Sale.
32. Cock, “Anticipating an Oil Boom.”
33. Hughes, Dependent Communities, 163
34. pact, Corruption and Cambodian Households.
35. Song et al., Cambodia Governance and Corruption Diagnostic.
36. Pak, “Dominant Party, Weak State.”
37. Hughes, “Cambodia in 2009,” 89.
38. Findlay, Cambodia.
39. Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia, 116.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 74.
42. Ibid., 75–76.
43. Mysliwiec, Punishing the Poor.
44. Slocomb, The People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 226.
45. Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge.
46. It is one of the ironies of the conflict in Cambodia that there are not substantial racial or ethnic divides, but that fabricating them becomes an important strategy in legitimising the conflict. See Hughes, Dependent Communities, 167–180.
47. Roberts, “Hybrid Polities and Indigenous Pluralities”; and Öjendal and Ou, “From Friction to Hybridity.”
48. Hughes, “Friction, Good Governance and the Poor”; and Öjendal & Ou “From Friction to Hybridity.”
49. Springer, “Articulated Neoliberalism.”
50. Hughes, Dependent Communities, 13. Emphasis in original.
51. Ibid., 156.
52. Le Billon, “The Political Ecology of Transition”; and Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
53. Hughes, Dependent Communities, 165.
54. Cock, “External Actors,” 246.
55. Springer, “Articulated Neoliberalism,” 2555.
56. Pak, “Dominant Party, Weak State,” 149.
57. Jacobsen and Stuart-Fox, Power and Political Culture.
58. Öjendal & Lilja, Beyond Democracy in Cambodia.
59. Nissen, Living under the Rule of Corruption, 61–62.
60. Biddulph, “The Decentralization Flower in Cambodian Soil,” 341.
61. Pak, “Dominant Party, Weak State.”
62. Smith, A Culture of Corruption, 191.
63. Hughes, “Cambodia in 2009.”
64. Le Billon, “The Political Ecology of Transition,” 418.
65. Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat.
66. Nissen, Living under Corruption; Olivier de Sardan, “A Moral Economy of Corruption?”; and Smith, A Culture of Corruption.
67. Scopis, “Cambodia’s String Economy.”