Precarious (non-) citizens: a historical analysis of ethnic Vietnamese’ access to citizenship in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

The current paper investigates the meaning and forms that citizenship can take in non-Western contexts. It does so by looking at the case study of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, a significant portion of which has been unable to obtain or retain Cambodian citizenship despite having lived in the Kingdom for generations. Drawing upon documentary sources and interview data collected over eight months of fieldwork, the paper retraces the Vietnamese’ tortuous path to citizenship and demonstrates how, over time, the group has gone from having immigration status to being granted Cambodian citizenship, to being again ‘downgraded’ to foreign resident status depending on the political environment and the actors in power. The dynamics explored in the article unveil the precarious and contingent nature of citizenship in Cambodia and the role that foreign and domestic actors have played in shaping it, pointing to the need to move beyond an ‘exclusively Western’ understanding of citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• precariousness
• ethnicity
• Cambodia
• Vietnam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 An example of this is Malaysia’s notion of bumiputera (Aguilar 1999).

2 This is not to say that these characteristics are completely absent in the West. The aforementioned ideal of democratic citizenship embodying the principles of transparency, equality, individual rights and universality has not been fully and definitely attained in all Western states. Several scholars have pointed out the obstacles that some categories of migrants face in acquiring citizenship, highlighting how the latter is being used to exclude ‘undesirable groups’ (Castles 2005; Joppke 2018; Kapoor and Narkowicz 2019). Furthermore, recently scholars have warned against the erosion of democratic citizenship through increasingly common practices such as citizenship by investment, which according to Joppke (2018) reflects the ‘instrumental turn of citizenship’ in Europe.

3 The villages I visited were ‘all Vietnamese’ communities, as opposed to mixed Khmer-Vietnamese communities. It follows that the current paper is not representative of the mixed Khmer-Vietnamese population, which may have experienced a different treatment and received different documentation from the Cambodian government and authorities.

4 Ethnic Vietnamese are one of the largest minorities in Cambodia, with estimates placing their number between 400,000 and 500,000 people – approximately 5% of the Cambodian population (Schliesinger, 2015; Rumsby, 2015). This number includes long-term settlers and newcomers. Newcomers are recent migrants who have moved to Cambodia as temporary workers, whereas long-term settlers are members of the Vietnamese minority who have settled permanently and spent all or most of their lives in the Kingdom. The latter group can be further divided into two sub-groups: the ‘original settlers’ who arrived before the Khmer Rouge and those who moved to Cambodia during the 1980s migration wave (Gottesman 2004; Nguyen and Sperfeldt 2012).

5 The definition was later expanded to include ethnic Chinese (Amer 2014).

6 Article 22(2) of the 1954 Nationality Law established that Cambodian citizenship should be conferred to children with at least one Cambodian parent and anyone born in Cambodia after 1954 whose parents were also born in Cambodia.

7 The process of naturalisation was determined by Kram No. 904-NS of 27 September 1954 and Kram No. 357-NS of 26 October 1959 (Sperfeldt 2017).

8 Currently both ID cards and passports constitute proof of citizenship.

9 Formed in 1982, the CGDK brought together royalist, republicans, and communists whose only common ground was the shared opposition to the ‘puppet’ PRK regime (Gottesman, 2004).

10 UNTAC was the UN peacekeeping operation that took over the administration of Cambodia between 1992 and 1993. Its aim was to implement the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements and oversee Cambodia’s transition towards peace, stability, and democracy (Widyono 2015).

11 ‘Yuon’ is a derogatory Khmer term meaning ‘Vietnamese’ that is still in use today.

12 Such uncertainty has been captured by several scholars who have analysed the in-between or ‘liminal’ position of the Vietnamese in the Kingdom of Cambodia (see e.g. Ehrentraut 2011; Sperfeldt 2017, 2019; Parsons and Lawreniuk 2018; Rumsby 2019).

13 Vietnam’s help in covering the costs of Cambodian documentation is an interesting dynamic which I analyse in: (Canzutti 2019).