An institutional palimpsest? The case of Cambodia’s political order, 1970 and beyond

Abstract

How do continuity and change coexist and coevolve? How does continuity enable change and change reinforce continuity? These are central questions in organizational and political research, as organizational and institutional systems benefit from the presence of both reproduction and transformation. However, the relation between the processes of change and continuity still raises significant questions. To contribute to this discussion, we analyse the coexistence of deep institutional continuity and radical political change in the second half of twentieth-century Cambodia. Over a two-decade period, Cambodia was ruled by radically different political systems of organization: a traditional monarchy with feudal characteristics, a failing republic, a totalitarian communist regime, and a Vietnamese protectorate, before being governed by the UN and finally becoming a constitutional monarchy. We use an historical approach to study how a succession of radical changes may in reality signal deep lines of continuity.

Keywords:

• change as continuity
• change as discontinuity
• institutional change
• Khmer Rouge
• state reforms

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the valuable feedback from the editor and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We have been exploring the case of the Khmer Rouge since 2009, and the theme for this particular paper emerged during the course of this major ongoing research project.

2. We would like to thank the thoughtful comment on this issue received from an anonymous reviewer.

3. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for the analogy with the zero-sum games.