Indigenous woman who has been involved in struggles to retain her community's land since the mid-2000s, in rice cultivation field in Northern Cambodia. Author's pic.
This article is part of a series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, and linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.
In Cambodia, political violence in the run-up to the 2018 general election signals a move away from an explicitly populist authoritarianism towards a deeper authoritarianism. Cambodia burst onto global news headlines in late 2017 when the Supreme Court dissolved the main opposition party, but behind this political spectacle lay a series of smaller legal changes, political violence and geopolitical shifts that set the stage for the turn to deeper authoritarian rule.
