Peacebuilding and Cambodian state-civil society interaction: An immanent critique of the promotion of NGOs as a means of resolving conflict

Peacebuilding has become a modem orthodoxy with both its goals and means being widely accepted within academic and policy communities. Despite some critical engagement with the concept, the study of peacebuilding is predominately technical in nature, seeking to assess past missions' successes and to determine how to best implement future missions. In contrast, this dissertation undertakes through a focus on state-civil society interaction to lay bare the assumptions informing peacebuilding practices, and through empirical research to demonstrate how such practices have led to new dynamics of conflict in Cambodia. The intent is to reinvest conversations about peacebuilding with the possibility for politics so that local communities might assert their voice to claim some control over the processes that are directly affecting their lives.;Building on primary and secondary documentary evidence, as well as over one hundred qualitative interviews with NGO and state representatives, it is argued that there have been four patterns of state intervention in NGO activity in Cambodia: 1. Intervention by the state to promote the interests of individuals; 2. State attempts to dictate the terms of development programs; 3. Struggles over identity politics; and 4. Struggles over what constitutes 'the political,' and thus over the roles of the state versus NGOs. While the first two patterns of conflict can be accounted for within a liberal framework, the final two arise as a result of the liberalization of Cambodia yet are occluded by liberal frameworks. Finally, it is argued that these contradictions which arise because of the attempt to universalize from Northern experiences, contain within them the possibility for local communities to reassert some control over their engagement with peacebuilding. These represent the potential for the return of politics.;Rather than focusing on the initial formal phase of peacebuilding, this dissertation explores the following years which entail an increasing emphasis on the promotion of civil society, equated to the NGO sector, as a source of conflict resolution and development. Through immanent critique, whereby the impacts of the promotion of civil society are assessed according to the internal logic of peacebuilding, this study lays bare the contradictions which emerge as a result of the attempt to universalize and extinguish local historical and cultural difference. This dissertation commences with a critical review of the academic and policy literature on peacebuilding, first exposing the liberal underpinnings of the concept, and then exploring how one of its central tenets, that the promotion of civil society is crucial to the establishment of a peaceful democratic state, obscures a history of contestation within the West over both the meanings of civil society and of what its roles should be in relation to the state. It is simultaneously understood within liberal frameworks to be a space of democratic learning, of efficient service delivery, removed from politics, and yet expected to be able to limit the state's authority. This tension, obscured in the North because of a gradual accommodation over what constitutes the appropriate jurisdiction of both civil society and state, becomes readily apparent when we explore those states where both democracy and liberal forms of society are introduced simultaneously. To this end the central research question is: has the process of promoting civil society in Cambodia resolved the sources of conflict in Cambodia. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was arguably the first comprehensive peacebuilding operations, and its relative stability since the end of the mission in 1993 makes it an ideal case for the analysis of the long-term impacts of peacebuilding. This in turn translates into the empirical question of understanding when the Cambodian state intervenes in the work of NGOs.