Nearly forty years after Hun Sen first became Prime Minister in 1984, Cambodia’s long-time ruler has passed on power to his son Hun Manet, who assumed the premiership in August 2023. Against the backdrop of this much anticipated succession, a group of the UK’s leading scholars of Cambodia discussed the implications of this pattern of dynastic succession for political continuity and change in the country.
This seminar was recorded and the video can be found here. Please note that the sound quality is intermittent.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Sabina Lawreniuk is a Principal Research Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham and current holder of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2022-2026), focusing a gendered lens on health and safety in the global garment industry. She works broadly on the promotion of workers’ rights and women's rights in the global garment and footwear industry, with a long-term area focus on the political economy of Cambodia and its authoritarian dynamics. Her recent book, Going Nowhere Fast: Inequality in the Age of Translocality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
Neil Loughlin is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics at City, University of London. His research focuses on authoritarian politics and the political economy of development, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. His forthcoming book The Politics of Coercion: State and Regime Making in Cambodia will be published by Cornell University Press in 2024.
Sokphea Young is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University College London. He is the author of “Strategies of authoritarian survival and dissensus in Southeast Asia: Weak Men versus Strongmen” with Palgrave Macmillan (2021). He also contributed to a recent book called "Citizen of Photography: the Camera and Political Imagination" (Duke University Press, 2023). Currently, he is working on his second book entitled “Visual Spectacle: Visual social media, citizenship, and political emancipation in Cambodia”.
Laurie Parsons is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has conducted research in Cambodia for 15 years, focusing in particular on the politics of labour, environment and climate change. His books include Carbon Colonialism, Climate Change in the Global Workplace, and Going Nowhere Fast, all of which highlight the complexities and contradictions of environmental governance in Cambodia and beyond.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).