In The Politics of Coercion: State and Regime Making in Cambodia (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr Neil Loughlin explains the persistence of Cambodia's authoritarian regime for more than four decades. This newly published book provides a historically grounded investigation of the country's ruling coalition: political elites, many drawn from within the state's coercive apparatus, who, in coordination with state-dependent tycoons, have come to control Cambodia's politics and its economy. Loughlin presents new empirical data foregrounding the coercive underpinnings of the modern Cambodian state and its party, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP). The focus on coercion reflects the regime's conflict and postconflict evolution and extractive political economy as the ruling coalition failed to channel popular interests through its political institutions, thus resorting either to low-intensity forms of coercion such as intimidation and surveillance or to high-intensity coercion such as violent crackdowns and extrajudicial killings.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr. Neil Loughlin is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at City, University of London. Neil’s main research interests include authoritarian politics and the political economy of development. Neil's s first book, The Politics of Coercion: State and Regime Making in Cambodia, was published by Cornell University Press in September 2024.He has published in journals such as Democratization, Third World Quarterly, and Journal of Contemporary Asia on topics including post-conflict state-building, clientelism, authoritarian developmentalism, and the politics of land dispossession and resource extraction. Neil's new projects focus on: 1) how Chinese investment, including through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is being mediated by local political economy dynamics in recipient countries, shaping political and developmental outcomes, and 2) The rise of cyber scams in Southeast Asia and the implications for development.
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).