Their diversity and range notwithstanding, theories of democratization converge in their tendency to regard transitions from authoritarianism and processes of democratization as both emergent/evolutionary and externally conditioned phenomena. Citizens, in response to political or economic crises associated with tyrannical regimes, invent and reinvent themselves, and demand through pleas for justice and reform, a more democratic developmental state. Equally, and especially in post-conflict situations, belligerent parties with the support of the international community, often readily agree to democratic elections and peaceful reconciliation of their differences knowing these convey international recognition and international developmental assistance. Democracy, as an end in itself, is rarely an issue or a major political objective, but desires for wider participation in the management of state institutions together with improved physical and social infrastructure and more equitable resource redistribution are the unmistakable signposts of the transition. Its outcome is problematic: this is not only because democracies differ in their institutional composition, or because the liberalizing momentum of democratization will be opposed by displaced authoritarian elites, but because improved state capacity and better government, as a minimum political agenda, may correspond to and satisfy the more urgent developmental aspirations of political activists employing democratic means and discourses. Theoretical and empirical issues such as these are explored with reference to Cambodia since the UN intervention of 1991–93.

Laura Summers, University of Hull

The political mobilization of women within the boundaries of modern Khmer nationalism has a long history, little of it emancipatory. In this context, the emergence of women’s organizations and, arguably, a women’s movement in Cambodia has an importance and potential which extends beyond the need to improve the status and livelihoods of women to the changing quality of political life itself. Questions are being raised about the ideas of "woman" and "citizen," about imagined linkages between family and nation, "woman" and "culture" and about the fairness of the legal system in which women are frequently denied equality with men. Issues and problems concerning women, many arising from the crises of transition from war and communist rule to coalition government, were first articulated in 1993 by a Committee of Cambodian Women for Non-Violence and Elections, and later, in the 1998 parliamentary elections, by four women’s parties. Viewing Cambodia’s constitutional order as a "low-intensity democracy" in which women’s organizations are tolerated and encouraged, the women’s movement is seen to be promoting revised conceptions of individual rights and citizenship and empowerment of women but to be seriously constrained by the unyielding gender hierarchies of society and nation.

Tim Conway, Overseas Development Institute, London

Analyses of political change in Cambodia have focussed primarily upon the halting evolution of democratic institutions and discourses at the national level. Although processes at this level are crucially important, there is a need to understand the political substrate: the political discourses, institutions and practices in which the lives of the rural majority are embedded and the ways in which these intersect with "development" practice wherein democracy is conceived both as an end in itself and a means to socio-economic advance. Since the early 1980s, ideals of beneficiary participation and community development have been adopted (or incorporated) within the mainstream of state, bilateral and multilateral rural development policy. In Cambodia, donor agencies have promoted the emergence of elected "Village Development Committees" (VDCs), bodies charged with responsibility for initiating and managing local development projects. The achievements of these experiments have been somewhat minor on the basis of participant observations of an EU project in Kompong Chhnang and a UNDP project in Banteay Meanchey. The lack of donor coordination, donor ignorance of local power structures or of the ideologies of power in which they are rooted, rivalry between ministries with different party allegiances and fundamental weaknesses in the theory underpinning participatory development approaches have each played a part in accounting for the weaknesses of the VDC approach and related attempts to promote local democracy.

Caroline Hughes, University of Nottingham