This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia and raises a critical challenge to the assumptions underpinning key tenets of the 'Liberal Project' as a mechanism for resolving complex, severe struggles for elite political power in developing countries. The book highlights the limitations of externally imposed power-sharing. In the case of Cambodia, the imagined effect was a coalition that would share power democratically. However, this approach was appropriate only for resolving the superpower conflict that had created Cambodia's war. Rather than bringing long-term peace to Cambodia, Roberts argues, it created the temporary illusion of a democratic system that in fact recreated the military conflict and housed it in a superficial coalition. The book challenges assumptions regarding the inevitability of the globalization of liberalism as a means of ordering non-western societies. It explains the failure of democratic transition in terms of the impropriety and weakness of the plan which preceded it, and in terms of the elite's traditional reliance on absolutism and resistance to the concept of 'Opposition'.

Rather than bringing long-term peace to Cambodia, Roberts argues, it created the temporary illusion of a democratic system that in fact recreated the military conflict and housed it in a superficial political coalition.".

This study focuses on the means employed by former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina to adjust to their new status as a free people and to battle attempts by whites to regain control over them. Using autobiographies, slave narratives, Freedmen's Bureau letters and papers, traveler's accounts, journals, diaries, personal letters and newspapers, this study attempts to understand how the freedmen saw themselves in the new order and to shed light on their hopes and aspirations, as well as examine the conditions of life under Reconstruction. A common thread running through this study is the determination of Charleston's freedmen to seize control over all aspects of their lives. Charleston's black population expected full citizenship and equal economic, social, and educational opportunities. Upon realizing that these expectations were not shared by the white population, they carefully plotted their strategy to obtain these desired ends.

This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia and raises a critical challenge to the assumptions underpinning key tenets of the 'Liberal Project' as a mechanism for resolving complex, severe struggles for elite political power in developing countries. The book highlights the limitations of externally imposed power-sharing. In the case of Cambodia, the imagined effect was a coalition that would share power democratically. However, this approach was appropriate only for resolving the superpower conflict that had created Cambodia's war. Rather than bringing long-term peace to Cambodia, Roberts argues, it created the temporary illusion of a democratic system that in fact recreated the military conflict and housed it in a superficial coalition. The book challenges assumptions regarding the inevitability of the globalization of liberalism as a means of ordering non-western societies. It explains the failure of democratic transition in terms of the impropriety and weakness of the plan which preceded it, and in terms of the elite's traditional reliance on absolutism and resistance to the concept of 'Opposition'.

Describes and analyses the propaganda and violence of the four Cambodian parties to the 1991 Paris peace agreements. This volume explores Cambodia during the UNTAC period and sets the events within the larger context of Khmer politics, history and culture.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

This book contributes to the ongoing debate on the complex transition in weak states from war to peace and from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. The analysis assesses the impact of foreign intervention on Cambodia’s state and societal structures during the period 1954–98. Three forms of intervention are discussed: competitive, cooperative, and co-optative. None of them contributed to the emergence of what is called a hurting balance of power -- a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for democratic compromise and maturation; none has the capacity to allow democratization to emerge and mature in the immediate term. While competitive intervention perpetuated hegemonic instability, cooperative and co-optative intervention seemed to lead the country in the direction of illiberal democracy, in which greater hegemonic stability exists and may persist for some time.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

This book explores the three continuing, intertwined transitions which have taken place in Cambodia since the late 1980s - the transition from command economy to free market, from civil war to peace, and from single-party authoritarianism to multi-party democracy. Using a political economy approach and drawing on extensive original research, the book argues that the first transition, to the free market, has been particularly important in determining the character of the other transition processes. The reorientation of the state on the basis of personal networks of political loyalty and economic entrepreneurship, backed by the threat of violence, permitted the emergence of a limited political accommodation between the major parties in the 1990s, which provided few benefits to Cambodia's poor. The book goes on to show how the interaction between local, state, transnational and international networks has provided different opportunities for local participation and empowerment in rural and urban areas, and suggests that the roots of a future Cambodian democracy lie in this local activity, rather than primarily in elite or international policies for state transformation. Book jacket.