These two absorbing books approach Cambodian issues from different directions. Both of them draw rewardingly on interview material.
Daniel Bultmann's book Inside Cambodian Insurgency began life as a PhD dissertation in sociology. It deals with the ways that power was conceived and exercised by the three militarized factions on the Thai-Cambodian border that opposed the Vietnamese-installed government of Cambodia between 1979 and 1991. These factions were the royalist Armée National Sihanoukiste (ANS), the anti-royalist Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF), and the Khmer Rouge. Until 1989, the Phnom Penh regime's forces opposing them were bolstered by over 100,000 Vietnamese troops.
The three factions shared an animosity toward Vietnam. They also hated each other. Some thirty years later, it is clear that the factions' perhaps understandable inability to work together contributed to their failure to defeat the more coherent forces arrayed against them.
The civil war died down after the Paris Peace Agreements were signed in October 1991. In Cambodia twenty years later, after what he calls “the dissolution of the field” (p. 179), Bultmann interviewed fifty-eight former officers and soldiers from the factions to determine, in broad terms, how they had perceived and enacted power and authority.
For his theoretical framework, Bultmann draws uncritically on Foucault's intimidating notions of power and more persuasively on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and habitus groups, pressing the point that peoples' social backgrounds and life stories influence and in a sense determine their views and behavior. Foucault and Bourdieu can carry him only so far, however, and toward the end of the book he admits endearingly, “in order to respond to realities in the field Bourdieu's approach had to be adjusted at certain points” (p. 186).
Echoing Bourdieu, Bultmann found, unsurprisingly, that his interlocutors' ideas of power, militarism, and authority often reflected their status and life histories. This approach was more helpful in interviewing former members of the noncommunist factions than it was for interviewing former Khmer Rouge. Most of the officers in the ANS and KPNLF and many of the rank and file had grown up in the Sihanouk era (1955–70) and the Khmer Republic (1970–75). In the early 1970s, many of the officers at least had fought against the Khmer Rouge and had been defeated.
In the interviews, these men often looked back nostalgically at pre-1975 Cambodia when they had enjoyed favored status and had never trained for combat duty. In those far-off days Cambodian society, in these men's view, consisted of those who had been born to lead and those who had been born to serve. Many noncommunist officers regarded ordinary soldiers as their inferiors, who only needed to be taught, as one of them remarked, “how to salute walk and respect higher ranking people” (p. 71). The more successful officers treated their subordinates as younger members of a family.
The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, came to power in 1975 with a fierce, transformative agenda. Its army had extensive combat experience, no peacetime history, and no officer class. Almost all of its officers and ordinary soldiers were drawn from the rural poor.
In 1975 the leaders of the Khmer Rouge—or more precisely, the leaders of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)—wanted to level Cambodian society at once by overthrowing the country's “exploiters” and empowering the poorest of the poor. In his discussion of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla faction in the 1980s, Bultmann draws on documentary evidence from the CPK's time in power to suggest why the Khmer Rouge were, among the factions, the best trained, the most aggressive, and the most prepared to take casualties. “Sometimes,” a former Khmer Rouge officer remembered, “we were asked to fight three times a day” (p. 90).
Bultmann's description of the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, however, is badly flawed (pp. 78ff). Determined to place the leaders inside a normative habitus group, he claims that a “Paris circle” was fully in command of the CPK between 1975 and 1979. Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen, to be sure, had studied in Paris and were powerful figures in the regime, but Bultmann fails to acknowledge the leadership's collective nature and the importance of Nuon Chea, Vorn Vet, Sao Phim, Ke Pauk, and Ta Mok, none of whom had ever been in France.
On balance, Bultmann's conscientious, tightly woven study will be of interest to scholars of recent Cambodian history and to those concerned with the sociology of guerrilla movements. Given its prohibitive price, some readers will need access to a well-endowed university library. They may also need a magnifying glass to enlarge the tiny type.
Sophal Ear's more accessible Aid Dependence in Cambodia—his first book—is a passionate and persuasive critique of contemporary Cambodian governance as well as a pessimistic account of the often misguided roles played by foreign donors to Cambodia since 1993.
Ear was born in Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge came to power. He escaped with his mother to France and eventually to the United States, where he attended UC Berkeley and Princeton. He has written widely on Cambodia's political economy.
Aid Dependence in Cambodia draws heavily on Ear's previously published work. Some chapters bear titles that are almost identical to published pieces, but the later versions are helpfully enhanced by more recent interview material and statistical data. The title of the book, however, is misleading, because only the introductory chapter, “Aid Dependency and Quality of Governance” (pp. 15–48), addresses the issue posed in the title. Happily, the remaining three chapters fit together neatly enough to form a well-constructed indictment of Cambodian governance from a human rights perspective. Ear also indicts what he believes has often been uninformed and impractical foreign interference in Cambodian affairs. Ear's book, like Sebastian Strangio's Hun Sen's Cambodia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014), shows how donors are consistently used and manipulated in ways that suit the Cambodian government's often dubious agendas rather than their own. Since 1993, Cambodia has been flooded with foreign aid, coming principally from the European Union and Japan, which has supplemented the inadequate funding provided by the ruling party for such areas as health, education, agriculture, human rights, and the environment. The often querulous proposals that donors have made for accountability, openness, and systemic reform have consistently gone unheeded, but most donations have no punitive clause, and over the years very little foreign assistance to Cambodia has been suspended, pruned, or withdrawn.
Ear's well-documented, helpful book sees no immediate future for pluralism, accountability, or the rule of law in Cambodia, or anything like equity for Cambodia's poor. At the same time, it makes it clear that the end of substantial, unappreciated foreign assistance seems nowhere in sight.
