Cambodia Votes.

• Author: Strangio, Sebastian
• Position: Book review

Cambodia Votes. By Michael Sullivan. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016. Softcover: 341pp.

Elections in Cambodia present something of a paradox. On the one hand, Prime Minister Hun Sen and his long-ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) enjoy massively lopsided advantages over their opponents. The CPP controls the security forces, the civil service and the press, as well as the state institutions tasked with administering the electoral process--all of which have helped guarantee its victory in the past four national polls. On the other hand, Cambodian elections have never become entirely meaningless rituals. At the last election in July 2013, the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) saw a huge surge of public support that slashed the CPP's majority in the 123-seat National Assembly from ninety seats to just sixty-eight. While the CPP escaped with a narrow, albeit contested, victory, it now faces serious challenges in extending its power beyond commune elections this June, and national polls in mid-2018.

This tension is the subject of Michael Sullivan's book Cambodia Votes, his highly readable account of Cambodia's "authoritarian elections" since 1993. "Over the preceding two decades", he writes, "internationally supported elections in Cambodia have been the central mechanism though which Hun Sen and the CPP have legitimized, maintained, and reproduced their authoritarian grip on political-economic power. At the same time, elections have been the principal instrument through which political and civil opposition have persistently struggled to challenge Hun Sen's system of governance" (p. 284).

Sullivan, a former director of the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, writes that Cambodia's electoral paradox originated with the Paris Peace Agreements, signed in October 1991, which sought to end the civil war that had raged between the CPP and three resistance factions since the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. To implement the terms of the Paris accords, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was established, a $2 billion peacekeeping operation tasked with disarming the factions, repatriating refugees and holding multi-party elections. From its very conception, then, Cambodia's electoral system was unusual for the extent to which it was infused by outside influence of various kinds. As Sullivan writes of the UN-administered 1993 election, "never before had national elections in a sovereign state been...