My Online Daily Blog

Written by Sophan Seng
Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Dear Editor,

Reading Sebastian Strangio’s interview “Border camps, Buddhism and building a mission” (June 5) made me think about the different approaches of Christian missionaries in Cambodia.

I really appreciate Sister Denise Coughlan, who says her Jesuit Services Organisation doesn’t proselytise or baptise Cambodian people.

Among Christian denominations, Catholicism has carried out their overseas missions very differently. While other denominations, such as the Anglican church, have used the Bible as their means to interact with people, and employ charitable proselytising to attract people to convert, Catholic missionaries have worked tirelessly at the grassroots level. For example, in their communities they work hard providing basic education, helping to preserve local traditions and culture, and they have worked closely with Cambodian Buddhist monks.

In Cambodia recently, there has been some controversy over Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses who have disturbed the calm of their Cambodian neighbours with their proselytising. Aggressive missionary approaches will, most likely, achieve more conversions. In contrast to this approach, Catholic missionaries spend more time improving education and health care and building their understanding of folk culture.

Catholics have always attempted to strengthen their ties to the grassroots level of Cambodian society. Catholic pastors have even adopted rituals that imitate Buddhist rituals, such as sprinkling sacred water on the participants at crops blessing ceremonies.

In addition, much Buddhist language has been used by Catholic pastors. Father Francois Ponchaud, a scholar of Cambodian history and tradition, exemplifies this.

In sum, the aim of all Christian missionaries is ubiquitous: to work towards the propagation of the Christian gospel, but their approaches are different.

World Vision, one of Cambodia’s largest charitable organisations, stated as their key mission “to follow Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God”. Many Cambodian employees working for World Vision might be a Christian or attend the Mass once per week.

The Catholic’s Second Vatican Council told those of non-Christian faith that they were created by God and they all will return to God. But this statement is badly opposed to the principle teaching of Lord Buddha, which holds that “human beings are created by Karma or deeds via thought, speech and action, and human beings can all be developed to be the master of Gods and men”.

Sophan Seng
University of Hawaii at Manoa

For your reference: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009061026388/National-news/Thank-God-for-Catholic-missionary-approach.html

Dear Editor,

I am surprisingly impressed by the different blessings during the Khmer New Year celebrations during the Year of the Ox, 2553 B.E. It is a very important opportunity for Cambodian people to give good wishes and blessings to each other. Political leaders have also used this day to deliver their blessing to their party members and supporters. The meaning of their blessings carries both good wishes and political messages.

The blessing that impressed me the most was that of Prime Minister Hun Sen, about the Prohm Vihea Thir Boun, or Four Sublime States of the Mind, to the Cambodian people. This blessing is extraordinarily well-known for the good leadership of the Kings, called “Dhamma King” or “Dhammika”.

Dhamma Kings have to pursue the virtue of loving-kindness (Metta), compassion (Karuna), sympathetic joy (Mudita) and neutrality (Upeka).

These four teachings are well-known among Cambodians. A good leader has to pursue this teaching, but to understand it clearly in both theory and practice is not well-conceptualised.

Furthermore, the mechanism to bring this teaching to the leaders as well as the general public is important. How can Cambodian political leaders and people pursue this Dhamma teaching? By blessings, individual observation or enlightenment, or strengthening the rule of law to embed it in Cambodian society? It would be a question for all policymakers and political leaders to leave their legacy for this ideal blessing of our current challenging and transitional world.

In the past, our parochial and charismatic leaders or kings might have been important. But now, these charismatic and capable leaders will not be substantial because the belief in democracy and good governance requires the capability of the people in active bottom-line participation and the rule of law, not the rule of any individual leader.

I hope with great optimism that the blessing of Cambodia’s prime minister this year will become a reality.

Sophan Seng
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Original source: The Phnom Penh Post

POLS 703

CAMBODIA: MEMORY, ATROCITY AND AFFECT

by Alvin Lim

In 2005, just as America was reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina, I embarked on a line
of flight from a quotidian life in Singapore, arriving in Phnom Penh to begin a new career as a
philosophy lecturer at Pannasastra University. Several months earlier I had resigned from my
excruciating human resources job at Singapore Airlines. So, it was as a Singaporean suffering
from ennui that I encountered several sites of memory of atrocity in Cambodia, some of which I
shall discuss in this essay. The organization of this paper is not what Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1987) would describe as aborescent, but is instead rhizomatic – its nodes crystallize
encounters I have and have not had with collective memories of atrocity (p. 21). This exploration
transverses time and space, and explores the political significance of sensory affects ranging
from the visual to the gustatory.

A Visit to Tuol Sleng

Under Pol Pot, the Tuol Svay Prey High School was transformed into S-21, the core of
Democratic Kampuchea’s internal surveillance and disciplinary apparatus. The former high
school’s classrooms were crudely transformed and deployed as prison cells and torture
chambers. During the Vietnamese occupation, S-21 was transformed into a genocide museum,
which has since become one of Phnom Penh’s most popular tourist destinations.
Any visit to a memory site of atrocity raises the question of visitor’s ambiguous identity as a
witness to the past or as a voyeur of the other’s pain. Philip Gourevitch (1998) confronted this
dilemma when he visited Rwanda’s Nyarubuye genocide memorial, where the murdered victims
were left unburied as a potent means of commemoration of their atrocious ends:

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The
skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility
of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there
– these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I
couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame,
incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took
photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I
saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely (p. 19).
Sven Lindqvist (1992), another explorer of historical pain, connects memory sites of atrocity to
the European project of colonialism. Noting that the Victorian liberal theorist Herbert Spenser
had applauded the extermination of those troublesome human populations that stood in the way
of the civilizing projects of Western colonialism (pp. 8-9), Lindqvist observes that:
The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald
lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. That insight has been completely repressed, even by
Germans, who have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are
actually a common European heritage (p. 9).
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Book Review

By Sophan Seng

Intervention & Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy? By Sorpong Peou. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, Hardcover: 573pp.

Recent studies of Cambodia have extensively focused on democracy building including its challenges as a post-conflict country. In 23 October 1991 is considered the significant turning point and it is the renaissance for Cambodia to develop democracy. This date is the Paris Peace Agreement collectively signed. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was appointed as the central body to implement all tasks stipulated by the Paris Peace Agreement. Among those key goals is to neutralize Cambodia’s politics that have been divisive among different political factions and ideologies. Building the capacity for democracy in Cambodia after the Paris Peace Agreement is the main focus written by Sorpong. In order to reflect the reality of democracy development in Cambodia, Sorpong has turned 90 degrees arguments to draw attention by contrasting many different approaches of his thesis. His work is engrossed and erudite through the combination of the topical, analytical, chronological and descriptive approaches. He put effort to justify his book as not substantially based on quantitative or statistic research, but his approach is academically prevalent. He used democracy development as the independent variable and he precisely included Cambodia’s political anti-democratic behavior, internal political structures, and external intervention as the based dependent variables to secure his debate[1].

Sorpong Peou presently is the Associate Professor of Political Science at Sophia University in Japan. He received his PhD in York University from Ontario, Canada. His researches interest is International relations in the Pacific Asia, comparative politics of East Asia, collective human security. His written books focusing on Cambodia potentially reflects his academic background in this area and his nationality as a Cambodian-born Canadian accredits his comprehension on Cambodia issues very well. This book is worthy to read for those who seek to read the academic works from Cambodian scholar writing about Cambodia. Sorpong has numerously written many books about Cambodia such as “Cambodia - The 1989 Paris Peace Conference : Background Analysis and Documents” in 1991, “Conflict Neutralization in the Cambodia War: from Battlefield to Ballot-Box” in 1997, “Intervention & Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy?” in 2000, “Cambodia: Change and Continuity in Contemporary Politics” in 2001, “International Democracy Assistance for Peacebuilding: Cambodia and Beyond” in 2007, “Human Security in East Asia: Challenges for Collaborative Action” in 2008 and other numerous published articles relating Cambodia. So we can agree that Sorpong has well illustrated his expertise on Cambodia.

Read the rest of this entry »

Strategic Views on Asian Regionalism: Survey Results and Analysis by Bates Gill, Michael Green, Kiyoto Tsuji, William Watts

This is the executive summary of a newly released CSIS study of elite opinion in Asia. The full report can be downloaded from the CSIS website www.csis.org/japan/asianarchitecture. It also draws on Asia’s New Multilateralism: Competition, Cooperation and the Search for Community, edited by Michael Green and Bates Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

Will Asia’s future see increasing economic interdependence and cooperation or growing power rivalry and confrontation? That strategic question will be answered in large measure by the region’s ability to construct effective multilateral institutions for integration and cooperation – what is now being called the new Asian “architecture.”

To illuminate the increasingly complex character of Asia’s new architecture, and to offer some practical judgments for future U.S. policy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) initiated a series of studies in 2006 focused on the areas of convergence and divergence in national views of regional institution-building. Building on a conference in 2006 and a major edited volume, CSIS approached the MacArthur Foundation, the Asahi Shimbun (Japan), the JoongAng Ilbo Shinmun (Korea), and the Opinion Dynamics Corporation to design a survey of strategic elites in Asia that would map aspirations and expectations across the region with respect to Asia’s emerging architecture.

Read the rest of this entry »

State and Society or State in Society

State in society is concurrently under debate among political scientists. At least, there are three different schools who have initially justified their own assumption. Among those perspectives, two extreme conception of finding the distinction of state and society has been in a heated dialogue. Autonomous state and society state should be two different schools in the dialogue. I prefer these two concepts as the basic premise to get a very constructive argument. However, pure society advocates will argue that statist approaches have always regarded state as the key structure and autonomous entity in political science and they will further their reason that state itself should not be existed irrespectively. Timothy Mitchell intuitively divided the argument in an extreme way to distinguish the different between state and society, regardless of autonomous state and society state. In this extreme respect, I see the “autonomous state” is a state that has been organized in the way that state structure or state bureaucracy can play by it own autonomously and at least is has always exploited their own people in that territory. Peter Evans named this kind of state “predatory state” in case study of Zaire country. India and Brazil have shared similar development of bureaucratic structure like Zaire, but it is not common for Evans to call these two developed states as “predatory ones”. These two are more complex and sophisticated than the case of Zaire. In extent to that, the same autonomous state constituted of autonomous bureaucracy like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Evans, admitted the empirical success in economic development. He named these three last states as “developmental states”. Are these developmental states autonomous? Are these developmental states in or outside society? How about Zaire, that has been called a “predatory state”, is in or outside society?

While Timothy Michell tried to reflect the extreme approaches of debate on the abandoning of the state, the political scientists concurred that the term “state” itself has been vague, very subjective, unrealistic, unpractical and academically disagreeable. State itself is so skeptical about its implementation if it doesn’t connect to society, state will not exist and it will not possibly implement its policy. State is a very unfavorable for researchers in term of its terminology and practical political breeding. And when it comes to practice, the prestige of the state will be easily lost because of its despotic characteristic in itself and in case of modern state like Zaire, is a good example to the unpopularity of the term “state”. If we look back to history of political movements in the old age, the state didn’t appear. When most territories were organized under the totalitarian leadership such as absolute kings, absolute republicans or absolutely kleptocrats, the state didn’t exist in that time. The state or nation-state in modern age, at least, constitute some key manageable elements and structures such as coherent bureaucrat, intermediate judicial body, embedded public policy, and the rule of law etc. So, Timothy Michell, including Peter Evans and Joel S. Migdal have insistently suggested the middle path theory of the state and society. In their different perspectives but directing the same goal, state and society is interconnected and inseparable social entity. At the end of his article, Timothy Mitchell recommended five new approaches to deal with the controversy of state and society. He suggested that state should not be taken as a free standing entity; the distinction between state and society should nevertheless be taken seriously; subjective view of the state is essentially important for its activities of decision making and policy for the well-being of the people; the state should be addressed as an effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification and supervision and surveillance; and finally the state appears as an abstraction in relation to the concreteness of the social and as a subjective ideality in relation to the objectiveness of the material world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Developmental States

The issues of developmental states have concentrated on the state intervention in building and rebuilding country economy. It has become an important part of the political economy which is the flagship of nation building in the post-cold war society. The debate in this reaction directly refers to the concept of “Bringing the State Back In” in our modern society. Implicitly, the state-centric analysis in developing the state, the government has still played important roles to build a strong economy. It has pivotally and pragmatically been relying on the state since the peasantry revolution, to industrialized innovation, and modern economic liberalization in trade and commerce. Evans skeptically stated that state is the “guardian of universal interests”. But the controversial debate that Evans made was that how effective state can take action to intervene the economy? And are there viable alternatives for state structure as well as sound policy of good governance to back up this effective intervention? Historically, we can see that each country in the reading articles is state-centered development. They shaped in different manner and policy enhancements.

First issue is the debate on state structure. First chapter, Evans elaborated the different structures that can help state intervention implement effectively. In case of governance, the state structure has been called “vertical structure” and “horizontal structure” or “vertical governance” and “horizontal governance”. Johnson has spent much of his time to articulate the developmental structure of the Military of International Trade and Industry (MITI) of Japan towards its economic miracle. In that phase, the state’s capital accumulation to growth and sustainability pursued in different strategies clearly compared the different between the United States and Japan. Regarding these two different approaches of economic development, Weber began the practice with his distinction between a “market economy” and a “planned economy”. With the same goal in this concept, Dahrendorf made distinction between “market rationality” and “plan rationality”, Dor made distinction between “market oriented systems” and “organization oriented systems”, and Kelly made distinction between a “rule governed state” and a “purpose governed state”. However, Johnson stressed that his comparison of these two economic strategies distinction is not in case of Soviet-type command economy because it is not plan rational, it is plan ideology. Soviet’s developmental economy was owned by the state and the state is the ownership of the means of production, state planning, and bureaucratic goal-setting (Evans, 1985). This is not in his dialogue to challenge the efficiency and effectiveness of plan rational conducted in Japan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Globalization and Financialization

The New Approach of Best Corporate Citizenship

Abstract

Globally speaking, the politics of globalization has been enormously debated. Current financial crisis has triggered the unenthusiastic brunt of people worldwide. This phenomenon is substantially caused by the impact of globalization. This paper will seek to understand the current financial crisis of financialization under the spectrum of globalization. The ongoing financial crisis of America and other regions of the world clearly translate the interconnectedness of the new approach of financialization conundrum. This paper elaborates the effect of globalization on financial flows and discovers the casualties from this crisis. The current United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called this crisis as “Slavery Perpetuated by Global Financial Crisis”.

First, there will be an introduction and some thought of pros and cons of globalization. Second, there will be an explanation of financial crisis, its casualties in our planet. Third, there will be suggestions and recommendations including the structure design to the new approach of best corporate citizenship to shoulder force in tackling this predicament.

Background

Globalization simply refers to the integration of regions into a global sphere. Many factors are considered the substantial proponents of globalization such as political ideology, social, culture, finance, technology, economics and geography that have drastically changed its shape to fulfill the lens of globalization. Many authors have linked current globalization to the belief of it is a repeating world history. Some said globalization has evolved around the expansion of human population and the invention of civilization such as the Sindhu of India, Roman Empire, or Han Dynasty of China. Some found that the historical routs of explorers and colonial agents are initially the links of flow of globalization such as the discovery of North America by Christopher Columbus or the Silk Road of Marco Polo. But the notion of globalization clearly emerged after the World War II when economists and politicians tried to restrain from continuing declining international economic integration and intractable division. The term itself was coined by different scholars interpreting in different periods. But in modern world, globalization has been preferably reiterated to identify the flows of trade, exchange of ideas and knowledge, technology, investment, and financial exchange. In Globalization and Its Discontent, Joseph Stiglitz defines globalization as “closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital knowledge, and (to a less extreme) people across borders” (Stiglitz, 2002). Part of this change is due to mobilization of labors and migration, but much of the larger part is due to changes in per capita income that is the “great divergence” as the ratio of per capita income of the richest to poorest nations are widened (Venables, 2006).

Read the rest of this entry »