ABSTRACT
After decades of civil war, the Paris Peace Agreement between Cambodia’s war factions aimed to achieve lasting peace, liberal democracy, and a free market economy. While low-scale violence continued after the agreement, by the late 1990s, Cambodia achieved stable peace and sustained economic growth. Taking the quality of peace to mean the absence of war, economic growth, and deepening democracy, Cambodia’s quality of peace across the two decades since the agreement has been mixed. This chapter reflects on these conditions by examining five factors—post-agreement security, economic reconstruction, the role of civil society, transitional justice, and governance—to assess how they impede or promote Cambodia’s quality of peace. The author concludes that these five factors did not work in parallel to enhance the quality of peace. The author makes the point that post-agreement security developments resulted in the presence of a dominant party system. This top-down approach brought political stability and stable macro-economic conditions that made possible sustained economic growth and increased security. Yet this system prevented the development of other governance factors such as CSOs and judicial systems, limiting higher-quality peace. However, there remains throughout Cambodia strong local-level developments, which could lead to bottom-up reform.
