ABSTRACT
Founded in 2012, the environmental activist group Mother Nature Cambodia has become one of the Hun Sen government’s main targets of repression. This chapter will attempt to analyse why the group’s activities pose such a challenge for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, which often paints its members as ‘enemies’ of the nation. It contrasts Mother Nature Cambodia’s campaigns with the government’s ‘green’ politics, reframed as a kind of spectacular ‘environmentality’ that covers up the plundering of resources by circles of officials and businesspeople. Using a selected set of videos, the chapter discusses Mother Nature Cambodia’s use of images to enact a type of ecological citizenship that has the potential to open the way for radically new forms of activism, especially for younger generations.
