2012 to move, on 27 March a large police force arrived in the early morning and demanded families and businesses leave immediately (Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5 Slorkram river community before (26 March) and after (27 March) the eviction, Siem Reap, 2012.
Source: Courtesy of Philippe Ceulen.
Orm’s home had been displaced several times; its fixity to the river bank had gradually been unstitched until it was gone. The fire that tore through it was deliberately ignited to remove every trace of familial life once lived on Siem Reap’s river banks. It was the end point of an attritional war waged by provincial authorities to make room for more ‘profitable’ uses. Described as a ‘sore sight for tourist eyes’, the river ‘clean up’ (Sokha 2006) was justified to help beautify the city, the economy of which is driven by international tourists visiting the archaeological ruins of Angkor close by.
The spectre of forced eviction and the eradicative violence that accompanied it, also revealed fault lines that were hard to ignore and compelled the twin study of domestic violence and forced eviction. Their juxtaposition was something I kept on returning to in my thinking. While the passing of DV law suggested a political willingness, of sorts, to tackle this type of violence against women through ‘rule of law’, the Cambodian government were concurrently using ‘rule by law’ against women contesting forced eviction on the streets of the country’s capital (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of these distinctions). 2011 saw the escalation of violences in, and politically motivated charges against, the Boeung Kak Lake (BKL) community of Phnom Penh and women in particular. Law and violence had an intimate relationship in Cambodia and was one I felt needed exploring. Over the years, spending more time in Phnom Penh for the DV law study interviewing NGOs and policymakers, I took the opportunity to visit BKL in 2012 and then to start new work there. This fieldwork was carried out in 2013 and 2014.
Garnering both national and international attention, BKL is perhaps the most widely known case of forced eviction, and collective resistance to it, in Cambodia. The controversial project involved the eviction of families living around the lake over many years in central Phnom Penh (see Chapter 4 for more information; Nam 2011 on its history and Kent 2016 on recent events there). As the United Nations General Assembly (2012, p. 8) note, ‘The case is emblematic of the desperation that communities throughout Cambodia feel in resolving their land disputes, and the ensuing civil unrest.’ To understand forced eviction as an embodied, located, and grounded phenomenon, in‐depth interviews were conducted with 15 women from BKL who had either been forcibly evicted and/or who had become active participants in protest in 2013. In addition to these interviews, material was gained via audio‐recorded tours (Figure 1.6) with some of the women as well as more informal ‘hanging out’ at the women’s advocacy centre. All the women chose to be identified using their real names: Kong Chantha, Bo Chhorvy, Phan Chhunreth, Nget Khun, Ngoun Kimlang, Soy Kolap, Srei Leap, Heng Mom, Van My, Sear Naret, Srei Pov, Soung Samai, Phorn Sophea, Srei Touch, and Tep Vanny. Given the government’s intensified clamping down on freedom of speech and willingness to incarcerate BKL women in recent years since, I have not used their specific names where I refer to any direct criticism of government party members.
Figure 1.6 Audio‐taped tour of Boeung Kak by residents, 2013.
Photo: Katherine Brickell.
A further five interviews in 2013 were conducted with women living in Trapaing Anhchanh, a resettlement community made up of evicted residents from the ‘Cambodia Railway Rehabilitation Project’.10 These are featured in Chapter 4 using pseudonyms. In 2014 I returned to interview three BKL women, Tep Vanny and Srei Leap, who I had met previously, and Yorm Bopha, who was in prison during an earlier research trip (see Chapter 6 for more information on incarceration). I also extended my sample to include six husbands of BKL activists and other menfolk to understand their experiences (I again adopt pseudonyms in the empirical chapters). Across both years of research, I undertook six further interviews with NGOs involved in land rights issues. In 2017 and into 2018 I also met several Cambodian political figures and journalists who were in London and who offered their views on the BKL situation.
Overarching Methodological Approaches
Taken together, the four projects I have outlined are marked by a series of overarching methodological approaches. First, the material presented in the book brings together and scans across a 16‐year horizon that is complementary to feminist geography research and emphasises the benefits of sustained engagement, of long‐term relationships, and commitments to particular groups of people or issues (McDowell 2001; Valentine 2005). It is not only that my arguments are based on a larger volume of interviews than individual studies might yield (over 300 in total) but that their undertaking over more than a decade gives rise to insights that go beyond snapshots of time. As Clare Madge et al. (1997, p. 96) note, longitudinal studies are valuable ‘because the research is not fixed in time but reflects the dynamism of people’s experiences, so enabling temporal differences’ to be comprehended (see also Sou and Webber 2019). The influence of Orm’s life story, followed from 2004 until 2013 inspired, for example, the shape of my research in the years that followed in this book. Learning from her twin experiences of marital breakdown and forced eviction, cemented my thinking that rather than discuss domestic violence and forced eviction in isolation from each other, it was important to trace and understand their connective tissue. Being attentive to individual as well as collective trajectories in a country in flux offers the ability to explore how women’s lives and those of their families are swept up with Cambodia’s transition – ‘to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction’ (Hartman cited in Saunders 2008, p. 7). Inspired by Orm, the book is therefore less reactive to, and more reflective on, the (un)eventful and women’s survival-work on a daily and long‐term basis. The book’s ability to capture the slow violences, less perceptible traces, and repeated articulations of injustice in Cambodian society are heightened through this approach. They provide a fuller and more cumulative story about the violences encountered in domestic life than might otherwise have been possible. Furthermore, given that violence is ‘a processual and unfolding moment, rather than an “act” or “outcome”’ (Springer and Le Billon 2016, p. 2), the longitudinal allows the book to transcend the singular event and moment to demonstrate the processing and unfolding nature of violence.
Second, the book draws out the experiences of ever‐married Khmer women from the wider data set of participants possible from the four studies.11 Albeit selective, this approach aims to ensure that histories of women in Cambodia are told not only through the more formal realms of female politicians (Lilja 2008) or Buddhist nuns (Kent 2011a, 2011b) but also through more informal spheres of political power tied to the marital realm. The book’s focus on the Cambodian housewife as domestic violence survivor and grassroots activist contributes to seminal work on the history of women and power in the country (Jacobsen 2008). It works to ensure that as domestic
