Insurgent Groups During Post-Conflict Transformation: The Case of Military Strongmen in Cambodia

Abstract

The article discusses the experiences of a group of military strongmen during the post-conflict transformation of two Cambodian insurgent movements into a society of peace after a decades-long civil war. It explains the reasons why some of these strongmen were able to transfer their high status within the insurgency into senior positions in the incumbent government, while others became impoverished and sometimes even preferred to relapse into further conflict. Even though all of these strongmen shared a very similar life course and fought until the end of the conflict, their post-conflict fates have been very different. Central to the explanation of their behaviour during the transition is their habitus, the set of resources at their disposal and the nature of their vertical and horizontal social networks.

Varieties of post-civil war violence

“…The largest counter-revolutionary group boldly declared its intention to attract 7000 armed recruits, but in reality its numbers "never exceeded 800, just a tiny fraction of which had access to weapons" (Conboy, 2013). As Daniel Bultmann summarizes, such groups were principally "fighting for their own survival and could not mount a serious attempt to overthrow the communist regime" (Bultmann, 2018). Undoubtedly, however, the presence of such organized threats to the Khmer Rouge fueled the regime's extreme paranoia and zealous persecution of perceived counter-revolutionaries which would see up to 2 million citizens perish (Chandler, 1991).…”