Indigeneity, precarity and peace: Lessons from Cambodia

Indigenous communities occupy complex positions within Cambodia’s histories of conflict, transition and peace. Since the advent of a UN backed peace process in the 1990s, Indigenous communities have experienced multiple, intersecting exclusions: Indigenous communities have faced hostility and discrimination, positioned as a marginal and less developed ‘other’; the legislation of new regimes of land titling embedded new forms of material insecurity around property rights that were dissonant to traditional Indigenous worldviews; and the wider liberalisation of the Cambodian economy enabled the penetration of forms of ecologically destructive and kleptocratic economic activity within Indigenous land. With a focus on former combatants in two Indigenous communities in northern Cambodia, this article explores some of the more pernicious effects of liberalising peace projects. Firstly, the article shows how peace can be productive of multiple regimes of precarity that cut across material and cultural bases. Secondly, it highlights how precarity limits and reconfigures the terms on which Indigenous communities seek to claim and articulate their Indigeneity in the context of peace. The article suggests that sociologists are well placed to unpack the iatrogenic effects of peace processes, with lessons for wider constituencies in Cambodia and beyond.