Opinion

In 20 years time, Cambodia will be as unrecognisable to us as our present would have been to our parents. Over the next eight weeks, Southeast Asia Globe, in partnership with Future Forum, will be speaking to some of the Kingdom’s brightest minds about the future they envision for the next generation.

Progress has been lamentably slow, but a decade on, benefits can be seen in Cambodians learning this terrible history.

The EU says Cambodia must improve its human rights record or face a suspension of trade privileges. What will that mean for the nation’s financial health and the lives of ordinary Cambodians?

Hun Sen’s regime to discuss free-trade deal with China amid EU and US threats to end trade privileges over Cambodia’s human rights record. But there has been growing resentment in Cambodia over Chinese investment.

40 years on from the devastating Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s road to recovery is rife with problems.

Amid the spotlight on the correspondence by the two leaders looms the bigger question of what a recalibrated relationship may look like and how it will evolve in the future.

Cambodia boasts one of the lowest unemployment rates in Southeast Asia. According to research platform for investors, Macrotrends, this number stood at 1.05 percent in 2018, putting its unemployment rate only higher than Thailand’s (0.67 percent) and Lao PDR’s (0.61 percent) when compared to other ASEAN countries.

In a letter, the US president assured Cambodia it does not seek regime change but wants to promote democracy.

European Union pressure is working, and revoking trade preferences might allow Cambodians to escape dynastic rule.

Chinese investment in the Global South is spurring anti-Chinese sentiment.

Earlier this month, following a report on an investigation, the EU threatened to pull trade preferences for Cambodia because it was “concerned about the human rights situation there [Cambodia]”.

In recent years, Cambodia has effectively become a one-party state with ever-tightening restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo should not hesitate in helping the Cambodian people restore democracy despite objections and possible threats from Prime Minister Hun Sen against dissidents.

After a big week for the country’s opposition, a look at what may lie ahead for it as well as Cambodian politics more generally.

Ahead of the two-year anniversary of the arrest of former Radio Free Asia (RFA) journalists Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin, Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southeast Asia, said:

At the request of the Phnom Penh authorities, Mu Sochua, a senior figure in the Cambodian opposition party, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), was briefly detained by Malaysian immigration officers when she tried to enter Cambodia on 7 November.

On a visit to Siem Reap in Cambodia some years ago, an expatriate Malaysian there intimated an open secret: that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is an admirer of Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

A closer look at Southeast Asia’s evolving approach to non-interference and the cross-border impacts of Cambodia’s recent opposition dynamics.

Almost two years after their arrest on outlandish charges of "espionage", two of Cambodia's finest journalists are snared by a government assault on free expression.

Annual Water Festival tempered by tight security and threats of war.