ARI Working Paper Series

The Kingdom of Cambodia today is nominally a constitutional multi-party democracy. But all power lies with the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), with Prime Minister Hun Sen at its helm; and elections have been reduced to little more than formalities. This consolidation of power has been brought about by extra-institutional means through building networks of patron-client relationships, known in Cambodia as khsae, or ‘strings’ – a process frequently explained by reference to ‘Khmer political culture’. In this article we attempt to instrumentalize Khmer political culture as an explanatory construct by focusing on how Cambodians understand the concept of ‘power’, its source, its use, and its legitimation. We then show how the Cambodian conception of power influences the direction of cultural change by biasing the selection of behaviour, including behaviour by and towards holders of power. Finally we suggest how the Khmer concept of power contributes to an understanding of the persistence of patrimonialism in Cambodian politics.