UC Berkeley

This dissertation explicates the remaking of sovereign rule through land reform in Phnom Penh, Cambodia through moments of social, political and economic reconfiguration. Depopulated by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Phnom Penh was repopulated after the genocide by a mostly new urban citizenry. Then, in the spring of 1989, the socialist state introduced a comprehensive land reform program, that was critical to the regime’s retention of power in the liberal era. What followed was a brief but highly contentious transitional period in which new land reform policies led to property disputes across the country, becoming especially violent in Phnom Penh. These territorial politics shaped and were shaped by new forms of authority, political economy, and rule of law, articulating shifting conditions of ownership and belonging. Through five empirical chapters, I explore how rupture becomes the basis upon which diverse claims to sovereignty are made. In particular, drawing from in-depth interviews with sixty-four state officials, property owners and informal settlers and archival research in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia state papers, and the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia land dispute files, I consider how property and political regimes were co-constituted in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. I argue that by claiming a rupture with past, the state invites new urban populations to claim land in line with new conditions of ownership and belonging. In so doing, claimants confer power onto the regime’s reformed political regime. Critically, these shifting conditions of land ownership in Phnom Penh are deeply entwined with a racialized state rule. In co-producing property and political regime, the state is simultaneously producing the normative national subjects that can rightfully claim a space in the city.