Challenging Khmer Citizenship: Minorities, the State, and the International Community in Cambodia

The idea of a distinctly ‘liberal’ form of multiculturalism has emerged in the theory and practice of Western democracies, and the international community has become actively engaged in its global dissemination via international norms and organizations. Liberal multiculturalism defends some forms of minority rights as advancing basic liberal values of individual freedom, democracy, and social justice. The internationalization of liberal minority rights norms faces many challenges. To help identify these challenges, it is useful to focus on one country and one particular interpretation of liberal multiculturalism. To this end, this thesis explores state-minority-relations in Cambodia in light of Will Kymlicka’s theory of multicultural citizenship. Kymlicka’s conception of multicultural citizenship shares many of the basic assumptions of other liberal theorists of multiculturalism and helps making sense of Western multiculturalism as well as of emerging international minority rights norms. Unlike other theorists, Kymlicka has explicitly discussed the potential for adopting liberal multiculturalism in non-Western societies.