Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia

Broadhurst, Roderic

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 110752119X ISBN 13 : 9781107521193

Editeur : Cambridge University Press, 2018

Biographie de l'auteur :

Thierry Bouhours is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Regulatory Institutions Network. He obtained his Ph.D. from Griffith University, Brisbane. His doctoral project adopted a multidisciplinary approach across psychology, education, and criminology to examine the life trajectory of children excluded from primary school. This work was published in 2008 as The Journey of the Excluded: Schooling and Crime in the Exclusive Society. His career has been research-focused with experience in qualitative and quantitative methods. In 2007 his research interests shifted to the comparative analysis of criminal victimisation in South East Asia and China and a long-term project on historical and contemporary patterns of violence and crime. He recently co-authored Business and the Risk of Crime in China (2011), and has been published in several international journals in both English and French. His work brought him to Cambodia many times over the years, and in 2014 he settled in Phnom Penh, where he works as a consultant and advisor in various development projects.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In 1939, the German sociologist Norbert Elias published his groundbreaking work The Civilizing Process, which has come to be regarded as one of the most influential works of sociology today. In this insightful new study tracing the history of violence in Cambodia, the authors evaluate the extent to which Elias's theories can be applied in a non-Western context. Drawing from historical and contemporary archival sources, constabulary statistics, victim surveys and newspaper reports, Broadhurst, Bouhours and Bouhours chart trends and forms of violence throughout Cambodia from the mid-nineteenth century through to the present day. Analysing periods of colonisation, anti-colonial wars, interdependence, civil war, the revolutionary terror of the 1970s and post-conflict development, the authors assess whether violence has decreased and whether such a decline can be attributed to Elias's civilising process, identifying a series of universal factors that have historically reduced violence.