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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Drawing on 15 years of fieldwork and over 300 interviews, Home SOS argues that the home is central to the violence and gendered contingency of existence in crisis ordinary Cambodia.
- Provides an original book-length study which brings domestic violence and forced eviction into twin view
- Offers relational insights between different violences to build an integrated understanding of women’s experiences of home life
- Mobilises the crisis ordinary as a critical pedagogy and imaginary through which to understand everyday gendered politics of survival
- Positions domestic violence and forced eviction as manifestations of intimate war against women’s homes and bodies located inside and outside of the traditional purview of war
- Reaffirms and reprioritises the home as a political entity which is foundational to the concerns of human geography
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Table of Contents
Cover
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
About the Author
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter One: Fire in the House
Introduction
Crisis Ordinaries of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
The Survival Work of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
The Gender‐Based Violences of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
Converging Research Trajectories
Overarching Methodological Approaches
Structure of the Book
Chapter Two: Conceptualising Domestic Crises
Introduction
Crisis Ordinary and Survival‐Work
Bio‐necropolitics and Precarity
Intimate War and Slow Violence
Law and Lawfare
Rights to Dwell
Conclusion
Chapter Three: National Trajectories of Crisis in Cambodia
Introduction
National Trajectories
Chapter Four: Attrition Warfare, Precarious Homes, and Truncated Marriages
Introduction
Domestic Violence in Cambodia
Forced Eviction in Cambodia
Conclusion
Chapter Five: Un(Invited) and (Un)Eventful Spaces of Resistance and Citizenship
Introduction
Legislating Against Domestic Violence
Contesting Forced Eviction
Conclusion
Chapter Six: Intimate Wounds of Law and Lawfare
Introduction
The Law and Lawfare of Domestic Violence
The Law and Lawfare of Forced Eviction
Conclusion
Chapter Seven: Dwelling in the Crisis Ordinary
Introduction
Inhabiting the Fire: Dwelling in the Crisis Ordinary
Fanning the Fire: Political Geographies of Home
Legislating the Fire: Towards a Feminist Legal Geographies Project
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 SOS sign in Boeung Kak Lake, Phnom Penh, 2011.
Figure 1.2 Orm’s sugar cane juice stall outside her home, Siem Reap, 2004....
Figure 1.3 Exterior of Orm’s home, Siem Reap, 2004.
Figure 1.4 Domestic violence law poster in Pursat Province, 2013.
Figure 1.5 Slorkram river community before (26 March) and after (27 March) t...
Figure 1.6 Audio‐taped tour of Boeung Kak by residents, 2013.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The fall of Phnom Penh, 1975.
Figure 3.2 Khmer Rouge women's unit harvesting rice.
Figure 3.3 Elite Town III, Koh Pich, Phnom Penh, 2019.
Figure 3.4 One park development built on the former Boeung Kake Lake, 2018....
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Kalliyan’s new house (right) next to her parents’ (left), Siem Re...
Figure 4.2 The shattered brick line of an evicted house in BKL swallowed up ...
Figure 4.3 Evidence of inundated homes, 2013.
Figure 4.4 Interviewee’s photograph of their drowned home, 2013.
Figure 4.5 Civica Royal Phnom Penh Golf Club, 2013.
Figure 4.6 Vacant plots at Trapaing Anhchanh resettlement site, 2013.
Figure 4.7 Typical makeshift housing at the Trapaing Anhchanh resettlement s...
Figure 4.8 Chankrisna’s watch, 2014.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Stopped ‘One Billion Rising’ cycling event, 2014.
Figure 5.2 Boeung Kak women’s workshop, 2013.
Figure 5.3 BKL women’s lotus‐wielding activism, 2012.
Figure 5.4 Lotus flowers at the barricade line, 2012.
Figure 5.5 SOS protest on the former BKL as US President Obama lands to atte...
Figure 5.6 Tep Vanny with Hillary Clinton, Vital Voices Awards, Washington D...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 A typical commune office where local reconciliation takes place, ...
Figure 6.2 Security guards at a protest in Phnom Penh, 2014.
Figure 6.3 Phan Chhunreth in a ‘Stop Violence Against Women’ T‐shirt, 2014....
Figure 6.4 Tep Vanny interview with the media outside the US Embassy in Phno...
Figure 6.5 Release of the ‘BKL 13’, 2013.
Figure 6.6 Drawing of ‘Mother Tep Vanny’ (top) with ‘Nana’ (middle) and a bo...
Figure 6.7 Reaching out to Michelle Obama outside the US Embassy, 2015.
Figure 6.8 Amnesty International protest outside the Cambodian Embassy in Lo...
Figure 6.9 Tep Vanny upon release from jail, 2018.
Figure 6.10 ‘Footprints’ artwork by Cambodian schoolchildren under the direc...
Guide
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RGS‐IBG Book Series
For further information about the series and a full list of published and forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com.
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Home SOS
Gender, Violence, and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia
Katherine Brickell
This edition first published 2020© 2020 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).This Work is a co‐publication between The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Katherine Brickell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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For Christian and Stefan
List of Figures
Figure 1.1
SOS sign in Boeung Kak Lake, Phnom Penh, 2011.
Figure 1.2
Orm’s sugar cane juice stall outside her home, Siem Reap, 2004
Figure 1.3
Exterior of Orm’s home in, Siem Reap, 2004.
Figure 1.4
Domestic violence law poster in Pursat Province, 2013.
Figure 1.5
Slorkram river community before (26 March) and after (27 March) the eviction, Siem Reap, 2012.
Figure 1.6
Audio‐taped tour of Boeung Kak by residents, 2013.
Figure 3.1
The fall of Phnom Penh, 1975.
Figure 3.2
Khmer Rouge women’s unit harvesting rice.
Figure 3.3
Elite Town III, Koh Pich, Phnom Penh, 2019.
Figure 3.4
One park development built on the former Boeung Kake Lake, 2018.
Figure 4.1
Kalliyan’s new house (right) next to her parents’ (left), Siem Reap Province, 2011.
Figure 4.2
The shattered brick line of an evicted house in BKL swallowed up by sand, 2011.
Figure 4.3
Evidence of inundated homes, 2013.
Figure 4.4
Interviewee’s photograph of their drowned home, 2013.
Figure 4.5
Civica Royal Phnom Penh Golf Club, 2013.
Figure 4.6
Vacant plots at Trapaing Anhchanh resettlement site, 2013.
Figure 4.7
Typical makeshift housing at the Trapaing Anhchanh resettlement site, 2013.
Figure 4.8
Chankrisna’s watch, 2014.
Figure 5.1
Stopped ‘One Billion Rising’ cycling event, 2014.
Figure 5.2
Boeung Kak women’s workshop, 2013.
Figure 5.3
BKL women’s lotus‐wielding activism, 2012.
Figure 5.4
Lotus flowers at the barricade line, 2012.
Figure 5.5
SOS protest on the former BKL as US President Obama lands to attend ASEAN meetings, 2012.
Figure 5.6
Tep Vanny with Hillary Clinton, Vital Voices Awards, Washington DC, 2013.
Figure 6.1
A typical commune office where local reconciliation takes place, 2012.
Figure 6.2
Security guards at a protest in Phnom Penh, 2014.
Figure 6.3
Phan Chhunreth in ‘Stop Violence Against Women’ T‐shirt, 2014.
Figure 6.4
Tep Vanny interview with the media outside the US Embassy in Phnom Penh, 2014.
Figure 6.5
Release of the ‘BKL 13’, 2013.
Figure 6.6
Drawing of ‘Mother Tep Vanny’ (top) with ‘Nana’ (middle) and a boy (bottom), 2013.
Figure 6.7
Reaching out to Michelle Obama outside the US Embassy, 2015.
Figure 6.8
Amnesty International protest outside the Cambodian Embassy in London, 2018.
Figure 6.9
Tep Vanny upon release from jail, 2018.
Figure 6.10
‘Footprints’ artwork by Cambodian schoolchildren under the direction of Heak Pheary, 2016.
List of Abbreviations
ADB
Asian Development Bank
ADHOC
The Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association
APRODEV
Association of World Council of Churches related Development Organisations in Europe
ASEAN
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
AusAID
Australian Aid
BRI
Belt and Road Initiative
BKL
Boeung Kak Lake
CAMBOW
The Cambodian Committee for Women
CCHR
The Cambodian Center for Human Rights
CDHS
Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey
CEDAW
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women
CNRP
Cambodian National Rescue Party
COHRE
Center on Housing Rights and Evictions
CPP
Cambodian Peoples’ Party
CRP
Compliance Review Panel
DK
Democratic Kampuchea
DV
Domestic violence
ECCC
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
ELC
Economic Land Concession
FDI
Foreign Direct Investment
FUNCINPEC
National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia
GADC
Gender and Development for Cambodia
GADNET
The Gender and Development Network
GIZ
Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit
GMS
Greater Mekong Subregion
GTZ
Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit
ICNL
The International Center for Not‐for‐Profit Law
IDI
Inclusive Development International
ILO
International Labour Organization
LANGO
The Law on Associations and Non‐Governmental Organizations
LICADHO
Cambodia League for the Promotion and Deference of Human Rights
LMAP
Land Management and Administrative Project
MOWA
Ministry of Women’s Affairs
NAPVAW
The National Action Plan to Prevent Violence Against Women
NCSWF
The National Committee for Upholding Cambodian Social Morality, Women’s and Khmer Family Values
NGO
Non‐governmental organisation
NGO‐CEDAW
Cambodian NGO Committee on CEDAW
NIS
National Institute of Statistics
OHCHR
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
P4P
Partners for Prevention
PRK
People’s Republic of Kampuchea
RGC
Royal Government of Cambodia
SNC
Supreme National Council
UN
United Nations
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNGA
United Nations General Assembly
UNHCR
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UN‐HABITAT
United Nations Human Settlements Programme
UNODC
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
UNTAC
United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia
UNWOMEN
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women
US
United States
US$
United States Dollar
VOA
The Voice of America
WHO
World Health Organization
WMC
Women’s Media Centre
About the Author
Katherine Brickell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), UK. Her research cross‐cuts social, political, legal, and development geography, with a longstanding focus on the domestic sphere as a precarious and gendered space of contemporary everyday life. She has over 15 years of research experience in Cambodia and since 2017 has begun to undertake new collaborative work in the UK and Ireland. Home SOS is Katherine’s first monograph and follows the publication of co‐edited collections including Translocal Geographies (2011 with Ayona Datta), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017 with Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia and Alex Vasudevan), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2017 with Simon Springer), and The Handbook of Displacement (2020 with her RHUL colleagues). In recognition of research excellence, she was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS‐IBG) in 2014 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2016. She is editor of the journal Gender, Place and Culture and is former Chair of the RGS‐IBG Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group.
Series Editor’s Preface
The RGS‐IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS‐IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.
For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:www.rgsbookseries.com.
David FeatherstoneUniversity of Glasgow, UK
RGS‐IBG Book Series Editor
Acknowledgements
It is difficult to know where to start writing these acknowledgements. I first submitted the proposal for Home SOS in 2012, and eight years on, its journey into print has finally come to an end. This end point has only been made possible through sustained, and much appreciated, professional and personal guidance and support.
The book would not exist without the time, generosity and emotional energy of participants in sharing their stories of domestic life in Cambodia. It has been an honour and a privilege to listen to and write about their intimate experiences in Home SOS. The four studies the book is based on have been made possible by the interpreters and research assistants I have worked with – young and inspiring Cambodians who I am incredibly grateful to for their dedication and kindness. I feel saddened and torn that I cannot name them here given the political sensitivities of the book, which have only intensified over the course of writing it. I am also grateful to the many photographers who have allowed me to use their images free of charge in the book to provide the reader with a visual sense of home precarities unfolding in Cambodia. The joint reporting of Cambodian and international journalists on forced eviction in national newspapers, now shut down or under new management, has been particularly helpful to understanding the frequency and impact of women’s activism in relation to Boeung Kak Lake.
Thank you to the RGS‐IBG Book Series for your expertise and understanding in bringing the book to fruition over such a long period of time. Thank you to Neil Coe and Dave Featherstone for providing constructive feedback at each stage, and to Jacqueline Scott for liaising with me for so many years.
The Leverhulme Trust has been instrumental in enabling the time to write the monograph. I would also like to thank the funders of the research, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Royal Geographical Society. The PhD research that forms the initial basis for Home SOS was supervised by Sylvia Chant at the London School of Economics. Thank you Sylvia for giving me the best start in my academic journey, for believing in me and for showing me what passion and drive can achieve. Since 2008 I have been a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London and having been home to my scholarly endeavours for over a decade, it is only fitting that I thank my colleagues, both academic and administrative, for the support offered.
In the academic community, I am also honoured to have had ongoing support from geographers who have read and commented on the many iterations of the book. Ruth Craggs is of especial note for having read drafts of each and every chapter, on multiple occasions. Since meeting for the first time at the Las Vegas AAG in 2009, I have rarely felt lonely in academia because of our friendship and our writing side‐by‐side across cafes in London. I am also grateful for the many writing retreats we have been on, memorably battling through snow to get there, and taking trips to garden centres as shared spaces of happiness in which to clear our heads. Writing retreats have been a key way I have managed to push the book substantively forward. Thank you Harriet Hawkins for our cherished writing retreats together, and for being such a positive and reassuring figure in the journey of this book. I have also benefitted from the insightful feedback given to me by James Tyner, Nithya Natarajan, and Laurie Parsons and which extended the book’s ambitions in the final year of its writing. The opportunity for honed thinking has also been facilitated by the feedback shared with me through departmental seminars at the University of Leicester, King’s College London and Durham University.
The long journey of the book’s coming to pass has arisen through personal circumstances that I could never have predicted when I began writing. Soon after returning from maternity leave in 2015 I was diagnosed with a rare cancer, Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP), and took medical leave to undertake major surgical and chemotherapy treatment. As the disease is so rare, it is important that I use this opportunity to raise awareness of it (see Macmillan and Cancer Research UK web pages). Throughout my treatment, and in the years since, I have received practical and emotional advice from the PMP community of fellow survivors and its organisation run by carers and patients (https://www.pseudomyxomasurvivor.org). My being here is testament to the NHS and the dedicated surgeons and nurses at the Peritoneal Malignancy Institute at Basingstoke, who I want to sincerely thank. I would like to note Mr Sanjay Dayal, my lead consultant surgeon, and specialist nurse Vicki Pleavin‐Evans for being there, still, at the end of the phone with your wise words. Given the significance of the treatment, I would also like to thank Gary Walker and Crystal Sutar at Grafton Tennis Club for working with me slowly, but surely, every week to build my confidence and trust in my body again.
Home SOS has been a monograph that has been with me on this unexpected journey, offering a sense of continuity and reflection in difficult times. Thank you Ruth Jacob, Ali Moss and Jana Ulph for providing me with a safe space to offload and to laugh; to Ellen Wiles for inspiring me and offering solidarity; and to Christine Widerøe Frenvik for our enduring friendship, which began upon a chance meeting on the streets of Siem Reap so many moons ago. Finally, I would like to warmly thank my family, without whom none of this would have been possible. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents and sister for caring for me through years of fieldwork, and offering practical, childcare and emotional support when it mattered most. This book is dedicated to my husband Christian and son Stefan, the loves of my life, from whom I have gained daily encouragement and joy. You have steadfastly held my hand, through my concurrent health challenges and the writing of Home SOS. I simply cannot thank you enough.
Katherine Brickell
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of LondonEgham Hill
Chapter OneFire in the House
Introduction
Home SOS casts a vital spotlight on the domestic sphere as a critical, yet overlooked, vantage point for understanding the trajectory of Cambodia, a Southeast Asian nation known for its encounters with genocide (Hinton 2005; Kiernan 2002), reconciliation and peacebuilding (Ciorciari and Heindel 2014; Gidley 2019; Hughes and Elander 2017; Öjendal and Ou 2013, 2015; Peou 2007, 2018; Richmond and Franks 2007), post‐conflict transition (Öjendal and Lilja 2009; Peou 2000), and economic transformation (Hughes and Un 2011; Hughes 2003; Springer 2010, 2015). During Pol Pot’s genocidal reign (1975–1979), the home was rendered ‘ground zero’ in efforts to break apart families, intimacies and other relations of the former society. As a lifeworld ‘constituted by relatively stable associations, relatively known and shared histories’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 42), it had to be destroyed. Cambodia needed to be ‘killed’, to cease to exist both literally and symbolically, for the radical communist revolution to be built (Tyner 2008, p. 119).
After decades of upheaval and displacement, Cambodia moved through a so‐called ‘triple transition’ (Peou 2001, p. xx): from armed conflict to peace, from political authoritarianism to liberal democracy, and from a socialist economic system to a market‐driven capitalist one. The accelerated neoliberal path that the country has taken, and its unravelling experimentation with democracy, has had a profound influence on domestic life. In this political economy context, at a time of formal peace, Home SOS contends that home is, once again, a spatial epicentre of intimate violences, thought to have been consigned to its genocidal past. It is not only that wounds remain in dysfunctional marriages and traumas carried through time, but rather, with its formal end, Cambodia opened up to the world, and new wounds have reconfigured and compounded the old.
The dual focus of Home SOS on domestic violence and forced eviction shows that the home is not a ‘pre‐political’ or ‘unexceptional’ space (Enloe 2011, p. 447) separate from these political changes. Its internal intimacies and external‐facing dynamics have the capacity to temper, retell, and rework the grand narratives of change that have so dominated writing on Cambodia. As a pivotal space of bio‐necropolitical world (un)making, the home demands greater scrutiny. It is where the production and destruction of life is perhaps most regularly and intensely expressed, yet it is systematically overlooked in theoretical writing in geography and related disciplines.
The starting point of the book then is the ‘extra‐domestic’ home, in and through which, multiple forms of violence flow and coalesce. This ‘extra‐domestic’ reading derives ‘precisely from the fact that it [the home] had always in one way or another been open; constructed out of movement, communication, social relations which always stretched beyond it’ (Massey 1994, p. 171). The home is host to violences that are played out through the microdramas of daily life, but also through public political worlds that influence, and are influenced by, the domestic situation (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Brickell 2012a, 2012b; Nowicki 2018). Tracing these violences through the realm of the extra‐domestic problematises the narrowness of ‘crisis‐affected’ and ‘crisis‐prone’ descriptors limited to countries and regions experiencing war, conflict, and natural disasters. The intimate wars of domestic violence and forced eviction render the home a crisis‐affected and crisis‐prone space, both inside and outside, of these formal hostilities and calamities. Home SOS thus works to reaffirm and reprioritise the home as a political entity that is foundational to the concerns of human geography.
More specifically, the book contributes to geographical scholarship on intimate geographies of violence and crisis that have not commanded as much attention as high‐profile public ones. The concern of Home SOS is not simply the enactment of domestic violence and forced eviction but how they are experienced and contested. While neither domestic violence nor forced eviction are formal emergencies, the title of the book deploys the SOS distress signal. This internationally known code has been used by forced eviction women activists in Cambodia as a political statement of emergency to oppose their dispossession (Figure 1.1). Their public SOS calls reassert the importance of imbuing everyday structural violences with a sense of scholarly and political urgency that is so often lost, given the seeming intransigence of routine violences (Philo 2017; Scheper‐Hughes 1996).
Figure 1.1 SOS sign in Boeung Kak Lake, Phnom Penh, 2011.
Source: © Ben Woods. Reproduced with permission.
Charting the journey of Cambodia’s first‐ever domestic violence law (DV law), alongside women’s housing activism against forced eviction, I examine how each usher women’s bodily presences from the home into the wider world to make life more liveable. They are, on the face of it at least, refusals for the injustices they embody to be known only in the private realm. As I go on to demonstrate, however, the political economy of Cambodia has conspired to stymy, and in some cases quash, the transformative potential that each might hold.
Based on over 300 interviews, conducted over the past 16 years, the research presented in Home SOS pivots around experiences of intimate violence and the work of survival as told through the gendered stories of ‘ever‐married’ Cambodian women.1 It incorporates continuums and rearticulations of violence from the Khmer Rouge period and includes discussion of episodic shocks and endemic precarities played out in the lifeworlds of participants in the four decades since. In what follows, I explore the ways in which home and intimate life are sustained, contested, and disrupted through marital relationships ‘in crisis’ and which are lived out, and shaped through, this history and newer manifestations of crisis taking place.2 The book therefore aims to document, make visible, and interpret women’s experiences of violence and survival in, and through, the home as an irreplaceable centre of significance in still challenging times. Looking to the home as the spatial epicentre of married life, the book contributes to the now growing body of research in geography on family and intimate relations (see Tarrant and Hall 2019 for a recent review). While noting that home and family are not necessarily coterminous, and intimate relations are not only marital but take a variety of forms, I take the marital home as my central referent point. A little over a decade ago, the family was considered an absent presence in the discipline (Valentine 2008), and marriage as the ‘commonest form of social cooperation’ had been neglected in the social sciences on the grounds of its ubiquity, taken for granted, and more‐than‐individual character (Harker 2012; Jackson 2012). By showing how marriage is a foremost social relationship through which domestic violence and forced eviction are articulated, Home SOS further questions the validity of these grounds for dismissal.
In Cambodia ‘family is at the core of society’ and is traditionally headed by a man who is invested with meeting its economic and social needs, and women its housekeeping and child rearing responsibilities (Ministry of Womens’ Affairs (MOWA) 2015, p. 23). It is normatively accepted that Cambodian wives must provide ‘shade’ including ‘shelter, safety and prosperity’ for their children (Kent 2011a, p. 197–198) and are responsible for the management of conflict in family life. Women in Cambodia have primary duty for the social reproduction of their households and, in turn, they gain important public value through domesticity. Nineteenth century normative Cambodian poems such as the Chbab Srei (Rules for Women) refer derogatorily to women who walk too loudly in the house as to make it tremble, and should a woman act too forcefully, neglect her household responsibilities, or not fulfil the entirety of her husband’s demands, then blame can be assigned to her for the breakdown of their marriage. Divorced women are typically regarded as socially incomplete in Cambodian society (Ovesen, Trankell, and Öjendal 1996) and a Khmer proverb reminds daughters that, ‘you should be married before you are called an old maid’ (cited in Heuveline and Poch 2006, p. 102). Women’s homes and bodies therefore risk being considered as lacking when marriages fail. To avoid this, women in Cambodia are invested with the demands of ensuring the harmony, intimacy, and warmth of their marriages and wider family in the home. Domestic violence and forced eviction not only challenge women’s capacity to fulfil these expectations, but they also threaten the material and symbolic foundations of everyday life from which life is grown and sustained. Both domestic violence and forced eviction have, therefore, a disproportionate impact upon women given the intensities of homemaking in comparison to men.
The twin focus of Home SOS on domestic violence and forced eviction arises, in part too, from their status as human rights abuses, which witness the ‘mutual absorption of violence and the ordinary’ (Das 2007, p. 7). The home is, perhaps, the most ordinary of spaces on which geographers train their research and analysis. An intimacy sustaining vision of the ‘ordinary’ home, however, is complicated by domestic violence and forced eviction. which both disrupt the safety, stability, and comfort that the space should normatively afford. As Lauren Berlant (1998, p. 281) argues,
intimacy … involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated by expressive and emancipating kinds of love … This view of ‘a life’ that unfolds intact within the intimate sphere represses, of course, another fact about it: the unavoidable troubles, the distractions and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios.
Berlant’s conception of intimacy brings to the fore the ‘unpredicted scenarios’, which are perceptible and woven into the ordinary. Under this guise, the ‘ordinary’ cannot be equated with the benign and harmless (Mayblin, Wake, and Kazemi 2019); its study requires that scholars go beyond and interrogate the taken‐for‐granted. The potential for such discordance, ambiguity, and negativity in experiences of ordinary life has been a motivating focus in the critical geographies of the home sub‐field, which emerged in the mid‐2000s (Blunt and Varley 2004; Blunt and Dowling 2006). As Jeanne Moore (2000, p. 213) argued, there was a ‘need to focus on the ways in which home disappoints, aggravates, neglects, confines and contradicts as much as it inspires and comforts’. Decades on, there is room to think more about how to theorise the home as a space that absorbs as well as repels ‘trouble’. The fact that in the family geographies sub‐field ‘everyday processes of family conflict, trouble and disruption’ currently only ‘occupy a marginal space in the geographic literature’ (Tarrant and Hall 2019, p.4) lends further weight to this task.
In Home SOS, I take the ‘crisis ordinary’ (Berlant 2011) as the lead conceptual frame through which I deepen theoretical engagements on intimate geographies of violence in these sub‐fields, and geography more broadly. Domestic violence and forced eviction, I contend, are both instantiations of the crisis ordinary, ‘when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life‐building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like an accomplishment’ (Berlant 2011, p. 3). Home SOS explores this social theory through a grounded, embodied, and long‐running account of crisis ordinaries that are unfolding in Cambodia and that allow elite men, in particular, to maintain the balance of power at the expense of women and their homes.
The book that follows is an ambitious, expressly experimental one, which rather being a single‐issue monograph is dedicated to the integrated study of domestic violence and forced eviction. Domestic violence and forced eviction are typically understood as discrete and unconnected violences, the former usually discussed as a type of interpersonal violence and the latter as a ‘violence of property’ (Springer 2013a, p. 608). However, a core argument made in the book is that the intimate injustices and precarious journeys that domestic violence and forced eviction embody are also intimately linked and, in some instances, simultaneously faced in women’s lives. I read and weave these interconnections through hybrid yet complementary theoretical engagements with the crisis ordinary and survival-work, bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell (see Chapter 2). Drawing on literatures from development studies, women’s studies, anthropology, politics, and international relations (IR), and spanning development, legal, political, and social geography, I provide, ultimately, an original book‐length study that combines domestic violence and forced eviction to offer relational insights between these violences.
In this introductory chapter I set up some of the major and interconnected arguments that the book takes forward: first, that domestic life is lived and manifest in and through crisis ordinaries; second, that domestic violence and forced eviction necessitate what I call ‘survival-work’; and, third, that they are both forms of gender‐based violence. I then turn to the research trajectories that led to the convergence of the domestic violence and forced eviction research and material. I also include reflection on key overarching methodological approaches taken and how these are reflected in the content and ethos of Home SOS. Finally, I move on to the structure of the book and summarise its findings.
Crisis Ordinaries of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
If Berlant’s work on the crisis ordinary reminds scholars ‘to make sense of the ways in which subjects find themselves habituating, situating, desiring, or feeling in the world, day to day, often amid conditions of cruelty’ (Cram 2014, p. 374), then Home SOS shows how systemic crises are entrenched in the home and speak to broader patterns of violences as part and parcel of the vernacular landscape of Cambodia. Both domestic violence and forced eviction can be considered as spatial exclusions or ‘expulsions’ (Sassen 2014) from home and living space as part of a wider diagnosis of unstable and disconcerting times. Yet they are forms of ongoing loss that a language of expulsion risks eliding. Taken together, domestic violence and forced eviction work to underscore the significance of ‘less sensational, yet nevertheless devastating’ dislocations from home (Vaz‐Jones 2018, p. 711). They are singular yet inter‐linked forms of crisis ordinariness rooted in metaphorical and/or physical displacement. Above all, however, they are lived experiences, which the book prioritises. Just as domestic violence can lead to forced eviction from home, empirical data in the book attests to the emergent links that can be drawn between forced eviction, domestic violence, and marital breakdown. In order to start building a holistic understanding of intimate violences encountered by women in contemporary Cambodian society, the equivalences and morphisms that exist between domestic violence and forced eviction are explored in the pages that follow.
Doing so aims to counteract how ‘there are many forms of precarity and disorder not captured under the designation of “crisis” that do not command the same critical attention’ as high profile disasters (Ahmann 2018, p. 147). In this regard, the book thus builds from recently published work in two areas. The first relates to crisis geographies that are multi‐scalar and embedded in political economy dynamics (such as austerity), but are experienced intensely at the personal scale and articulated through everyday fragilities of family life (Hall 2019). In Home SOS, for example, I show how marriage is an intimate yet precarious union that is influenced by wider political structures and processes, including Cambodia’s recent history of humanitarian crisis at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. A second area that Home SOS builds from is the vital importance of ‘non‐eventful geographies’ of violence and everyday life – violences that are too often left out of social science work on suffering and dying (Wilkinson and Ortega‐Alcázar 2019). Such ‘quasi‐events’, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011, p. 13) argues, ‘never quite achieve the status of having occurred or taken place’. My ambition, then, is to reposition domestic violence and forced eviction as events, rather than quasi‐events, that happen, and are happening, in the extra‐domestic realm.
Domestic life for many women in Cambodia, I show, is saturated with crises, which are viewed in ordinary and anticipatory terms. The Cambodian Buddhist expression ‘fire in the house’ embodies the idea, for example, that in order to maintain a harmonious household, women are responsible for suppressing three fires of potential conflict within the home – parents, husbands, and ‘others’ (Derks 2008). Often uttered in relation to domestic violence, the Khmer proverb ‘Plates in a Basket will Rattle’ speaks to the saturation and management of conflict (fire) in everyday life that is normal rather than diversionary. Crisis in this guise can be approached as a ‘prosaic’, ‘the routinization of a register of improvisations lived as such by people and, in this sense, belonging at most to the domain of the obvious or self‐evident, and at least to the banal or that which no longer evokes surprise’ (Mbembé and Roitman 1995, p. 326). The first‐ever survey of domestic violence in Cambodia opens with a vignette that evokes this further: ‘if people live in the same house there will inevitably be some collisions. It’s normal … it can’t be helped. But, from time to time, plates break. So do women’ (Zimmerman 1995, np). Through the life stories of female respondents, Home SOS focuses on these collisions and, in some tragic cases, their fatalities; my argument is that women’s homes and bodies are being broken, time and again, in the making of Cambodia today.
The joint study of domestic violence and forced eviction reveals how this pernicious breaking exceeds baseline expectations of domestic conflict. Not only this, but the home is a dynamic space of potentiality (Povinelli 2011) in which women are innovating under these debilitating circumstances in different ways. Some women I spent time with continued to manage the flames, others felt compelled to ignite them in the public sphere to try and extinguish their threat, whilst others exited marriage to escape the heat altogether. In the ordinary, then, it is possible to read the eventful, the memorable, and also the episodic, ‘occasions that make experiences while not changing much of anything’ (Berlant 2007, p. 760). As Susan Fraiman (2017, p. 123) writes in relation to the reproduction of the ordinary, it is women who ‘generally get the brunt’ of this work. Women’s firefighting takes many forms in contemporary Cambodia and the book ignites discussion of domestic violence and forced eviction as fires with multiple and politically imbued sources, responses, and outcomes.
Home SOS goes on to show, for instance, how the mundanity of the crisis ordinary continues as marginalisation and containment of these supposed ‘non‐events’ to the home by a government unwilling to tolerate its spilling out into public and the concomitant political questions and challenges to its power that this may bring. Government attempts to keep disruption to the established order at a minimum enables the continued production of death, social or actual, through de facto gerrymandering whereby political advantage is achieved by manipulating and regulating the boundaries of home and the ‘fire’ within. Women have the right to dwell free from violence, but in their everyday lives, and in their pursuit of this goal, are subject to a bio‐necropolitical brutality that the book brings into view through its joint focus on domestic violence and forced eviction.
The Survival-Work of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
To examine women’s injuries, but also the survival practices, that are performed in the domestic domain, I synergistically place domestic violence and forced eviction within an expansive conceptualisation of work that exposes capitalist patriarchy as the requirement that women perform survival-work across private and public realms (Dalla Costa 1972; Mies 1982). The centrality of social reproduction to accounts of violence and dispossession thus take on critical importance (Fernandez 2018). As Maria Mies (2014, p. 2) elaborates in relation to the accumulation of wealth, productive capital, and control by men:
Today, it is more than evident that the accumulation process itself destroys the core of the human essence everywhere, because it is based on the destruction of women’s autarky over their lives and bodies.
As feminist writing has long set out, women’s labour in the home is not a separate social sphere located outside of economic relations but is integral to it. Despite this, ‘housework is not counted as work, and is still not considered by many as “real work”’ (Federici 2012, p. 127). My reference to survival work therefore tries not to lose sight of the range of labour that women undertake in the extra‐domestic home, but which remains largely invisible in writings on political and economic change in Cambodia. The home is a discursive construct and product of ongoing and demanding labour that is intimately connected, rather than sealed off, from political meaning and impact. Just as Sylvia Chant (2007) identifies a ‘feminisation of responsibility and obligation’ taking hold in the Global South as rising numbers of poor women of all ages are working outside the home and are continuing to perform the bulk of unpaid reproductive tasks, Home SOS adds the precarities of domestic violence and forced eviction to this growing suite of duties. As such, it directly responds to Berlant’s (2007, p. 757) incitement that ‘we need better ways to talk about activity oriented toward the reproduction of ordinary life: the burdens of compelled will that exhaust people taken up by managing contemporary labor and household pressures’.
Evidence from around the world demonstrates that it is women who, with deepening inequalities, are shouldering the burden of adjustment as ‘shock absorbers’ and carers for households on the edge of survival (Brickell and Chant 2010; Cappellini, Marilli, and Parsons 2014; Elson 2002; Gill and Orgad 2018; McDowell 2016; Sou and Webber 2019). Given the corporeal and material hardships of domestic violence and forced eviction, as well as the dramatically limited and high‐stake choices that they both entail, the significance of emotional (Hochschild 1983) as well as physical labour cannot be discounted. Focusing on daily spaces and routine situations reveals how ‘precarity is embedded in the mundane tasks of the domestic, and as a result, unevenly impacts women whose traditional roles as mothers and caretakers mean that they are often at the fore of place‐making practices and responsibilities’ (Muñoz 2018, p. 411). Both domestic violence and forced eviction are traumatic ruptures in time and space of domestic and social reproduction in all their dimensions. This includes the symbolic dimensions of identity and representation (Meertens and Segura‐Escobar 1996) that Cambodian women are typically responsible for in their familial lives.
If patriarchy is to be understood as men’s violent appropriation of women’s labour as a dominant force of production (Federici 2014, p. x), then the survival-work that women perform is being co‐opted as a means to uphold the viability of the Cambodian state. This is because ‘the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system’ and ‘the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving’ (Federici 2012, p. 2). In other words, the Cambodian government’s accumulation model is being strengthened not only through the waged labour of women in the garment factories sustaining its economic growth but also the unwaged labour that women are undertaking in the home. Both are ‘productive’ for the reproduction of ‘big men’ and the modern Cambodian state; predicated on the control of women’s homes and bodies that they desire to have firm and lasting dominance over. The home and women’s labour in it, are cornerstones upon which capital accumulation is forged. Cindi Katz (2001, p. 709) writes that, as a result, it is important to critically study ‘the material social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed’ (see also Federici 2018a). The survival-work entailed in living with, or on, domestic violence and forced eviction pushes the importance, therefore, of ‘broadening the concept of labor to more fully articulate the dialectics of production and reproduction’ (Tyner 2019, p. 1307; see also Rioux 2015).
With these points in mind, a mainstay argument pursued in Home SOS is that women are not only disproportionally impacted upon by domestic violence and forced eviction as events and processes in themselves but that they are also tasked with the adjustive work of homemaking and the management of everyday precarity stemming from this. The expectation of, and necessity for, women’s survival-work in the crisis ordinary is highly problematic and the home is a key setting where this can be identified and studied. Homemaking is a cultural process and since a ‘culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations’ (Macgregor Wise 2000, p. 310), this ‘pragmatic (life‐making)’ and ‘accretive (life‐building)’ work becomes endangered and more arduous when the conditions for predictability are undermined (Berlant 2007, p. 757). My reference to survival is therefore a ‘back to basics’ move (Heynen 2006, p. 920), which recognises the centrality of home to survival and the labours that go into the meeting of basic material need, familiarity, and comfort. ‘Practices of survivability’, Loretta Lees, Annunziata, and Rivas‐Alonso (2018, p. 349) write, include ‘all of the different practices people employ to stay put’ and that counteract ‘blanket statements of neoliberal hegemony’.
The survival-work that women do to ‘stay put’ is underpinned by the home being both ‘a nodal point of concrete social relations’ and ‘a conceptual or discursive space of identification’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998, p. 17). The home as a physical and ideological entity reflects the significance of place in ‘displacement’ (Davidson 2009, p. 226, emphasis in original). As I conjectured earlier, domestic violence and forced eviction are attempted deprivations of home, its material infrastructure, and/or sense of belonging. Domestic violence is one of the most overlooked forms of displacement as women are often forced to leave their homes suddenly, without their possessions, to an unknown and unfamiliar place (Warrington 2001; Graham and Brickell 2019). In the United Kingdom, for example, tens of thousands of forced migrations occur each year as a result of domestic violence yet it is a country designated as having no internally displaced persons (Bowstead 2015, 2017). Such mobilities
‘could certainly be understood as emergency’ given that they ‘demand highly intensive forms of movement that radically transform one’s life chances and quality of life’ (Adey 2016, p. 32). Women experience ‘a process of spatial churn’ as they undertake individual, isolated journeys, and move multiple times before they are able to find a settled home (Bowstead 2015, p. 317). For women who cannot leave meanwhile, they may feel ‘homeless at home’ (Wardhaugh 1999), living in, and managing, a violent environment through daily and multiple forms of survival-work. The ideological scripting of home as intimate and safe can also lead to women tolerating violence so as not to signal a deep failure or collapse of home (Price 2002). The book shows that in Cambodia, this ideological scripting is strongly focused on women’s familial responsibilities and has a similar influence. Part of what makes the violence so untenable and cruel is the survival-work required to keep up this pretence.
The threat of forced eviction can also lead to the chipping away of home, materially and metaphorically, and the eventual displacement and dislocation of families ejected from their homes leads to their ‘re‐settlement’/homelessness. Much like the ‘spatial churn’ that domestic violence survivors can face, forced eviction also produces a harmful turbulence that women must typically counteract through their emotional and physical labours. Survival-work inside, and outside of, the home is therefore an important, yet still neglected, part of labour and economic geography that warrants scholarly development (Strauss 2018).
The Gender‐Based Violences of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
While domestic violence and forced eviction are significant issues for women in their own right, Home SOS contends that, taken together, they most clearly and definitively demonstrate the gendered contingency of existence in contemporary Cambodia. Situating the book as a feminist geography intervention with broader (inter)disciplinary significance, I venture that both are acts of gender‐based violence. Gender‐based violence is defined as ‘violence which is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately’ (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 1992, np). This includes acts that inflict physical, mental, or sexual harm or suffering, the threat of such acts, coercion, and other deprivations of liberty (CEDAW 1992).
Domestic violence is a well‐known form of gender‐based violence that encompasses violence against women by an intimate partner and/or other family members, wherever this takes place, and in whatever form, be this physical, sexual, psychological, or economic. Adult women account for the vast majority of domestic violence victims globally. The insidious nature of domestic violence in Cambodia was first highlighted by inaugural research conducted in the mid‐1990s by the Project Against Domestic Violence with 1374 women (Nelson and Zimmerman 1996). The study found that 16% of women surveyed reported physical abuse by their spouses and 8% acquired injuries mostly to the head. More recently, a nationally representative Partners for Prevention (P4P) (2013) study showed that one in four women (25.3%) in Cambodia had experienced in their lifetime at least one act of physical or sexual violence, or both, perpetrated by an intimate partner. Figures published in the country’s National Survey on Women’s Health and Life Experiences (MOWA 2015) report too that approximately one in five women (between 15 and 64 years old) who had ever been in a relationship had experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime. Further to this, three out of four women who had experienced physical and/or sexual violence had encountered severe acts of violence that were likely to cause injury. These include being hit with a fist or something that could hurt; dragged, kicked, or beaten up; threatened or hurt by a gun, knife, or other weapon. The survey also found that women are much more likely to experience frequent acts of violence rather than one‐off incidents. Domestic violence occurrence is not an isolated event, but is a pattern of violative behaviour that women encounter. This includes emotional abuse, with almost one in three (32%) of ‘ever‐partnered’ women aged 15–64 in Cambodia reporting controlling behaviour and/or the threat of harm (MOWA 2015).
In contrast to domestic violence, it is unusual that forced eviction is explicitly framed as gender‐based violence. Forced eviction is viewed as a widespread and systematic human rights violation in Cambodia but is rarely discussed as gender‐based violence. Cambodia is infamous for the scale and brutality of forced evictions occurring in, and beyond, Phnom Penh under the auspices of development. According to WITNESS (2017), at least 30 000 residents of the capital city, Phnom Penh, have been forcibly evicted, and approximately 150 000 Cambodians throughout the country are at risk of forced eviction. Underscoring the magnitude of the issue, between January 2000 and March 2014, the human rights LICADHO (2014a) documented more than 500 000 Cambodians affected by state‐involved land conflicts in investigations covering roughly half the country.
Kaori Izumi’s (2007, p. 12) writing on Southern and East Africa was, until recently, rare in its direct contention that forced eviction ‘represents a form of gender‐based violence in itself, as well as often being accompanied by other acts of extreme violence against women, including physical abuse, harassment, and intimidation, in violation of women’s human rights’. A United Nations (2014a, p. 16) fact sheet on forced eviction now acknowledges that, ‘women often tend to be disproportionately affected and bear the brunt of abuse during forced evictions’. Furthermore, it affirms that forced eviction commonly entails ‘direct and indirect violence against women before, during and after the event’.3 Forced eviction hurts in multiple senses, but is particularly traumatic for women given its targeting of the domestic sphere. As Yorm Bopha, an interviewee activist evocatively told me,
My message is that home is life for women. Even the bird needs a nest. Even corpses need a cemetery. The most important place is home. If we do not have a home, how can we bring up our children?
The point that Yorm Bopha is making is that every woman needs somewhere either to nurture new life or rest their deceased bodies. Forced eviction, however, is a form of gender‐based violence that reduces and unravels women’s capacity to fulfil social reproductive roles that many women value. Although scholastic work collectively evidences the gendered dimensions of displacement (see Brickell and Speer 2020 for a review), Home SOS strengthens the case for viewing forced eviction more specifically, and emphatically, as a form of gender‐based violence like domestic violence. The book reveals women’s feminised responsibility to deal with the far‐reaching and adverse consequences of forced eviction, from possible destruction of the family home, splintering of familial and/or community ties, the loss of livelihood, and access to essential facilities and services. These carry with them significant physical and mental burdens. As UN‐HABITAT (2011a, pp. 3–4) notes and Home SOS demonstrates, ‘the prospect of being forcibly evicted can be so terrifying that it is not uncommon for people to risk their lives in an attempt to resist or, even more extreme, to take their own lives when it becomes apparent that the eviction cannot be prevented’.
