Part 1

• Bokor Hill Station: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Memories and Hauntings, 1850s-2020s Haejeong Hazel Hahn Seattle University

  This paper analyzes competing narratives and memories about the Bokor mountain resort in Cambodia. From the 1850s, with European incursions, the Kamchay Mountain Range began to be mentioned in European maps. While the colonial government publicized the construction of both the hill station and the Bokor Palace Hotel as major achievements for medicine, leisure, and tourism, they also used the colonial trope of the mysterious powerful past that was tamed through colonial modernity. At the same time, the project generated much controversy in Cambodia and France due to the human and material cost. In addition to treating these competing narratives of representation, this paper focuses on the extent to which names, stories and legends about the area were represented and also changed as the result of colonization, posing questions about the erasure of memories of the Khmer population and also minority ethnic groups who lived in forests and mountains. From the late 1970s, that it was one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge gave it a dark reputation that also recast narratives about the past. This paper reflects on the processes for this research project that helps critique the colonial framework of scientific, rational developmental modernity opposing “superstition.” I argue that the project of the hill station was subject to a variety of “hauntings” that undermined the project from the outset, that the stance of scientific rationality was never in clearly dominant position.

• Index Allegory Affect: an archiveological reading of the image-allegories of Phnom Penh, 1979 Erin Collins Dartmouth College

  In this paper I engage the imagistic archive of Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1979 as produced in and through ‘Second Worlding’ networks and imaginaries of East German, Vietnamese and US Anti-Imperial cultural production. I analyze images from two films made in Phnom Penh in 1979 alongside text and testimony from the trial of Khmer Rouge leaders held in absentia in Phnom Penh in that same year. While these archival sources take the Cambodian genocide as their object of inquiry, I argue that they in fact index German, American, and Vietnamese histories, circulations, and preoccupations. The films and trial speak in the terms of Cold War geohistorical frameworks: war, capitalism/socialism, Sino/Soviet, imperialism/genocide, when disinterred from their existing form. Whereas I argue that the image allegories that saturate these sources speak to the materiality of memory as it crystalizes in unruly images now as then.

• “Techo-(au)toritarianism”: The Monumentality of the Production of Space in Cambodia, Between Displayed Sovereignty and Behind-the-Scenes Influences Dolorès Bertrais University of Geneva

  Based on fieldwork in Cambodia since 2017, this paper analyzes the production of space and its materiality, focusing on the Funan Techo Canal (FTC) mega-infrastructure project. Although the FTC’s second phase launched on April 11, 2026, Hun Manet’s inauguration remarks dismissed criticisms as “groundless propaganda” even as the first phase remained nascent. The FTC is part of a constellation of major projects—including the Morodok Techo National Stadium and Techo Takhmao International Airport—shaping Cambodia’s contemporary landscape of power. The recurrence of “Techo,” Hun Sen’s honorary title, functions as a critical political operator.

  This paper conceptualizes this configuration as “Techo-(au)toritarianism,” an exploratory concept designating a modality of authoritarian production of space where naming, construction, and narratives jointly stage power. It relies on both monumentalization—transforming infrastructure into monuments—and a diffuse monumentality within the landscape. Beyond development or hydropolitics, the FTC appears as a mechanism affirming a strong Khmer identity, through which power is inscribed in space and projected into time.

  While “Techo” localizes power nationally, these projects are also part of investment strategies closely linked to China’s regional presence. They reveal forms of interdependence involving Chinese state and parastatal actors in financing and engineering. From this perspective, “Techo-(au)toritarianism” is a hybrid configuration serving as both an instrument of internal political legitimization and a vehicle for geopolitical influence. Between sovereign assertion and structural dependencies, it produces a space where national visibility and international partnerships intertwine. By focusing on contemporary Cambodia, this study invites a dialogical reflection on earlier political regimes, examining continuities and reconfigurations in the monumentalization of power.

Part 2

• Unbuilding Landscapes to Build the Techo Era: Sand Extractivism at the Mekong Paul Christensen Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

  The material basis of Cambodia’s construction boom is concrete. Concrete consists of roughly 75% sand, much of which is dredged from the Mekong, where industrial extraction has accelerated over the past two decades. As a consequence of massive extraction along the river, riverbanks have eroded, houses and stretches of road have collapsed into the river, and a dramatic decline of fish catches is changing the social fabric of riverside communities. Relating to the panel topic, this paper does not focus on what is being built, but on what is being destroyed in the process.

  The paper introduces a planned research project on sand mining in Cambodia. It draws on data from a pilot study, where the busy sand operations of pumping stations and freight barges were observed through the lens of what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence” (2011). The Cambodian government attributes erosion and fish loss to natural causes and presents sand extraction as an engine of national development, while critical voices are silenced by the authoritarian regime.

  Beyond the implied violence of sand extraction, it is striking how Cambodians are changing their relationship to the Mekong as a spiritual landscape. For many communities along the river, the Mekong has long been understood as a space inhabited by spirits, and the use of natural resources required spiritual negotiation. Industrial dredging bypasses these arrangements and treats the landscape as a commodity (Tsing 2005). The study of sand extraction thus serves as an entry point into broader questions about how communities renegotiate their relationship to landscape, politics, and belonging when the material foundations of their environment are literally removed.

• Visions of Progress and Precarious Realities: The Politics of Cambodia’s Funan Techo Canal in the Lower Mekong Region Soksamphoas Im Michigan State University

  This study examines the political, environmental, and ethical dimensions of Cambodia’s Funan Techo Canal, a mega infrastructure project inaugurated in August 2024. Situated within broader processes of digital governance and data- driven development in the Lower Mekong Region, the project investigates how state-led and transnational infrastructural ambitions reshape rural livelihoods, ecological systems, and power relations. We argue that the canal exemplifies a contemporary model of technocratic development in which narratives of national progress and connectivity obscure uneven social and environmental costs borne by marginalized agrarian communities.

  Drawing on an interdisciplinary, multi-method research design, the study integrates multi-scalar ethnographic fieldwork, 3D drone mapping of environmental transformation, multimedia documentation (including film and visual essays), and critical media discourse analysis. Together, these approaches trace how the canal is experienced on the ground, how it reconfigures riparian ecologies, and how it is framed within official state narratives and public discourse. Preliminary findings suggest that the project not only disrupts local ecosystems and livelihoods but also contributes to the consolidation of centralized authority under conditions of authoritarian governance, where digital tools and infrastructural expansion are leveraged to enhance state visibility and control.

  By foregrounding voices and perspectives often excluded from infrastructure planning, this project contributes to ongoing debates on environmental justice, development ethics, and authoritarian governance in Southeast Asia. It further demonstrates the value of integrating ethnographic, spatial, and visual methodologies to capture the multi-layered impacts of mega-infrastructure projects. Ultimately, the paper calls for more inclusive and ethically grounded approaches to infrastructure development in the Mekong region and beyond.

• Rerouting the Nation: The Khmer-American Friendship Highway and Cambodian Sovereignty Coplen Taylor Harvard University

  This paper examines the Khmer-American Friendship Highway as a project of material nation-building in postcolonial Cambodia. Constructed alongside the new deep-water port at Sihanoukville, the highway was designed to reduce Cambodia’s dependence on the transport circuits inherited from French Indochina and to connect Phnom Penh to a maritime outlet under national control. More than a development project, it was an effort to remake the spatial geography of independence.

  Focusing on the planning and construction of the highway during the Sangkum period, the paper argues that road building became a means of transforming formal sovereignty into territorial and economic reality. The highway did not simply link the capital to the coast. It redirected flows of goods, movement, and political imagination away from colonial-era regional dependence and toward a more self-consciously national spatial order. At the same time, the project’s technical difficulties, environmental constraints, and diplomatic tensions reveal how fragile and contested this process of nation-building could be in practice.

  By treating the highway as both infrastructure and political artifact, the paper speaks to broader questions about how built forms participated in the making of Cambodian sovereignty and the reshaping of political space in the postcolonial period.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Cambodia
• Cambodia-China
• Funan Techo Canal
• Khmer and Highlander spiritual beliefs
• Lower Mekong
• Mekong
• colonial architecture
• ecology
• extractivism
• haunting
• hill station
• mega infrastructure
• political economy
• sand mining
• slow violence
• spiritual landscape
• tourism