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Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy

Lecture | November 26 | 4-6 p.m. | Institute of East Asian Studies (2223 Fulton, 6th Floor), Conference Room, 6F

Speaker: Sophal Ear, Assistant Professor, National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School

Panelist/Discussant: Khatharya Um, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Center for Southeast Asia Studies

Based on Prof. Ear’s new book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy (Columbia, 2012), this talk will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. While massive intervention by the U.N. in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule, the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Prof. Ear explores the issue of why the more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainable ways. As a post-conflict state, Cambodia is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance - a major impediment to balanced, equitable growth.

Sophal Ear has four degrees from UC Berkeley (Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science, M.S. in Agricultural & Resource Economics, and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science), and an M.P.A. from Princeton University. He advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated The End/Beginning: Cambodia, an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has been on the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey since 2007.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609