Mekong Review

Category: Cambodia

Cybercrime unchained

Nick J. Freeman

Cybercrime is a big business, and some of its leading perpetrators are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities in Southeast Asia.

Pol Pot’s guests

Colin Meyn

Meeting with Pol Pot adds to Rithy Panh’s resume as the most prolific maker of films about the regime that took his family and terrorised his country.

Persistence

Debra Carney

Luise Ahrens, a Maryknoll nun and education innovator from the US, worked with seismic stamina for twenty-six years to build up higher education in Cambodia.

Onward the water flows

Dương Mạnh Hùng

The arts can remind us of our connections to home and nature as we are propelled forward by development projects that prioritise profit over nurturing rootedness and well-being.

Bomb pond

Agnès Bun

In short vignettes, Y-Dang Troeung gives a compelling account of the journey which brought her family from Cambodia’s Kampong Thom to white rural Canada, beyond the feel-good newspaper headlines.

Making way

Yann Bigant

Touching that sensitive Cambodian topic of land ownership and dispossession, Further and Further Away questions the nature of relationships entertained with the land.

Dictionary, revis(it)ed

Ben Rost

Tracing a Khmer-language dictionary’s trajectory across the past century of Cambodian history offers insights into the ways language has been called on to construct—and to challenge—notions of national identity and community.

Conservation stories

Wayne McCallum

Lifting the stone on ‘Big Conservation’, Sarah Milne’s book demonstrates how conservation is inherently political—an effort to impose meaning on to landscape and people.

Observations of an American diplomat

Chong Ja Ian

Scot Marciel spent most of his time in service focused on one region. In Imperfect Partners, he brings readers through the evolution of US involvement and interest in Southeast Asia from Reagan through Trump.