Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia: Preface and Extracts from Introduction the Authors' Manuscript
Roderic Broadhurst, Thierry Bouhours and Brigitte Bouhours, Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia, Cambridge University Press, 2015
26 Pages Posted: 29 Nov 2015
Date Written: November 27, 2015
Abstract
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 to the present day. Analysing periods of colonisation, anticolonial wars, independence, civil war, the revolutionary terror of the 1970s, and postconflict development, the authors assess whether violence has decreased and whether such a decline can be attributed to Elias’s civilising process, which identifies a series of universal factors that have historically reduced violence
Keywords: Cambodia, violence, Norbert Elias, crime, history of crime
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