Cambodia’s foreign policy (re)alignments amid great power geopolitical competition

Abstract

In recent decades, Cambodia has gained geopolitical significance in the competition among great powers in the Indo-Pacific—China, Japan, and the United States—forcing Cambodia to align and realign its relations with these powers. Comprehensive, comparative, systemic analyses of Cambodia’s relations with these three great powers remain limited. This is despite the shifting geopolitical context associated with China’s rise, the United States’ changing international liberal agenda, and Cambodia’s domestic political development. Utilizing various qualitative methods that include data from news reports in Khmer, English, and Chinese and interviews with diverse stakeholders—scholars, journalists, leaders of civil society organizations, representatives of multilateral institutions, and diplomats—this article seeks to fill this gap by providing an up-to-date, empirically rich, and theoretically grounded analysis of Cambodia’s relations with these three great powers. This study will delineate economic, security, and domestic causes of change and continuity within an integrated analytical lens that combines international relations and comparative politics to provide a multi-level (state and systemic) and multi-actor (state and non-state) analysis.

Keywords:

• Cambodian-Japanese relations
• Cambodia’s foreign policy
• great power competition in the Indo-Pacific
• hedging
• limited bandwagoning
• Sino-Cambodian relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interview with author, June 15, 2022.

2 Interview with author, 04 November 2022, Phnom Penh.

3 Interview with author, 10 July, 2023, Phnom Penh.

4 Interview with author, 04 November 2022, Phnom Penh.

5 Cambodian diplomat, interview with the author, Phnom Penh, 25 June 2022.

6 Interview with the author, 03 July 2022.

7 Interview with the author, 08 June 2022.

8 Interview with the author, Phnom Penh, 03 July 2022.

9 Interview with the author, Phnom Penh, 04 November 2022.

10 Cambodian scholar, interview with the author, Phnom Penh, 12 July 2022.