PeaceWorkForum

Oct 7, 2026 · @Ngarm The question At its height in the 12th and 13th centuries, the Khmer Empire ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia: present-day Cambodia, most of Thailand, southern Laos and the Mekong Delta of today's Vietnam. Its capital, Angkor, was among the largest urban complexes of the pre-industrial world. Today its heir, Cambodia, is a small country squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and its people are overwhelmingly Khmer, roughly 90 to 95 percent by most estimates. Two questions follow. Why did a great, multi-ethnic empire shrink to a small, nearly single-ethnic state? And what does that tell us about how any dominant community keeps, or loses, the loyalty of those it leads? This reflection offers one answer. Power can rest on love or on hate and fear. A leading community that lifts up smaller communities, does more for them than for itself, and is not threatened when they succeed, earns their confidence and loyalty. A leading community that ...

How informal influence enters formal systems of power — and begins to override them Oct 6, 2026 · @Ngarm Abstract Contaminated power leakage names a governance risk that ordinary corruption law often misses: people with no public office gain privileged access to those who hold it, and their informal influence gradually reshapes how official power is used. The route in may be fame, social-media reach, kinship, friendship, wealth or patronage. None of these is illegitimate on its own. The problem starts when access turns into leverage, leverage into dependency, and dependency into decisions that public rules can no longer explain. This paper sharpens the concept, places it beside related ideas such as clientelism and state capture, and tests it against documented cases: Rasputin at the Romanov court, the Gupta family in South Africa, Jho Low and 1MDB in Malaysia, Cambodia's Oknha system, and the nationalist information war around the 2025 Cambodia–Thaila...