Forthcoming: International Affairs Review: Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, New Haven: Yale University Press 2014. Matthew Copeland, Mahidol University International College In the 1960s, Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk unsuccessfully sought to distance his kingdom from the blood-letting of neighboring states. Hard-pressed to enforce strict neutrality and inclined to believe that the United States would eventually quit the region anyhow, he edged strategically leftward, casting an ever-more complicit eye on the growing number of Vietnamese combatants who sheltered and resupplied on Cambodian soil. American military planners responded in kind, targeting communist base areas for cross-border raids and, in due course, backing a putsch that bumped Sihanouk from power, all but ending the authority of the Cambodian state. A very uncivil war followed. With stunning speed, troops of the newly-proclaimed Khmer Republic lost the countryside to an expanding communist force, despite (or quite possibly because of) a relentless American air assault on rebel positions that constituted one of the heaviest aerial bombardments in the history of warfare. A victorious Khmer Rouge then declared the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea and began emptying its cities and forests of myriad enemies, hundreds of thousands of whom were put to death over the next three and a half years. The purge was still underway when Vietnamese troops intervened, occupying (or arguably liberating) the country and establishing a puppet administration led by a group of Khmer Rouge defectors. The struggle did not end there: deposed Khmer factions of all stripes regrouped on the border and, with liberal doses of economic and military aid from China and the United States, fought each other and the Vietnamese for the better part of the next decade. Indeed, by the time peace talks bore fruit in the late 1980s, Cambodians had been killing each other for some twenty years and roughly a quarter of the population, some two million people, had been laid to waste for no particular end. This is the mise en scene for Sebastion Strangio’s study of Hun Sen and his role in contemporary Cambodian politics. His is the second act of the tragedy: a tale of the muddled authoritarian state that is cobbled together, first under Heng Samrin and then under Hun Sen, as war and peace-making wind down and the rapacity-building forces of the market are granted free rein. Nothing goes as it should. Perpetrators of war-time atrocities are left at large, unpunished and unrepentant. International agendas for electoral politics and democratic pluralism are renegotiated and shunted aside. Foreign aid, forest cover, civic freedoms, and due process all quickly go missing. Para-politics and state-sanctioned thuggery prevail. Reconstruction eventually gets under way and the economy begins to show signs of life but the emergence of a tiny class of well-dressed coffee drinkers in the cities is more than offset by the deteriorating conditions of the majority poor and the increasingly concentrated wealth and power of an inter- connected elite.