235 Chapter 12 Klepto-Neoliberalism Authoritarianism and Patronage in Cambodia Simon Springer In response to the financial crisis of the 1970s the Wall Street–Treasury nexus, in concert with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, sought to reconstruct the global power (im)balance by attempting to eliminate any inklings of collectivism in the global South through the imposition of brutal forms of economic discipline. For some this represents the heart of neoliber- alism, which has been considered as a class reaction (Harvey 2005). Yet to focus our attention exclusively on the external forces at play in the constitu- tion of neoliberal ideas risks contributing to an overgeneralized account of a universal and singular political economic idea, which insufficiently accounts for the abundance of local variegations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing institutional contexts and cul- tural forms. The nascent language of ‘neoliberalization’ (England and Ward 2007) responds to this ubiquitous view by instead encouraging a geographical understanding that recognizes neoliberalism’s hybridized forms as it shape- shifts along its travels around our world. This more nuanced interpretation was first advanced by Peck and Tickell (2002), who insisted that neoliberal- ism is not merely an end-state, but rather a varied series of processual, protean and promiscuous phenomena that occur both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’, with diverging and irregular effects, yet still recalling an overarching ‘logic’ owing to its spatial diffusion. With such an appreciation of neoliberalization in mind we can better understand the consequences of inherited historical contexts, institutional frameworks, geographical landscapes, policy regimes, regulatory practices and ongoing political struggles as repeatedly reconstituting neolib- eralism through unfolding processes of articulation (Peck 2001; Smith 2007). Cambodia offers a useful example of neoliberalization insofar as this tran- sitional process to a free market economy was actually a predetermined out- come of the United Nations peace agreement of the early 1990s (UN 1991). 16_892_Tansel.indb 235 12/13/16 10:43 AM