Civil society, political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia Dennis Arnold University of Amsterdam, Human Geography, Planning and International Development, PO Box 15629,1001 NC Amsterdam, The Netherlands article info Article history: Received 19 May 2016 Received in revised form 23 March 2017 Accepted 25 March 2017 Available online 6 April 2017 Keywords: Cambodia Civil society Hegemony Labor politics Political society abstract This paper questions under what conditions the social foundation necessary for the construction and sustenance of civil society are present in post-colonial social formations, and the extent to which there has been a need to develop concessionary politics to maintain a project of rule. It utilizes Partha Chat- terjee's usage of Gramsci's political society to understand how Cambodia's ILO-led garment factory monitoring regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of worker citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for their well being. I argue that the hegemonic project is fraught by virtue of the fact that consent-seeking forms of regulation, which aim to prevent strikes through trade union membership and tripartitism, have reached their limit and spilled over and into a disaggregated, messier terrain of struggles akin to political society. To develop the argument that workers' politics cannot be expressed in state-civil society relations, I present case studies of two forms of protest. The first form is distinguished by mass faintings, which I characterize as ‘visceral protest’ against the terms of workers' insertion into industrial capitalism. The second is large-scale, worker-led strikes that signal a ‘politics of social disorder’ is emerging, characterized by extra-legal, disruptive, and sometimes violent protest. The paper calls for a re-politicization of labor, and research attuned to workers' ambitions that cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within state-civil society relations. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on pre- carious labor and state-labor relations through a study of workers' mobilizations in Cambodia's textile and garment sector. According to export-led economic growth models, formal employment in sectors like textile and garment manufacturing is upheld as an inherent good. A labor contract between employers and employees that regulates working conditions can be the boundary between political inclusion and exclusion (Barchiesi, 2011). Yet for the ma- jority in Cambodia, formal employment and trade union mem- bership is not the way out of poverty, rather, it is the manner in which workers' are included in the labor regime that precludes a decent wage and becoming active members of the body politic. Indeed, workers protests sparked by poverty wages have fostered mobilizations among factory workers that, with their autonomy from dominant institutions of state and civil society, challenge the political order deemed necessary for capital accumulation, complicating efforts to integrate subaltern classes into economic development projects pursued by leading social groups. While both state and civil society actors attempt to appropriate these struggles as part of hegemonic projects, the political space opened by workers cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within either (Doucette, 2013). How, we therefore need to ask, do workers react when civil society channels of mediation fail to realize core livelihood needs? A Gramscian perspective is useful when analyzing tensions between subaltern workers and civil society. Civil society is regarded as the terrain upon which social classes compete for social and political leadership, or hegemony, over other social classes (Thomas, 2009). State hegemonic projects are conceived as a network of social relations for the production of consent through civil society, with hegemony ‘guaranteed’‘in the last instance’ by capture of the legal monopoly of violence, concep- tualized by Gramsci as political society. For Gramsci, state and state power is both centralized and diffuse (Ekers & Loftus, 2008), with the integral state comprising political society and civil so- ciety. No hegemony is ever complete, and due to its partial and precarious nature hierarchies fundamental to hegemonic imper- atives in capitalist social relations can never be eliminated (Davies, 2011). To unpack such fraught hegemonies, a central problematic the paper addresses is ‘order’ in the global economy. In this regard, E-mail address: D.L.Arnold@uva.nl. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.03.008 0962-6298/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Political Geography 60 (2017) 23e33