Building Between the Blocs: Engineering Non-Alignment in Cold War Cambodia

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Cambodia constructed national sovereignty through infrastructure during the Cold War. Between independence from France in 1953 and the collapse of the Sangkum regime in 1970, Cambodian leaders pursued a strategy of non-alignment that extended beyond diplomacy into the material organization of the state. Rather than choosing between competing models of capitalist and socialist development, Cambodian planners integrated technical assistance from rival powers into a single national system of infrastructure. Highways financed by the United States carried materials to Chinese-built factories; broadcasting networks combined American studios with Chinese transmitters and Eastern European equipment; and hydropower projects drew simultaneously on proposals from Western, socialist, and non-aligned partners. The dissertation terms this process engineering non-alignment: the effort to assemble rival technologies, institutions, and development practices into an integrated infrastructure capable of sustaining sovereignty. Drawing on multilingual archival sources from Cambodia, the United States, Australia, and China, as well as site visits to major infrastructure projects, the study traces how Cambodian officials negotiated foreign aid, coordinated competing technical proposals, and adapted imported technologies to local political and environmental conditions. By following the histories of highways, factories, radio networks, and dams, the dissertation argues that Cold War development did not produce separate geopolitical spheres of infrastructure. Instead, rival technologies were forced to coexist within the same national systems, where their political meanings were reinterpreted by postcolonial states. Cambodia’s experience also shaped the development practices of the powers that engaged with it. In the American case, the Khmer-American Friendship Highway exposed the limits of using infrastructure as a demonstration of technological superiority, while Cambodian resistance to U.S.-backed regional hydropower planning frustrated efforts to fold the Mekong into an anti-communist developmental framework. Chinese engagement proved equally consequential. Cambodia provided the People’s Republic of China with one of its earliest opportunities to present itself to a postcolonial state as a source of technocratic achievement rather than revolutionary export. This perspective shifts Cambodia from a passive arena of great-power influence to a site from which the geopolitics of infrastructure can be rethought.