A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats?”: Climate, Inequality and Violence in Translocal Cambodia

Key information

Date
Time
5:15 PM to 7:00 PM
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
G3

About this event

Laurie Parsons, Royal Holloway

Inequality has long been a contentious issue; its very relevance a key political battleground, even as the numbers grow ever starker around the world. Oxfam’s annual report now has the world’s richest 8 men owning the same share as wealth as the poorest half of the global population. Yet whether or not this matters remains disputed. Indeed, a popular perspective among economic liberals holds it is equality of opportunity, not income, that is important. Metaphorically speaking, “a rising tide lifts all boats”, even if transient waves of fortune leave some looking up or down at others. This argument has long been applied to Cambodia, where a blistering period of growth in the early part of the new millennium contributed to a sextupling of the economy between 1993 and 2015. Nevertheless, viewing inequality through the lens of its mobility reveals the fallacy of this position. Amid the vast transformations that technological change has engendered, the persistence and even entrenchment of certain forms of advantage and impediment appears a stark paradox. Structural divides including gender, ethnicity, and class have not lost their relevance in our mobile world but remain intransigent, allowing differential access to opportunity or, otherwise, precarity. By exploring the politics of poverty, power and protest in this mobile context, this seminar will show how inequality is not rooted in one place, but many, leaving the worst off – wherever they should move – chained to the bottom in a rising tide.

The events are free and open to the public. Registration is not required.