Blockchain Papers

Thon Ly, Miss Aquarius

Why a corpus that must be authoritative in its own language cannot normalise toward someone else's — and what that made of one man's work in Cambodia between 1929 and 1969. It is widely assumed, and rarely stated, that digitising a language is a tooling problem — better optical character recognition, better fonts, better models. This paper argues that for one class of corpus it is not, and that the constraint is upstream of any tool. We begin from a claim that turns out to be false: that a machine-readable corpus requires the language to have a standardised orthography. Swiss German and the Arabic dialects refute it. Both lack standardised spelling; both have substantial corpora, speech systems, machine translation and dedicated benchmarks. Corpora can be and are built for languages whose spelling is unsettled. What the refutation reveals is the mechanism by which those corpora are possible: they normalise toward a standard the variety itself does not have. Swiss German normalises to Standard German. Dialectal Arabic normalises to Modern Standard Arabic, or to a convention created for the purpose. The corpus is about the variety and encoded in a target borrowed from elsewhere. That move is available to most languages and unavailable to a specific and important minority: a corpus that must be authoritative in its own language cannot normalise toward another. A Khmer canonical text rendered in Thai orthography is not a Khmer witness to anything; it is a Thai rendering, and the distinction is the entire content of a critical apparatus. For such corpora, native standardisation is a genuine precondition, because the borrowing that substitutes for it is disqualified by what the corpus is for. We then examine the Cambodian case, which is unusual in that the precondition has a name, a date and a documented programme. Between the 1930s and 1967 Chuon Nath led the standardisation of Khmer orthography, compiled the dictionary that fixed its lexicon, and led the translation of the canon into it. ⭐ But the case also contains its own counterexample, and this is the paper's second contribution: standardisation is necessary and not sufficient. Khmer's orthographic layer was settled by the 1960s; its encoding layer was not, and the volumes this project transcribes carry five mutually incompatible legacy font encodings in a single book, one of them apparently custom and undocumented. Seventy years separate the solution of the first layer from the ongoing repair of the second. We state the claim in falsifiable form, name the comparison class against which it should be tested, and concede three limits — including that standardisation was contested, that its politics are not innocent, and that this paper is not an argument for it. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/the-borrowable-standard. Its SHA-256 is a5774b3c66dc801f125d4f6712b054ee83d10c9e86b6ec3c35e7f3e0be4ba715, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.

Brian R. Cook, Nicholas Harrigan, Van Touch, Kirt Hainzer · 7 authors

ABSTRACT The arts are envisioned as able to help address the longstanding ‘implementation gap’ between research and realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For SDG2 (Zero Hunger), Forum Theatre offers a participatory alternative to top‐down interventions, yet its impacts have not been evaluated using rigorous, mixed‐methods that are attentive to both quantitative and qualitative data, to spillover effects, or to diffusion over time. This study analyses 13 performances in Northwest Cambodia, each attended by 50–150 people, with follow‐up interviews conducted with 66 attendees 1 year later. Results identify a replicable impact pathway: learning correlates with on‐farm behaviour change, which is predictive of knowledge‐sharing with non‐attendees, whereas recollection alone does not. By evidencing this process, the analysis provides rare empirical proof of theatre's effectiveness as a catalyst for change. More broadly, it evidences a replicable pathway for achieving the SDGs, but one that requires moving beyond information‐transfer models toward participatory interventions that foster dialogue, critical reflection, forum, and the collective diffusion of new practices. A short documentary and accompanying video of performances are available to illustrate the process and support others seeking to replicate or adapt the approach in different contexts.

Naomi Takeda

Scheme of the CBDC: Ueda and Hay state that the e-CNY issued by the People's Bank of China (PBOC) “adopts a similar two-tier system in which the PBOC issues e-CNY and retail banks distribute it through wallets set up by users … the PBOC admits e-CNY as its liability. Similarly, the NBC should admit the Bakong as its liability.” In reality, the e-CNY and the Bakong adopt contrasting schemes. With the e-CNY, while private banks provide user interfaces and wallets for retail users, money within such wallets is a liability of the PBOC—not of private banks backed by CB reserves, which is the case for the Bakong. Readers would benefit from learning that, here, the provider of the wallets differs from the issuer of money, that is, whose liability money is. Without recognizing this, one cannot fully grasp the typical two-tier system that provides a retail CBDC. Quasi-retail CBDC: Ueda and Hay's statement that “the NBC has been emphasizing that the Bakong is not a liability of the NBC, which is not true from the viewpoint of the underlying technology and economics” needs further clarification and consideration. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) accommodates various types of money on a common platform. It does not equate tokenized deposits with a CBDC or transform the nature of tokenized deposits into a CB liability. Furthermore, DLT adoption is neither a prerequisite nor a general feature of a retail CBDC. Economic researchers should be mindful of the differences between a retail CBDC (a CB liability) and a quasi-retail CBDC backed by CB reserves (not a CB liability), as the latter could carry risks that affect user behavior. Economics viewpoints vary depending on how we define economics; oversimplification should be avoided. Future course: Finally, Ueda and Hay argue that “[i]f the demand continues to be low like this for a few more years, the NBC should stop offering the retail Bakong … the government should not provide services that the private sector can provide.” To begin with, abolishing the retail Bakong and leaving retail payments in the hands of the private sector would not prevent dollarization and ensure efficient and stable retail payments in emerging economies. These policy objectives ought to be pursued by the public sector, not the private sector. Assessing the long-term effects of the Bakong today would be a prejudgment. It is not uncommon for payment infrastructures to become widely adopted with a lag due to existing conventions. Additional policy actions therefore may well likely be taken in the future. A conceivable future might involve continued efforts to establish network effects of the Bakong while proceeding with structural reforms and conducting sound fiscal and monetary policies so as to increase the credibility of the KHR, then shifting into KHR payments when deemed appropriate.

Radoslav Yordanov

In 1957, Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk fled to a monastery near Angkor Wat to become a monk. As it turned out, this was just a maneuver aimed at proving his indispensability rather a fulfilment of his lasting monastic vows. Within a fortnight, he was back in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, launching an attack on his political enemies within the Democrat Party, pitting soldiers against party leaders. He then initiated new elections and won 99 percent of the vote against the only rival party, the socialist Pracheachon. The Communists, realizing that they could not compete against the omnipotent Sangkum, decided to go underground. This is just one episode in Sihanouk's long political biography, but it provides an excellent outlet to understanding this complex political figure, who did not shy from engaging in long-winded, controversial moves in pursuit of Cambodia's independence.Sihanouk's political career, known for its remarkable longevity, spanned eight decades, undergoing myriad transformations. The “Prince of Light” of the 1940s turned into the “Prince of Darkness” in the late 1960s, to borrow Milton E. Osborne's apt metaphors in his Sihanouk Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). But Sihanouk's career did not end there. He came back to the Cambodian throne in the 1990s as the King Father and eventually departed the scene in the 2010s as the progenitor of a whole nation. Sihanouk's diplomatic initiatives, which were as convoluted and imaginative as his domestic political antics, bemused his counterparts from Washington to Delhi and Moscow to Beijing. Seeing Sihanouk as the political figure at the center of a proud kingdom, defending its right for existence while surrounded by inimical neighbors and the great powers is the interpretative vignette and point of departure for this study.Although William J. Rust's Eisenhower & Cambodia pays intellectual homage to the motivations underpinning the political life of one of the most recognizable monarchs of the twentieth century, it is not intended as yet another biography of Sihanouk. Instead, this diplomatic history of U.S.-Cambodian relations during the Eisenhower administration completes Rust's examination of U.S.-Indochina relations prior to the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam, following up on his research into U.S. policy toward Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s. The book offers the fullest coverage to date of the back-and-forth between Washington and Phnom Penh in the 1950s. Rust rightly understands, however, that a nuanced contextual reading of those relations would be impossible without delving into Sihanouk's image as “a great man in a small country” as seen by U.S. diplomats in Phnom Penh and Saigon, U.S. State Department officials, and two U.S. presidents—Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the center of the story, and John F. Kennedy on its fringes. Additionally, Rust convincingly employs center-periphery Cold War optics, which helps to situate the book as a comprehensive case study, portraying the uneasy search for mutually acceptable terms of engagement between the great powers and their smaller local counterparts, limited by their own interests and agendas.The center-periphery framework puts the story into an international context, explaining the mismatch between the two sides’ expectations of each other. Seen from Washington, the small, formerly French-ruled Cambodia was just a dot on the world map, sitting very low on the U.S. national security agenda. Seen from Phnom Penh, the world seemed an appendage to all social and political problems plaguing the old and proud Khmer empire in its present territorial incarnation. U.S. officials saw Cambodia's internal politics through an anti-Communist lens, a view that, for Cambodian leaders, bore little resemblance to the country's real problems. On the other hand, Sihanouk's obsession with Cambodia's territorial integrity vis-à-vis its neighbors Thailand and South Vietnam rubbed up against U.S. diplomatic calculations regarding regional allies.By outlining the ebb and flow of Washington's relations with Phnom Penh during the Eisenhower years, Rust focuses on both covert and overt channels, demonstrating that the former permeated into the latter, hindering it as a result. Rust's event-driven account shows that the difficult relationships of U.S. diplomats in Phnom Penh—from Robert McClintock through Carl Strom to William Trimble—followed a recurring pattern. Despite different personalities, managerial styles, and degrees of local knowledge, all U.S. envoys invariably clashed with Sihanouk's idiosyncratic persona. As a State Department's Bureau of Research and Intelligence desk officer noted, Sihanouk was “volatile, vain, egotistical and sensitive” (p. 6). In Phnom Penh, opinions were not much at odds with Ambassador McClintock, who eventually made fun of Sihanouk by referring to him as “Snooky” (p. 93). These characterizations resemble earlier observations of the Cambodian leader's complex mixture of personality traits, as exhaustively detailed by Ross Marlay and Clark Neher in Patriots and Tyrants: Ten Asian Leaders (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): “Depending upon the situation, Sihanouk can be charming, tenacious, revengeful, ebullient, stubborn, wily, intolerant, megalomaniacal, autocratic, shill, or playful” (p. 151).In line with the book's subtitle, the other conspicuous themes in Rust's account are the U.S. government tendency to play “footsie” with Sihanouk's non-Communist rivals and the “doctrine of plausible denial.” Rust convincingly shows that covert actions affecting Cambodia's internal political affairs proved to be, as with the Laotian case in 1958–1960, counterproductive in advancing U.S. anti-Communist goals (p. 3). The book suggests that the failure of the 1959 Dap Chhuon Plot against Sihanouk and the ensuing rebuff of U.S. involvement in the coup irreversibly damaged U.S. relations with the Cambodian ruler but also further strengthened Eisenhower's “dubious legacy of relying heavily on” the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “to remove worrisome national leaders” (p. 252).In the prologue, which reads as an epilogue, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Relations and former Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Roger Hilsman, Jr., speaking with President Kennedy, claimed that during the “Eisenhower administration the CIA ‘did things the State Department didn't know about’” (p. 2). This quotation may serve as an excellent tag line for the book, whetting the reader's appetite, but the subsequent development of the narrative falls flat, failing to provide concrete documentary proof. Those who have had the chance to wade through the released CIA papers of the period will hardly be surprised by this. Instead, by weaving a detailed narrative based on conjecture, memoirs, and oral histories, Rust paints a nuanced story of clandestine U.S. assistance to rebel leader Sơn Ngọc Thành and his Khmer Serei militia against Sihanouk. However, as Rust notes, scholars’ diverging views about the degree of U.S. involvement in the Dap Chhoun affair cannot be adjudicated without more “enlightened declassification of fifty-five-year-old government documents” (p. 183). This gap, however, does not prevent Rust from offering yet another case showing the relationship, or lack thereof, between U.S. overt and covert involvement in distant local actors at the crossroads between the Communist bloc and the “free world.” The Cambodian case thus puts in context other U.S. clandestine operations in the region in the 1950s, such as those in Laos and Indonesia, which would indeed need further documentary evidence.Another important theme in the book is Sihanouk's treatment of neutrality in the increasingly polarized international relations of the early Cold War. For U.S. officials, questions about Sihanouk's neutrality and nationalism were intertwined. Local considerations meant that Cambodia's national interest did not coincide with U.S. interests in the region, and, in Machiavellian fashion, the Cambodian leader took a principled approach toward accepting aid on a no-strings-attached-basis as he sought to preserve his country's neutrality. As Rust demonstrates, this approach did not meet with approval in Washington, especially when local overtures were being made by Communist China. The Eisenhower administration was unimpressed with Sihanouk's “indifference to the global ideological struggle between the ‘communist bloc’ and the ‘free world’” (p. 4). Sihanouk believed that an orientation toward either of the blocs equated to submissiveness and that such a posture would contradict Cambodia's linkage of its neutrality with foreign non-interference in its domestic affairs. In McClintock's words, Cambodian neutrality was “primarily an expression of the country's intense nationalism.” Cambodia, in the American diplomat's view, therefore sought to protect independence “by judiciously balancing Eastern and Western influence” (p. 111). This, as Rust points out, served domestic purposes, as “[p]oliticians on the left and right unanimously endorsed Sihanouk's policy of neutrality” (p. 111).Rust argues that the United States overplayed the salience of Communist ideology in international relations while downplaying the history, people, and politics of individual states. U.S. officials in the 1950s tended to reduce the complexity of relations within and among foreign countries to a zero-sum game in which a country was either lost to or won from an international Communist conspiracy efficiently directed by the Soviet Union (p. 18). This challenged Phnom Penh's overarching security concerns, which had developed independent of global Cold War imperatives and were instead focused on the local rivalry with Saigon and Bangkok. The Eisenhower administration's reluctance to oppose South Vietnam's plotting against Sihanouk, whose neutralist tint was deemed less pertinent to U.S. interests, was in agreement with Washington's desire to maintain Saigon as “a strong anti-Communist bastion in Southeast Asia” (p. 200). Therefore, Cambodia and United States seemed to have reached an impasse in which visions of neutrality and independence from below clashed with the seemingly all-engulfing zero-sum calculus from above.Rust's book is a valuable, well-researched, and lucidly written case study demonstrating the pitfalls that can develop in diplomatic relations between a superpower and a small state when local imperatives and global interests are mismatched. The added value Rust provides to our understanding of the Cold War's spread into locales hitherto thought of as insignificant is that it puts similar experiences in perspective. As I read Rust's findings with rapt interest, I could not help but draw parallels with my earlier study of the Soviet Union's involvement in the Horn of Africa. The Soviet Union, like the United States, had to deal with rival local actors that almost invariably put their own narrowly defined interests above and before vague and broadly drawn global prerogatives, more often than not managing to elevate the status of their localized cleavages into international crises. Although Rust's new book may not add much in the way of novel interpretations of the studied period—for that, see Kenton Clymer's The United States and Cambodia 1870–1969: From Curiosity to Confrontation (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) and The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000: A Troubled Relationship (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004)—it undoubtedly enriches our knowledge by offering clear and concise analysis of primary material that will interest not only students of Indochina but also those who seek to develop a wider understanding of center-periphery relations during the Cold War.

Jacques Bertrand, Alexandre Pelletier

This article seeks to understand why monks played a central role in anti-Muslim violence in transitional Myanmar (2013–2014). We argue that scapegoating is one of many strategies used by monks to gain visibility, to strengthen their autonomous networks, and to increase their social credentials. By analyzing two episodes of monks' participation in religious violence (1930s and 2013–2014), we identify two factors that make scapegoating strategies more likely: (a) decentralized religions foster a multiplicity of organizations and provide incentives for leaders to be entrepreneurial and compete for followers; while (b) the rapid pluralization of the public sphere explains the timing, because it intensifies competition among religious leaders and between religious and secular leaders for social ascendency and power.

John Grundy, Qiu Yi Khut, Sophal Oum, Peter Annear · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Jean-Philippe Fontenelle

Is the Decentralisation of Water Management for Agriculture in Vietnam’s Red River Delta a Break a Break from Tradition? Decisions taken in the 1980s to establish decentralised local pumping stations in the Red River Delta continue to influence the transformation of its water management system to this day. These technical changes resulted in the fragmentary decision making, financing and regulation of water management in the delta region as a whole. The current intensification of agriculture in the Red River Delta has benefited from these changes, although further decentralisation is limited by the size and the hierarchical organisation of large scale water management works and by the State’s desire to maintain its power over the population through the control of water resources. Today, cooperatives and hydraulics companies are competing for financial resources, which creates differences amongst farmers depending on the availability and price of water. The State appears to sway on a fine political line, facing contradictory pressure from international investors and from internal rivalries within the Vietnamese Communist Party, which rules the country. The example of the Red River Delta demonstrates that water management is typified by the fluctuation of its institutions, which are under constant alteration, as is the society they stem from.

Tuckson, Michael

Support for integrated capacity building focusing on learning support for government organizations, communities, networks and small business is the most important contribution foreigners can make to local development.Excessive equipment and action assistance with minimal learning support, is more likely to create dependence.However learning support without locally financed working resources and improved motivation is hardly effective.Decentralization of authority requires decentralization of skills.Learning support focusing on specialist and management training without integrated courses for all staff limits organizational effectiveness.Aid/ cooperation should be much better integrated.This can only be achieved through deeper dialogue and better strategies.To seek a reasonable future for the region

Angana P. Chatterji

Abstract This paper is contextualized within postcolonial movements for social justice and ecological restoration in India, enabled through the emergent participation of diverse and subaltern stakeholders. This paper engages shifts in forest management in India. Within this frame, it refers to public forest lands reform initiatives in Orissa, a state in eastern India. In 1997-98, assisted by the Swedish International Development Agency, a review was conducted of forest management systems in Orissa. The intention was to understand microlevel frameworks within the state toward the transfer of authority over public forest lands from the government to local communities. Using information generated by this review, this paper discusses critical concerns in Orissa. ********** Explanations Within movements for social change currently underway in South Asia and India, development reforms imply a multitude of contradictions and complexities to a diverse constituency of stakeholders. Such reforms instigate discussions and debate on sustainable development and raise strategic questions related to the role and responsibility of the State and international agencies to marginalized rural communities, and of community access to livelihood resources. It speaks to possibilities of social and ecological restitution that confront critical concerns of governmental decentralization, and relocation of authority and resources. This paper is informed by research connected to public forest lands reform in Orissa, a state in eastern India. In 1997-98, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), the Swedish Government's international development assistance program, aided a review of forest management systems in Orissa. The intention was to understand microlevel frameworks within the state of Orissa toward the decentralization of forest management. A primary objective was to reframe the fabric of donor-community-government collaborations. The aim was to operationalize development mechanisms that embody the ethical commitments of postcolonial advocacy and action in India. I was involved in this process, and responsible for conducting a Statewide participatory assessment of management systems related to public forest lands. (See Chatterji, 1998.) The SIDA review supported participatory and generative methods of inquiry. It produced openings for limited participation of citizens in decision making within consultative governmental forums on public forest lands management. The review submitted its recommendations to SIDA in 1998. These recommendations constituted a proposal for future action linked to the devolution of authority over public forest lands, requesting SIDA financing for an implementation phase in Orissa. This implementation phase would facilitate capacity building for public lands reform through a reorganization and decentralization of the forest department and support to community institutions. In 1998, India conducted nuclear experiments, and in 1999-2000 SIDA retracted its support, citing its differences over India's nuclear politics as a primary reason for its withdrawal. While implicitly committed to anti-nuclear military policies, I would like to acknowledge the problematics of North-South relations where attempts at political/military self-assertion by ex-colonies are policed and met with punitive aid sanctions. (1) Reciprocal penalties are not enforcible on countries of the Global North as they continue to set the standard for nuclear stockpiling or participate in nuclear proliferation. The history of manufactured debt, and the plundering of the resources of former colonies, makes donor aid a critical component of human rights activities in the Global South. This is especially true as the debt of the colonizers to the most underprivileged sections of these societies have never been calculated or repaid. Revoking aid impacts the most margilanized sections of these societies who, ironically, do not have access to decision making that relate to nuclear policy. …

Nick Devas

The transition from communism to a market economy poses many important questions concerning the appropriate role for the state, and the institutional capacity for service delivery and development. Cambodia, after the turmoil of the Khmer Rouge and a decade of Vietnamese-guided communism, has opted for a market economy. This article considers some of the problems facing the Cambodian government following the UN-backed elections. It outlines the system of government at national and local level, focusing on Battambang province and district. It considers the current debate there about centralization and decentralization, and examines the problems of finance at national and local levels. The case study on water supplies in Battambang town contrasts the public provision through the provincial water enterprise with private sector and community/NGO provision. Whilst there is an urgent need to increase water supply capacity and improve quality, there are institutional constraints in relation to the various providers. The development of the capacity of the local government to manage service delivery will be crucial. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.