Dr Katrin Travouillon

I first visited Cambodia in 2005 and spent half a year in a small rural village in Takeo province to conduct a survey for an international development organization. I have been fascinated by the country, its people and the Khmer language ever since. To develop my language skills, I relied on the help of my generous Cambodian colleagues and friends in Phnom Penh, Takeo, and Berlin.  

My early research was dedicated to a critical assessment of the increasing securitization of EU migration and refugee politics. I was one of the lead authors of two large-scale research projects on migrant labour exploitation in Germany, commissioned by the German government. I continued to visit Cambodia, worked as an Election Observer during the 2008 parliamentarian election, interned in the National Assembly of Cambodia, and contributed to the design and implementation of projects in the civil society sector.

In 2010 I successfully applied to lead the Cambodian case study in the DFG-funded project ‘The Institutionalization of Interpretative Authority in Post-Conflict Societies. An Analysis of the Transitional Authority in Kosovo and Cambodia’ at the Centre for Conflict Studies of the Philipps University in Marburg.  

From 2010 until 2016, I conducted interviews with human rights defenders in Cambodia and followed the trail of documents left by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC, 1992-99) around the world. I conducted research in archives in Cambodia, France, and the United States.

From 2016 to 2018, I was a Tobis Fellow at the University of California Irvine (UCI).

In 2018, I took up my current position at ANU’s Department of Political and Social Change in the College of Asia and the Pacific. Building on my archival research and drawing on in-depth interviews with Cambodian politicians and human rights activists, my research explores the discursive and affective dimensions of political change in intervention contexts.

In 2019, I became a member of the editorial team of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. As the Co-Editor in Chief, I support critical conversations about justice and peace during socio-political transitions.

BA and MA (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder); PhD, Political Science (Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps University Marburg)

My research is motivated by my fascination with the difficult to grasp connections between global politics and the trajectories of people’s everyday lives.

As a peace and conflict scholar, my research pursues three interrelated agendas:

1) Focused on the case of Cambodia, I aim to identify and scrutinise the hidden impacts and legacies of the liberal peacebuilding project. With the deployment of the UN peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s, Cambodia became a testing ground for liberal interventionism. Under the guidance of a UN Transitional Authority the intervention set out to implement the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements with its commitment to establish a liberal democratic order. Ever since, Cambodia's political landscape has been shaped by and through the ongoing interactions between interveners, donors, representatives of foreign governments, the Cambodian elite, and the Cambodian population. For almost three decades, the unquestioned claims and assumptions inherent in the transition paradigm structured the distribution of and access to resources committed to the country's political and economic transformation.

Informed by my extensive research with unique English-, French, and Khmer-language archival collections, I provide counter-narratives to official UN-narratives of the large-scale intervention’s impact on the country’s socio-political transformation. In ZIB,  Peacebuilding and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, I observe struggles over legitimacy between Cambodia’s political elite and the UN interveners. In the Review of International Studies, Julie Bernath and I scrutinize the discursive uses of the ‘international community’. We offer a critique of the idea’s continued reification in academic and political discourse and demonstrate how it shaped actors’ expectations and strategies of cooperation instigated under conditions of global liberal optimism (see also our interview). My contribution in Contemporary Southeast Asia attends to the impact of these transnational struggles on the foreign policy vision of Cambodia’s ruling party.  

2) My research on political and social transformations in intervention contexts is increasingly influenced by the emotion turn in International Relations. Through a series of individual and collaborative research projects, I contribute to a systematic assessment of how emotions can support the articulation of peace as an embodied knowledge of complex socio-political relations and power dynamics. My co-edited Special Issue in Cooperation and Conflict brings together contributions by several leading peace and emotion scholars, who are united by the belief that emotions fundamentally shape how peace is imagined and enacted. To recover the political significance of emotions to peace, the contributors explore how emotions shape the bounds and boundaries of actors and alliances committed to fostering peaceful societies. In this issue, I discuss how the liberal vision of peace and its implicit biases toward negative emotions are retained and reproduced in the temporal, institutional, and ideological dimensions of liberal interventions.

3) My work with peacekeeping archives has furthermore inspired several ongoing research collaborations with the aim to develop and promote innovative and ethically sound research methods for peacebuilding and intervention contexts. In the European Journal of International Relations, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and I are bringing IPT in conversation with Critical Archival Studies (CAS) – a body of scholarship grounded in a relational and dynamic ontology of archives and committed to analyses of their embeddedness in politics and power relations. We argue that IPT can benefit from activating an analytical sensibility towards the archival practices of record-making, record-keeping and record-using. To support this argument and demonstrate its analytical value, we revisit official accounts of the interactions between interveners and the ‘targets of intervention’ during the United Nations’ Transitional Authority in Cambodia. Together with Monique Beerli and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert I contribute a piece on Archival Praxiography to an IRS forum on The Future of International Practice Theory. I also produced a video for SAGE Research Methods, where I discuss how to organise archival research on a UN Peacekeeping Mission.