Time & Perspective Quote by Hun Sen

“Peace” is doing double duty here: it’s a promise and a verdict. Hun Sen’s line reads like a national weather report - decades of storms, now clear skies everywhere - but the simplicity is the point. By framing peace as “elusive” until “now,” he collapses Cambodia’s messy recent history into a before-and-after story with a single implied hero: the regime that declares the all-clear.

The intent is legitimizing power through a moral trump card. After civil war, the Khmer Rouge period, and years of factional violence, stability becomes the ultimate political currency. If peace “prevails all over the country,” then dissent can be recast as needless disruption, even betrayal. It’s a phrase that invites citizens to measure political freedom against the memory of chaos - and to choose quiet over risk.

The subtext is that peace is not just the absence of war; it’s the presence of control. “Prevails” is a revealing verb: peace doesn’t simply exist, it wins, it dominates, it enforces a new normal. That’s rhetorically useful in a context where Hun Sen’s long rule has been criticized for eroding opposition space, tightening media, and turning state institutions into extensions of incumbency. The sentence offers a bargain: accept the consolidation of authority as the price of safety.

It works because it taps a real, lived trauma. The line doesn’t need policy detail. It needs memory. In post-conflict societies, the most persuasive argument is often the one that warns, quietly, what could return.