Why was the Khmer Empire so disunited?

I'm writing a timeline right now, and a main character visits Cambodia and meets up with Suryavarman II. Still, there's a problem I don't understand.

Why was the Khmer Empire so disunited? Was it because of the mandala system?
 
Would it be possible for the Khmer to reunite and not have the mandala system? IMHO it sounds pretty unproductive to have to go through such long civil wars.

Have you read *The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia*? It sheds some light on the mandala system, although it focuses more on Burma and the Burmese hills.
Anyways I feel like an attempt to enforce centralized rule would lead to just as much conflict if not more as the mandala system, and wouldn't really work out in the long term due more to geography than human conditions.
 
Have you read *The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia*? It sheds some light on the mandala system, although it focuses more on Burma and the Burmese hills.
Anyways I feel like an attempt to enforce centralized rule would lead to just as much conflict if not more as the mandala system, and wouldn't really work out in the long term due more to geography than human conditions.

I haven't read it, but I've heard of it. I was thinking of finding it somewhere and buying it. The one by James C. Scott, right?

So centralization wouldn't work in Cambodia? Can they not establish control over just the cities? (not even the upland parts, just the coast and cities)
 
In general all historical Indian and Indianised regions have tended toward something like the mandala system. The general massive ethnolinguistic diversity pushes things that way.
 
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