Agency, Responsibility, and Culpability: The Complexity of Roles and Self-representations of Perpetrators

Timothy Williams

doi:10.21039/jpr.2.1.16

Abstract

How much agency perpetrators have during genocide is highly contested and significant for dealing with the past after the end of conflict. In this context, ascriptions of roles such as perpetrators, bystanders and victims are drawn upon to delineate responsibility and innocence. Yet, this simple, black-and-white categorisation belies the complexity of roles which individuals can take on and the actions they engage in during genocide and mass violence. Naturally, there are many actors who fit neatly into categories as perpetrators who kill, victims who are killed or heroes who rescue. However, people can often be more aptly located in the ‘grey zones’ between these categories. This article explores the various types of actions that former low-level cadres of the Khmer Rouge engaged in, and looks at how they represent these actions. Former Khmer Rouge portray themselves only rarely and indirectly as perpetrators, but more often as victims and sometimes as heroes; this article uncovers various strategies they employ to justify these self-representations. These various actions and self-representations are drawn upon to reflect on the notion of agency of low-level perpetrators within the context of an oppressive genocidal regime.

Highlights

Raul Hilberg’s trichotomy of perpetrators, bystanders and victims is often the starting point for thinking about various types of actors involved in genocidal violence.1 Such rudimentary classifications suggest static and simple allocations of responsibility and culpability, with perpetrators being solely responsible, victims wholly innocent, and bystanders perceived as only passive and beyond the remit of action
What Does This Mean for Agency and Culpability?. The actions that these former Khmer Rouge engaged in and their self-representations allow us to reflect on some issues regarding the degree of agency they possessed, and what consequences this could have for the culpability associated with their actions
The killing at security centres often took on a very routinized form, with as many as one hundred people being delivered from the holding cells, being killed one after another and thrown into pits which had already been prepared. Another facet that takes on particular prominence in the case of Cambodia is the fact that, as many of the Khmer Rouge were child cadres, they had even more constrained capacities to act in a self-determined way

Summary

Introduction

Raul Hilberg’s trichotomy of perpetrators, bystanders and victims is often the starting point for thinking about various types of actors involved in genocidal violence. Such rudimentary classifications suggest static and simple allocations of responsibility and culpability, with perpetrators being solely responsible, victims wholly innocent, and bystanders perceived as only passive and beyond the remit of action. This article displays the multifaceted types of actions that Khmer Rouge cadres could and did engage in, and discusses how these are represented by the individuals themselves This discussion of self-representations goes beyond just a portrayal of the actions themselves, as these have consequences for how people perceive their responsibility for violence and their part in it, in particular for the agency – and culpability – that can be ascribed to them in these situations. The differentiation between the person and the action is important in our context here, because of the analytical consequences, and because they reflect in the self-representations of the individuals themselves It is precisely this focus on actions that allows people, who had official roles within the Khmer Rouge and whom we can classify most as perpetrators, to highlight the other actions they engaged in. Brown, ‘Gender and Genocide: Assessing Differential Opportunity Structures of Perpetration in Rwanda’, in Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, ed. by Williams and Buckley-Zistel, pp. 133–50; Megan MacKenzie, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone’, Security Studies, 18.2 (2009), 241–61. 14 B Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic

Talking to Former Khmer Rouge

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge

What Does This Mean for Agency and Culpability?

Conclusion

Works Cited