Married by the Revolution: Forced Marriage as a Strategy of Control in Khmer Rouge Cambodia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article asks how genocidal regimes select policies of social control and why they vary in implementation within a revolutionary movement. Using the case of forced marriage under the Khmer Rouge regime, I argue that regime ideology was used to make violence against civilians appropriate. I find that forced marriages of civilians were most frequent among targeted population groups that represented an internal threat and among populations living in highly productive economic regions. Forced marriage was a unique tool of sexual violence: unlike other wartime practices of sexual violence, these marriages were meant to be permanent. Both parties married together were civilians, coerced into matches by state agents, and enforced by armed militia members who monitored the couples’ behaviour. I find that the content of the regime’s ideology made forced marriages not only thinkable, but the only appropriate choice. Lastly, this article pushes back on the claim that highly ideological groups do not commit sexual violence against civilians, but rather the findings suggest that regime ideology made permissible new tools of sexual violence and shaped practices of violence perpetrated by the state on civilians.