Cambodian Genocide Research Articles

Understanding Parental Historical Trauma and the Effect on Second-Generation Cambodian Americans

This qualitative research study examines the effects of parental historical trauma on the educational aspirations and outcomes of second-generation Cambodian Americans. Twenty second-generation Cambodian Americans whose parents survived the Cambodian Genocide (1975–1979) participated. The conceptual framework of historical trauma addressed the research questions for this study which were to what extent were children of Cambodian genocide survivors affected by the trauma their parents experienced and what form did this inherited trauma take? The data were analyzed using qualitative methods and NVivo software. Three key themes were found. The first theme was denial of historical trauma, the second was unresolved grief among parents and children, the third theme was overprotection. It was common behavior among parents who survived the genocide to want to shield their children from any unforeseen circumstances. Building on the findings of this study, it is recommended that schools with large Cambodian American populations should educate later generations about Cambodian history including the genocide and provide dual immersion language classes. This would help to interrupt intergenerational trauma, reduce the language barrier, and allow students and their parents to find purpose and peace. Future research should explore the experiences of survivors, including survivors who lived through the genocide but did not suffer persecution. Such research could lead to truth and reconciliation.

Memory Preservation in Cambodian Graphic Narratives

Since the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), first-and-second generation survivors have developed new ways of processing personal and national trauma, including through the mode of graphic arts. This paper first extrapolates how graphic narratives differ from comics and cartoons. Then the graphic narrative’s role in assisting genocide survivors will be examined. In this section, the works of graphic artists, Ing Phoussera, Aki Rai, and Vath Nath, will be specifically looked at in relation to Franz Stanzel’s idea of ‘reflector narratives’ and Mieke Bal’s definition of ‘focalization.’ The paper will also focus on how graphic narratives have become a mode for second-generation survivors to engage with the past through Bui Long’s ‘refugee repertoire’ and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory.’ Within this section, Tian Veasna’s Year of the Rabbit’s will be analyzed. Aspects considered include illustration, dialogue, and layered content. Finally, this paper will look at how graphic narratives contribute to the concept of the memory archive and “memory citizenship” within Cambodia. Specific questions that prompt my research include: What is a graphic narrative? Can graphic narratives be sources of memoir and postmemory? How do graphic narratives function as a tool for remembering and working through trauma for artists and readers?

“An Asiatic Deed”: The Cambodian Genocide and the West German Right, Or a Study of an Illiberal Variant of Multidirectional Memory

ABSTRACT This article explores West German commentary on the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979) to theorize the existence of an illiberal multidirectional memory. Multidirectional memory, as defined by Michael Rothberg, involves the intercultural interaction between different memory regimes. Since Rothberg coined the term, scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies have used this concept to investigate how the memory of the Holocaust informed political battles waged in the aftermath of colonial violence. Yet, few scholars have considered how multidirectional memory functions as a tool for right-wing political commentators. Examining the West German New Right’s response to the Cambodian genocide and the Historikerstreit of 1986–1987, a famed debate over the historicization of the Holocaust, this article uncovers an illiberal variant of multidirectional memory. It shows how right-wing thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s forged multidirectional discourses, connecting Nazi and Khmer Rouge violence, to condemn the organized left and promote self-exculpatory narratives. Scholars have recently argued for the necessity of studying the right’s memory politics. This article demonstrates that such studies should feature investigations into Europe’s illiberal, multidirectional memories.

An Analysis of the Historiographic Tradition Surrounding the Extraordinary Chambers in the Cambodian Courts

From 1975 to 1979, The Democratic Kampuchea, or the Khmer Rouge, killed between one and a half to two million people, or twenty percent of the population of Cambodia through starvation, torture, and other means. This period is often cited as prime example of a genocide, yet forty years have passed and only four people have been held accountable for these crimes. In 2003, after years of negotiation with the government of Hun Sen, the prime minster of Cambodia from 1985 until the present, the United Nations and the government of Cambodia decided to establish the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the prosecution of the people many believe responsible for the death of over a million people. Yet, from 2003 until the present, as the courts are still in operation, only four people have been prosecuted despite sixteen years and $300 million dollars from the international community.[1] Despite the Cambodian Genocide being a prime example of genocide, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC, has proven to be a complete failure for the millions of dead, and the many millions more who lived through the events, and continue to live with the memory every day. Historians, lawyers, and international scholars have debated the issues surrounding why the ECCC has failed to deliver the promises of justice. Over the course of this paper we will be looking at the historiographic tradition surrounding the Extraordinary Chambers in the Cambodian Courts, dividing the works into two different camps. These two camps differ in their opinion on the fatal flaw with regard to the ECCC. These two camps of thought are, one, that political interference by the authoritarian Hun Sen government has, over the courts ten plus years of existence, used its power to prevent any real progress from being made. The other camp argues that the United Nations 2003 agreement with its international standards of justice does not fit into the national ideal of justice and that hybrid courts that attempt to balance international and national priorities have been flawed since its creation. By providing a detailed analysis of these sources the goal will be to find how the two different camps make their arguments and perhaps how scholars have proposed solutions to the difficulties of the Hun Sen government and the UN to attempt to find justice in Cambodia.

Families Formed Under Forced Marriage During the Genocide in Cambodia: Exploring the Perspectives of Men, Women, and Children

This paper explores the realities of men and women forced to marry by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, as well as the perspectives of children born of forced marriages. Forced marriage has been predominantly investigated in relation to violence and coercion towards girls and women. However, less attention has been paid to forced unions involving both spouses, as well as to children born of these couples. Data were collected from 80 participants, including in-depth interviews with 28 women and 30 men who experienced forced marriage, and focus groups with 22 children born of forced marriages. Those who experienced forced marriage highlighted the coercion and threats of violence that underlay the marriage process. However, interviews also pointed to spouses’ key coping mechanisms and resources, such as the long-term acceptance of the marriage and support from larger community, which sustained positive familial relations. Children born of these unions, who regarded their parents’ marriage as generally loving and supportive, corroborated these findings. Our study revealed the ways in which forced marriages within the context of genocide were not necessarily characterized by domestic violence and abuse. We suggest that the shared and widespread nature of forced marriage and post-genocide community support may play a role in leading to positive family relationships in the context of unwanted unions.

Review: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. By Y-Dang Troeung. (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2022. 262 pp.) Geoffrey Gunn Geoffrey Gunn Emeritus, Nagasaki University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 323–324. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.323 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Geoffrey Gunn; Review: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 323–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.323 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search A short book divided into four chapters, each suggests a psychological condition stemming from war (the Cambodian war), refugee displacement, and memory (or amnesia). In a substantive standalone preface, author Y-Dang Troeung positions her work between transnational literatures, critical refugee studies, global south studies, and “critical disability studies.” Neither does she ignore trauma-based paradigms as with post-memory, haunting, and intergenerational trauma (p. 11). Matching the subtitle of the work, as stated, the text “aims to construct and animate a genealogy of the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia in the service of decolonist, antiwar, and abolitionist futures” (p. xi). In doing so, Troeung reframes questions of international complicity and responsibility in the Cambodia genocide in ways that implicate us all. Such is the power of this book including a final “coda,” that no one reading it could doubt her general sentiments for a moment. Born in a refugee camp... You do not currently have access to this content.

The long-term effects of genocide on antisocial preferences

We conduct an artefactual field experiment to examine the long-term effects of exposure to violence due to the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979), during childhood and adolescence, on individuals’ antisocial behaviors. Since antisocial behavior can co-exist with other preferences, we also investigate the effect of this exposure on prosocial and risk-taking behaviors. We find that as district-level mortality rates increase, individuals who directly experienced violence during the genocide period exhibit greater antisocial and risk-taking behaviors decades later. These effects are relatively muted among individuals who did not directly experience genocidal violence. The results imply significant long-term effects on antisocial and risk preferences in association with direct exposure to genocidal violence.

Visual Storytelling about Genocide, Displacement, and Exile

In this article, I examine encounters with an artist and his art: Cambodian exile filmmaker Rithy Panh. In his cinematographic and artwork, Rithy Panh comes to terms with his childhood, the death of his family, and the suffering of his people during the Khmer Rouge regime and the genocide in Cambodia. Conflict and displacement are themes usually approached by researchers using language-based methods, which do not give us fully adequate insights into the “felt and experienced” temporal/spatial aspects of conflict and displacement. I frame my discussion through the reflective interaction between art, an artist with violent conflict and displacement background and the audience—a researcher. First, I examine how taking the sentipensar approach to research through art encounters and researcher as a thinking-feeling person contributes to a different understanding of personal trajectories, experiences of, and emotions connected to conflict, war, and displacement. My second aim is to analyze how artistic practice of Rithy Panh contributes to coming to terms with and to creating alternatives to the official public discourses about the past and the present, at individual and societal levels.

Eliticide: The Main Examples

The issue of the annihilation of the elite and the intelligentsia plays an important role in the context of genocides, massacres, as well as the deprivation and control of the intellectual potential of a given nation or state. There have been cases throughout history, when elites have been deliberately targeted in order to exterminate different racial, ethnic, religious groups or commit cultural genocide. Due to this circumstance the topic received the attention of the author of the term “Genocide” Raphael Lemkin, who considered the destruction of the intelligentsia and the elite from the social, physical and cultural aspects of genocide. However, it is interesting, that the destruction of the intelligentsia and the elite did not receive a specific definition for a long time until the term “eliticide” or “elitocide” was introduced in 1992. And since the phenomenon of eliticide is comparatively little studied, in this article we tried to present and to analyze its most obvious examples – the destruction of the elite of the Armenian intelligentsia during the Armenian Genocide, the eliticide carried out by Nazi Germany in Poland, as well as cases of eliticide in Tibet, Cambodia, Burundi, Bangladesh, Bosnia. The extermination of the elite during the Armenian Genocide was widespread, although the most famous is the arrest and murder of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople on April 24 1915. And the peculiarity of this genocide is that the eliticide was an integral part of the extermination of Armenians on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, therefore it is considered as a separate stage of the genocide. And unlike the eliticide committed during the Armenian Genocide, the extermination of the elite in Poland, Tibet, Burundi, Bangladesh and Bosnia was not in the context of the complete annihilation of the targeted ethnic or religious group, but in the context of erasing the identity of the group and cultural genocide. And the extermination of the intelligentsia during the Cambodian genocide was more in the context of the anti-intellectual campaign.

‘We vowed by force, not by our heart’: men’s and women’s perspectives on forced marriage during the Cambodian genocide

ABSTRACT While many of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime during the Cambodian genocide have been well documented, forced marriage remains poorly understood. This article documents the perspectives of women and men who experienced forced marriage under the Khmer Rouge, using primary data from interviews with 28 women and 30 men. The interviews reveal the profound violence, coercion and threats that surrounded the experience of forced marriage, with similarities and differences in the experiences of men and women. In addition, drawing upon participant narratives, we highlight the three ways in which forced marriage was used to advance the unique socio-political and ideological goals of the Khmer Rouge. First, forced marriage was a used as a mechanism to both secure absolute loyalty to the regime, and further the Khmer Rouge’s goal of an agrarian revolutionary order. Second, forced marriage was used to systematically dismantle families of origin, while simultaneously constructing a ‘new’ family, representing the regime itself. Finally, forced marriage appeared to be a channel through which the next generation of loyal members of the Khmer Rouge regime could be assured through procreation. We conclude with a discussion of the gendered and intergenerational implications of our findings.

On the Academic Classifications of Genocides

Discussion continues over the subject of genocide, the boundaries of the crime, as genocide scholars debate its key concept, the term genocide. Some of them have contributed their own definitions of the phenomenon, which cannot have legal force. Disputes continue over whether the massacres can be considered genocide or not. It can be summed up that most scholars are in the middle ground between the two farthest approaches (if some argue for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, then the other camp offers a broad, almost universal inclusion of mass murder cases under the definition of genocide). There is almost complete consensus on the four major genocides: the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, and the Rwandan Genocide. But many more other cases are the subject of academic and often political debate. To clarify this debate, comparative genocide studies and the classification of genocides can be helpful. The classification of Vahakn Dadrian is essential for us. He divided genocidal cases into four groups: Cultural, Latent, Retributive, Utilitarian and Optimal genocide, based on the outcome of the genocide. In parallel with this process, several terms continue to be used that do not correspond with genocide, but help explain related issues: politicide, gendercide, eliticide. However, we should remember that genocide is a legal term; the others are not.

Conflict, Institutions, and Economic Behavior: Legacies of the Cambodian Genocide

This paper examines potential long-term effects of the Cambodian genocide under the Pol Pot regime (1975-’79) on individual economic behaviors. Combining spatial genocide data and census microdata, we compare children’s education among couples who had their first child during and after the Pol Pot period. We show that the genocide is negatively associated with subsequent educational investments for children among the former couples, but not the latter ones. Underlying social institutions and structures are discussed.

Há sempre uma imagem que falta:

Nesse artigo, tomamos o filme A imagem que falta (2013) como dispositivo mnemônico que permite ao cineasta, Rithy Panh, reconstruir sua experiência do genocídio cambojano, através das lembranças e da falta delas. Ao empenhar-se no testemunho de um tempo de terror vivido coletivamente, Panh coloca o passado em elaboração através das imagens – seja de arquivos ou dos bonecos filmados -  e alcança ainda duas questões ligadas ao cinema: por um lado, a insuficiência do mesmo frente ao processo do trauma, e, por outro, sua potência política na reparação de um dano social. Entre as singularidades dessa potência está o modo com a infância lembrada no filme se revela como resistência.

Making Visible the Work of Translation in Transnational Feminist Research

Background: Transnational feminist work seeks to cross boundaries that are marked by differences in language, culture, and history, which necessitates the work of translation. Analysis: With a focus on women’s multiple experiences under the Khmer Rouge, this article explores the mechanisms and strategies of translation in a cross-cultural feminist exploration of gender and genocide in Cambodia. Conclusion and implications: In this research, translation emerges as a shared and ongoing labour across many locations and as a constantly evolving process that is never complete. A multilayering of the interpretive efforts is proposed in order to bring visibility to gender(ed) representations and their mediation within and by a cross-cultural feminist research project.

Agrarian Marxism, Animal Geographies, and non-human labor in Democratic Kampuchea

Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) embarked on a genocidal program of sweeping economic, social, and political change. In an effort to modernize Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was renamed, CPK officials forced the entire populace to clear forests; build dams, canals, and reservoirs; and grow rice in an effort to accumulate rapidly the necessary capital for industrialization. In doing so, upwards of two million people died from disease, hunger and malnutrition, torture, and execution. The broad coordinates of the genocide are well-established. To date, however, no scholarship has examined critically the role of non-human animals in the agricultural transformations initiated during the Cambodian genocide. Drawing on two bodies of scholarship, Agrarian Marxism and Animal Geographies, in this paper we examine the role of draught animals in the regime’s plans to build an economy around agricultural expansion and rice production for export. Specifically, we trace the new productive relationships into which Cambodia’s water buffalo and oxen became enmeshed, and the structures of violence within which these animals played an essential part. We find not only that the work of draught animals materially contributed to the CPK’s plans for state-building, but in the process, the new state–animal relationship became an exemplar of the idealized relationship between the CPK and its human laborers. We conclude that the human–animal relationship provides key insights into the mass violence that transpired in Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge and to this end encourage future engagement with interspecies relationships in the Cambodian context and in genocide studies more broadly.

Making (In?)Visible: Selectivity, Visibility and Authenticity in Cambodia’s Sites of Atrocity

ABSTRACT This article examines victim representation in former atrocity sites in Cambodia. It concentrates on Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, two prominent sites for the detention and torture of suspected enemies of the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime and the subsequent creation of mass graves. These sites of trauma, memory, and transitional justice are inextricably linked to the experiences of victims. Yet, the voice of victims, their visibility, and authentic representations of the past are not always centred in Cambodia’s atrocity sites. Drawing on empirical fieldwork in Cambodia and an interdisciplinary literature, this article interrogates the intersections between selectivity, visibility, and authenticity in sites of atrocity associated with the Cambodian genocide. As this paper demonstrates, engaging with these themes of selectivity, visibility, and authenticity, and by extension issues of, for example, “who” is recognized as a victim, “how” responsibility for past horrors is represented, “which” sites become tourist facing attractions, and “why” certain narratives of the past are prioritized, is essential to recognizing the rights, humanity, and dignity of victims and survivors.

Long-term Well-being among Survivors of the Rwandan and Cambodian Genocides

This paper adds to the thin empirical literature estimating the long-term effects of exposure to conflict from in utero to adolescence on adult well-being. The effects through adolescence of the two worst genocides in recent history – those occurring in Rwanda (1994) and Cambodia (1975–79) – are examined. The Rwandan genocide is shown to have produced long-term health outcomes among women exposed to the conflict during adolescence. A further contribution is the analysis of gendered effects during adolescence, which is enabled by the availability of data on men’s height for Rwanda. The long-term effects are confirmed for men, however this appears to be the consequence of exposure during adolescence later than for women, a result that is consistent with the biological literature on the differential timing of the onset of puberty by gender. No significant effects are detected in the case of the Cambodian genocide and we discuss some issues that may influence this result. Although more research and better data are needed, our results are suggestive of adolescent-specific effects of the Rwandan genocide, which may be comparable or larger than those previously found for younger children.

Intergenerational Transmission of Traumatic Stress and Resilience Among Cambodian Immigrant Families Along Coastal Alabama: Family Narratives.

Purpose: Intergenerational transmission of psychological trauma is an ongoing global public health concern. Cambodia experienced ∼4 years of genocide, causing about 2 million deaths. Many survivors fled and resettled in the United States where they continued to face the psychological and relational consequences of forced displacement, with limited access to mental health treatment. This study employed an ecological social determinants of health framework to explore how resettled families discussed traumatic experiences and resilience transmitted across three generations.Methods: Narrative inquiry-guided, in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with intergenerational families: five grandparents, six parents, and nine adult children. The interview protocol included developing detailed family genograms that facilitated the sharing of experiences of living through the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979) and resettlement to the United States in the 1980s. A thematic data analysis was conducted across individual and family experiences before, during, and after the genocide and resettlement.Results: The findings highlight parent–child relationships as the primary mechanism of intergenerational transmission of traumatic stress and resilience among Cambodian immigrant families. Specifically, high parental expectations, authoritarian parenting, corporal punishment, and submissive communication styles were reported. On the other hand, strong bonds and less hierarchy between parents and children were found to be resilience factors among this population.Conclusions: The results of this qualitative study underscore the need for a systemic mental health conceptualization for practitioners working with resettled Cambodian families to overcome the cycle of intergenerational transmission of traumatic stress and promote resilience postresettlement.

“We Planted Rice and Killed People:” Symbiogenetic Destruction in the Cambodian Genocide

In recent years, genocide scholars have given greater attention to the dangers posed by climate change for increasing the prevalence or intensity of genocide. Challenges related to forced migration, resource scarcity, famine, and other threats of the Anthropocene are identified as sources of present and future risk, especially for those committed to genocide prevention. We approach the connection between the natural and social aspects of genocide from a different angle. Our research emanates out of a North American Indigenous studies and new materialist rather than Euro-genocide studies framework, meaning we see the natural and the social (or cultural) as inseparable, deeply imbricated, phenomena. We argue that those entities designated natural are often engaged in co-constitutive relations with the social and cultural groups that are the focus of genocide studies. Simply put, groups become what they are through interaction—or symbiogenesis—with their natural world(s). Symbiogenetic destruction, then, is the destruction of this symbiogenesis. We use this term to draw attention to how relations with more-than-human entities are integral components of the ongoing formation of group life, and how they are put at risk by genocide. In particular, we examine testimony that centers on the relationship between Khmer people and rice, including rice cultivation and consumption, as it was impacted by the Khmer Rouge. In so doing, we highlight the cultural consequences of social/natural death in the Cambodian genocide.

Critical Physical Geography and the Study of Genocide: Lessons from Cambodia

For holistic accounts of past and present genocides to exist, the production of critical geographies of genocide, produced at the interface of human and physical geography, is vital. The emergent area of critical physical geography (CPG) scholarship stands to provide such holistic accounts in addition to providing genocide studies with a much‐needed geographic perspective, one that is grounded in the lived material realities and social relations produced by the material interactions humans have with their environments. With the land, water, and people of Democratic Kampuchea and contemporary Cambodia as subjects, this work demonstrates how a grounded, empirical CPG approach enhances our understanding of genocide and its aftermath. By examining processes of landscape transformation we suggest that violence, agriculture, and water in the context of Cambodia cannot be considered separate “social” or “natural” components of systems that are either exclusively geopolitical or physiographic. Rather, we emphasise the importance of understanding genocide and violence as internally related to the wider geomorphology—and resulting hydrology and agricultural landscape—produced under the Khmer Rouge. Our approach here has two important consequences. First, the resultant empirical knowledge serves to reinterpret how the Cambodian genocide happened, upending normative myths by demonstrating that the Khmer Rouge consistently acted with intentionality in devaluing human life to the point of mass death while transforming physical landscapes to modernise and enter the global capitalist economy. This reinterpretation serves as a framework for reinterpreting how other genocides may also be stories of continuity and acceleration, rather than aberrant rupture. Second, our CPG approach communicates to genocide studies the need to better situate genocides within their material‐geographic contexts. Specifically, that paying close attention to how humans live and die socio‐politically, relative to the changing physical landscapes around them, can yield significant insights into how and why genocides continue to happen.