Research
Cheoung Ek Genocide Memorial, Phnom Penh
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Book Project
Building on my dissertation research, this project asks what explains the uneven effects of collectivization and why the practice became so lethal. In answering these questions, I focus on collectivization during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 - 1979. The Khmer Rouge sought to destroy preexisting social order and fundamentally remake the state. This was done through the implementation of village cooperatives, which included reorganizing traditional social order through the destruction of the family, as a means to transform everyday life into cooperative production. As a result, there was famine that caused excess mortality, unnecessary suffering, and imprinted a generation with the physical and psychological effects of the conflict. I argue that the uneven levels of collectivization can be explained by the ways that authority was delegated to local administrators, while the destruction of social institutions, through the practice of forced marriage and group living, decreased the likelihood of population survival. I break down collectivization into practices pertaining to living, eating, and working cooperatively, to capture the ways that these policies were put in place, where they changed over time, and why they persisted despite deaths from famine. This book puts forward an organizational approach to revolutionary governance and an original measure of collectivization to explain the relationship between state organization, local governance, and mass deaths during periods of revolution.
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Papers and research in progress:
Married by the Revolution: Forced Marriage as a Strategy of Control in Khmer Rouge Cambodia (2020, Journal of Genocide Research):
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.
Working papers:
Repertoires of Coercion in Mass Violence: A Framework from the Cambodian Genocide (in progress)
A Logic of Forced Labor During Mass Atrocity: Evidence from Cambodia (in progress)
Constructing Victimhood: Sexual violence, transitional justice, and institutional legacies of conflict in Cambodia:
This paper addresses the role of transitional justice mechanisms in Southeast Asia through an analysis of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of the Cambodia (ECCC) and its approach to prosecuting sexual violence and cultural destruction. I ask why a dominant victimhood narrative was constructed and put forward in support of the legal case against the Khmer Rouge leaders, and how it constrains contemporary gender roles in Cambodian society. I find that the emphasis in the ECCC’s caseload on forced marriage as a cultural shift and exclusion other acts of Sexual and Gender Based Violence has critical implications for the acceptance of domestic or gender-based violence as a crime in contemporary society. I argue it has created a divide between private and public violence, the public form being the more legitimate or justiciable. Further, I contend that the limited prosecution and slow pace of justice has implications for domestic violence in contemporary society.
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.
Working papers:
Repertoires of Coercion in Mass Violence: A Framework from the Cambodian Genocide (in progress)
A Logic of Forced Labor During Mass Atrocity: Evidence from Cambodia (in progress)
Constructing Victimhood: Sexual violence, transitional justice, and institutional legacies of conflict in Cambodia:
This paper addresses the role of transitional justice mechanisms in Southeast Asia through an analysis of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of the Cambodia (ECCC) and its approach to prosecuting sexual violence and cultural destruction. I ask why a dominant victimhood narrative was constructed and put forward in support of the legal case against the Khmer Rouge leaders, and how it constrains contemporary gender roles in Cambodian society. I find that the emphasis in the ECCC’s caseload on forced marriage as a cultural shift and exclusion other acts of Sexual and Gender Based Violence has critical implications for the acceptance of domestic or gender-based violence as a crime in contemporary society. I argue it has created a divide between private and public violence, the public form being the more legitimate or justiciable. Further, I contend that the limited prosecution and slow pace of justice has implications for domestic violence in contemporary society.