Left justified: The early campaign for an international law response to Khmer Rouge crimes

In April 1979, a mission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers made a solidarity visit to Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of Khmer Rouge rule of the country. One of the mission members, John H. E. Fried, a former advisor to the United States' military trials at Nuremberg, was moved to subsequently advocate for United Nations recognition of the then ostracised Cambodian state. The crisis of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the political justifications made by early visitors there, illuminate late Cold War cultures of progressive international law scholarship and activism through their constitutive affects and material practices. While legal investigation of Khmer Rouge crimes is now largely understood through the frame of ‘transitional justice’, this paper rejects such a framing. It argues instead for attention to Cambodia's early experiences, in which left legal activism – calling for Nuremberg's lessons to be applied to the violence perpetrated in Vietnam and Cambodia – played an important role. For scholars interested in post-1979 Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum historical visitor books, recently digitised, promise insight into the multiple actors, motivations and understandings of international ‘early responders’ to evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes.     

Strange Legacies of the Terror: Hegel,the French Revolution,and the Khmer Rouge Purges

Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be explained by theories of mass violence in the current literatures on genocide or state terror. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we show how key features of a theory of limitless, exterminationist, and ultimately self-destructive violence are contained within G.W.F. Hegel’s obscure analysis of the Terror of the French Revolution. Second, this Hegelian theory of exterminationist violence with a particular model of modern consciousness at its heart, can account for the transformation of typical forms of revolutionary violence into limitless self-annihilation. By drawing on Party documents, speeches, and radio broadcasts, we show that this theory can explain the shape and sequence of the internal purges of the Khmer Rouge.     

Politics by other means? The virtual trials of the Khmer Rouge tribunal

This article argues that more emphasis should be placed on the political aspects of international tribunals, which are often in the business of reshaping politics as well as simply administering justice. By examining the hybrid Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), popularly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, the article develops arguments previously advanced by Victor Peskin in respect of Rwanda and the former Yuogoslavia. Peskin has suggested that courtroom war crimes trials are paralleled by ‘virtual trials’, in which international and domestic political actors struggle for power and control over the form and outcome of proceedings. He terms these virtual trials ‘trials of cooperation’, in which governments of states where war crimes have been committed seek variously to help or hinder legal proceedings to address those crimes. Such virtual trials now loom extremely large in the Cambodian case; the Hun Sen government, while exploiting the ECCC to deflect domestic and international attention from the endemic corruption and growing authoritarianism over which it presides, has sought tightly to limit the Tribunal's room for manoeuvre. One trial has been completed, another is about to start, and the international investigators and prosecutors are planning a couple more—but Prime Minister Hun Sen has personally declared his opposition to any further cases going ahead. If the ECCC succeeds in trying only five defendants from the murderous 1975–79 Khmer Rouge regime, justice will not have been done; and wider questions will emerge about the future viability of hybrid tribunals. The Cambodian case demonstrates that where war crimes tribunals are concerned, backroom ‘virtual trials’ need as much academic, policy and media attention as the actual courtroom trials of key defendants.     

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Colony and Difficult History

A recent exhibition staged by the National Gallery of Victoria Australia can be regarded as an expression of the international difficult histories boom. In large part, its representation in Colony of Australia’s black history is in keeping with the Manichean accounts that have come to dominate in the realm of popular culture and is a function of its decision to represent the past in forms that are primarily memorial and performative rather than historical and pedagogical. I argue that any serious attempt to come to grips with this nation’s difficult Aboriginal history requires its settler peoples to rethink rather than merely reject previous settler accounts of the past, and I contend that this task demands the practice of both scholarly history and local Aboriginal community history, which provide more complex accounts of the past.     

A tribute and a review

On 8–9 May 2010, a deprived chengzhongcun (urban village) in the city of Hefei hosted a session of the Second Hefei Contemporary Art Biennale. In this article, we focus on the artistic practices and the online and offline discussions that they evoked. Drawing upon literature on citizenship, public art, public space and public pedagogy, we analyse the exhibition and its social and political potentialities. Looking at a case study in a country where fear of an aggressive crackdown is part and parcel of the psychology of urban protest, we reflect upon the pedagogical potential of public art in the struggle for equal rights to housing, education and urban space. By paying special attention to the geographical and the pedagogical dimensions of this extraordinary event, we demonstrate that public art can play a role in Chinese citizenship struggles.     

The Political Ecology of Transition in Cambodia 1989–1999: War,Peace and Forest Exploitation

Over the last decade, forests have played an important role in the transition from war to peace in Cambodia. Forest exploitation financed the continuation of war beyond the Cold War and regional dynamics, yet it also stimulated co‐operation between conflicting parties. Timber represented a key stake in the rapacious transition from the (benign) socialism of the post‐Khmer Rouge period to (exclusionary) capitalism, thereby becoming the most politicized resource of a reconstruction process that has failed to be either as green or as democratic as the international community had hoped. This article explores the social networks and power politics shaping forest exploitation, with the aim of casting light on the politics of transition. It also scrutinizes the unintended consequences of the international community’s discourse of democracy, good governance, and sustainable development on forest access rights. The commodification of Cambodian forests is interpreted as a process of transforming nature into money through a political ecology of transition that legitimates an exclusionary form of capitalism.     

Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum

Museums are conventionally viewed as institutions dedicated to the conservation of valued objects and the education of the public. Recently, controversies have arisen regarding the representation of history in museums. National museums in America and Germany considered here, such as the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the German Historical Museum, have become sites of contention where national histories and personal memories are often at odds. Contemporary art installations in museums which take historical consciousness as their theme similarly raise contentious issues about public knowledge of and personal interest in the past. When members of publics find that their memories of the past or their expectations for museum experiences are not being met, a kind of "distortion" occurs. The "distortion" related to memory and history in the museum is not so much of facts or interpretations, but rather a distortion from the lack of congruity between personal experience and expectation, on the one hand, and the institutional representation of the past on the other. This essay explores the possibilities for a redefined relationship between personal memory and history that is experienced in contemporary museums.     

Border wars: the ongoing temple dispute between Thailand and Cambodia and UNESCO’s World Heritage List

This article traces the history of the ongoing tension between Thailand and Cambodia over a beautiful Khmer temple located on the unresolved border between the two countries. The struggle is noteworthy for its transethnic character, the deep and imbricated history of the players, and the fight’s intersection with dramatic contemporary politics in both countries. The paper argues that the dispute implicates existential challenges to ancient and contemporary political legitimacy. It emphasizes the significant role iconic sites can play in the construction of national identity as well as in the competitive global tourism market. The paper questions UNESCO cultural heritage policy concerning contested nominations to the World Heritage List and offers a recommendation for future treatment of similar cases.     

Practice What You Teach: Facilitating Anarchism In and Out of the Classroom

Abstract: In recent years, human geographers have criticized the increasing corporatization, commodification, and objectification of knowledge production, and have looked to critical pedagogical frameworks that seek to counteract these forces. Anarchism, as a body of theories and practices, has a long history of engagement with radical pedagogical experimentation. Anarchism and geography have much to contribute to one another: anarchism, through its support for creative, non‐coercive, practical learning spaces, and geography, for its critical examination of the spaces of education. In this paper, I evaluate the prospects for anarchist‐geographic pedagogies theoretically, as well as through my own experiences teaching and learning about anarchism over the past decade in a liberal arts, higher education US environment. I argue for a combined critical anarchist‐geographic pedagogical approach that appreciates the challenges of building alternative learning models within existing neoliberalizing institutions, provides the necessary tools for finding uniquely situated opportunities for educational change, and emplaces a grounded, liberating, student‐led critical pedagogy.     

Tourism and Tragedy: The Memorial at Belzec,Poland

In 1942, within in a period of 10 months, 500,000 people were systematically murdered in a specially built death camp at Belzec, Poland. When it had served its purpose the Nazis demolished it, and to hide its existence, grassed the site over, allowing the atrocities performed there to remain virtually hidden from public view for over 60 years. In 2004 an important new Holocaust memorial, covering the whole death camp area, was opened. Visually striking, this conceptual art/architectural artwork affectively elicits strong visitor responses. I explore ways in which the materiality of the reconfigured site makes the invisibility of such horror and collective loss paramount. My interpretation and visual analysis shows how ‘memory work’ can operate through viewer experience. This paper locates Belzec within its historical context and includes a related discussion about Polish–Jewish relationships up to the present. As a significant heritage site, Belzec’s new role in Polish Holocaust tourism is examined.     

历史与记忆

当代史学和历史哲学中关于记忆问题的探讨为我们关于史学的理解提供了新的视角。在这一视野下,记忆超越单纯个体心理的层次获得了作为脑外"文化记忆"的历史维度。在历史与记忆关系的层面上,历史记忆的多元性对历史记载的单一性提供了重要的补益,同时,史学文本的宏观视野对于历史记忆的微观局部性和片断性亦显示出认识上的优越性。在认识论维度之外,历史记忆诉诸历史正义的道义性是其十分显著的特质,于此凸显史学科学性与道义性维度复杂的张力关系,历史科学性不能成为漠视道义性的理由。最后,在历史与记忆关系上传统的历史本位立场之外,对人生有意义的历史终究要落实在人间的历史记忆中,从而彰显记忆本位的合理性,这或许是关注历史记忆所能带给我们的一点理论启示。     

Historical empathy in a museum: uniting contextualisation and emotional engagement

Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum’s strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.     

To live and let die: Food,famine, and administrative violence in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million people died in the Cambodian genocide. We argue that the mass violence that transpired during this period was a manifestation of the Khmer Rouge's attempt to make life. Through a focus on the production of both violence and vulnerability we direct attention to the contradictory policies and practices forwarded by the Khmer Rouge that were designed to maximize life through the maximization of death. Specifically, we consider the mass starvation that accompanied the genocide as a structure of violence; we forward the argument that the rationing of food constitutes a calculated yet contradictory policy, namely that food rations represent in material form an inner contradiction of fostering life and disallowing life. Subsequently, the policy of forced rations—which imposed a particular space of vulnerability on Cambodia's population—resulted in massive loss of life through starvation and disease that were not the unintended side-effects of poor research, poor planning, or poor implementation on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, but rather were the necessary consequences of a proto-capitalist form of state-building.     

李大钊论历史知识普及问题

李大钊从对历史学功用的重新定位与全新阐述,指出史学"最要紧的用处,是用他来助我们人生的修养"。因此,历史学的功用不能只强调政治性而不重视文化性;只关注社会而不顾及人生。这是历史知识需要普及而且能够普及的社会基础与广阔前提。在如何普及历史知识的问题上李大钊认为:首先,只有把历史看成"活的东西",才能把历史写活;只有把历史写活,才能引人入胜。其次,需要"历史研究的本身亦含有艺术的性质"。要"把历史研究的结果用文学的美文写出来"。第三,充分利用一切可以利用的机会与手段进行历史的普及。     

Gombrich’s critique of Hauser’s Social History of Art

This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism and his sociological interpretation of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook.     

To live and let die: Food,famine, and administrative violence in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million people died in the Cambodian genocide. We argue that the mass violence that transpired during this period was a manifestation of the Khmer Rouge's attempt to make life. Through a focus on the production of both violence and vulnerability we direct attention to the contradictory policies and practices forwarded by the Khmer Rouge that were designed to maximize life through the maximization of death. Specifically, we consider the mass starvation that accompanied the genocide as a structure of violence; we forward the argument that the rationing of food constitutes a calculated yet contradictory policy, namely that food rations represent in material form an inner contradiction of fostering life and disallowing life. Subsequently, the policy of forced rations—which imposed a particular space of vulnerability on Cambodia's population—resulted in massive loss of life through starvation and disease that were not the unintended side-effects of poor research, poor planning, or poor implementation on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, but rather were the necessary consequences of a proto-capitalist form of state-building.     

China and the Pol Pot regime

This article attempts to shed additional light on one of the most sensitive aspects of China's Cold War legacy – its support for Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea (DK) between April 1975 and January 1979. Drawing on field interviews with former Khmer Rouge cadres and official DK records, it examines how the terms of the Sino-DK entente were understood by the parties and affected Chinese influence on the ground. The evidence shows that despite providing important technical guidance, China developed little influence over high-level Khmer Rouge policies, even when such policies put China's own interests at risk. The Sino-DK relationship illustrates the capacity of weak states to exercise considerable autonomy in asymmetric alliances and some of the dangers of relatively unconditional great power assistance.     

Picturing Feminism,Selling Liberalism: The Case of the Disappearing Holbein

Responding to recent scholarly and activist discussions of the public museum as a site of anti-feminism, this article examines the historical development of ‘feminist museology’ in Britain. Focusing on the mystery and controversies surrounding an anonymous woman’s gift of Hans Holbein’s Christina of Denmark to the National Gallery in 1909, this study investigates the dynamic of art, gender, and citizenship during the prewar Liberal crisis. The Holbein debates marked an important shift in the institutional status of feminism and the gendered parameters of cultural property, and offer a new perspective on our own practices of heritage and patrimony.     

西汉长安的公共空间

从西汉史可见都城长安"千余人"集会,"守阙上书"的情景。"阙下"曾经发生大规模的武装冲突。而宫阙前特殊事件的发生,"吏民聚观者"甚至可达"数万人",也说明这里有规模可观的空间。民众可以比较自由地进行公共活动的空间是"市"。刘据在"巫蛊之祸"时曾经策动"市"的群众"数万人"与丞相军激战。"里巷仟佰"也曾经成为民众"聚会"场所。而礼制建筑区也有相当宽阔的空地。不过这是不允许民间活动使用的空间。总体说来,西汉长安宫殿区的宏大规模,使得普通居民的生存条件受到严重压抑,而公共活动空间相对有限,使得都市功能的实现,不得不以诸陵邑作为补充。考察西汉长安和东汉洛阳的城市规划和城市建设,可以发现公共空间的区别。东汉洛阳已经有空间更为充裕的公众活动场所。城市史进程中都会职能和交往条件的这一重要变化,也体现了汉代都市社会构成形式和社会生活形态的若干历史特征。     

Corporations and commemoration: first world war remembrance,Lloyds TSB and the national memorial arboretum

This paper explores the role of corporations and financial organisations in maintaining a memory of employees who have served during the wars of the 20th century. Focusing initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative era after the Great War, the paper examines the emergence of a broader approach to organisational memory and the social construction of collective memory. Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the origins of the company’s war memorial in central London are examined, and the recent attempts to re‐locate a number of memorial objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group. This case study indicates how the social memory of an organisation might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture that lives, often invisibly, within an organisation. The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature of organisational memory when confronted with a history of merger and acquisition, and the difficulties in finding a commemorative site able to represent and safeguard these histories.