Surveillance, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Anonymity in Democratic Kampuchea

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1979 upwards of two million men, women, and children died from exposure, exhaustion, disease, starvation, and murder under the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Pervasive to the widespread forms of structural and physical violence was a complex security apparatus. In this paper, my direct concern lies not in the legalities of surveillance and control but instead with the violence that emanates from the material practices of bureaucratic surveillance and the politics of anonymity. Drawing on the organizational structure and activities of the CPK I critically interrogate the dialectics of anonymity that preconfigured the Cambodian genocide. More precisely, I call attention to the dialectics of self- and state-anonymity, of the violent contradictions of men, women, and children who wanted to remain unknown yet became known and a governmental structure that drew power from its being simultaneously known but unknown. In so doing, I draw on several fields of study, including insights from the literature on surveillance and space; the scholarly study of bureaucracies; and studies on the geopolitics of anonymity. In so doing I demonstrate the salience of a political economic perspective for the study of bureaucratic state surveillance.