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

Abstract

a b s t r a c t 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 rationsdwhich imposed a particular space of vulnerability on Cambodia's populationdresulted 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.

Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe

“…With few notable exceptions (see Tyner and Rice ), relatively little has been written connecting Mbembe's necropolitical work with the idea of “structural violence” as posited by Johan Galtung (). This is surprising given that biological harm and the potentiality of death are central to necropower, which transcends the direct violence of genocide or active killing.…”

‘Finland kills with a pen’ – asylum seekers’ protest against bureaucratic violence as politics of human rights

“…I propose that bureaucratic violence as broader term than suggested in earlier literature in which it has been used to refer to 'rights deprivation', such as the denial of identification papers (Beaugrand 2011). Similarly to Tyner and Rice (2015), who discuss the administrative violence inherent in the agricultural policies of the Khmer Rouge of Kampuchea that led to widespread famine, I perceive bureaucratic violence as the violent outcomes of the bureaucratic practices of migration and asylum regimes. Asylum seekers' protests make visible the violence inherent in the asylum regime, and through this critique, they are able to make human-and fundamental rights-based claims to the Finnish nation-state, due the fact that Finland should follow supranational human rights legislation.…”

“…In this article, I examine how asylum seekers, using their experiences of the structural and bureaucratic violence they have encountered, make claims based on human and fundamental rights. Accordingly, this article contributes to the existing literature by offering a reading of the claims made at the Right to Live protest from the perspective of politics of human rights that reveals the nation-state's structural (Galtung 1969) and bureaucratic violence (see also Beaugrand 2011;Gunneflo 2012;Spade 2011;Tyner and Rice 2015). Asylum seekers' protests can be understood as collective acts 'against the exclusionary technologies of citizenship, which aim to make visible the violence of citizenship as regimes of control' (Tyler and Marciniak 2013, 146, emphasis in the original).…”

The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence

“…But to maximise the ratio of profit to cost, there were no planned increases to the standard ration (see for example Party Center of the Community Party of Kampuchea 1976b, Tables 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26 and 29). As such, despite the rhetoric of the CPK and the STV's claims that the Party was ‘pure’ communist, the mode of production was a classic model of state capitalism and production for exchange (Tyner and Rice ).…”

“…These governing bodies were responsible for overseeing the implementation of party plans and policies – a mandate that involved delegating tasks to lower administrative levels and passing information to higher levels. Under the CPK's vertical hierarchy, broad decisions about what to plant, where and when had to percolate up from local production groups to higher levels of authority where local socioecological demands were balanced against centrally determined production quotas (for a discussion of this hierarchy with respect to rice production, see Tyner and Rice ).…”