Between 1975 and 1979 Cambodia was witness to a period of mass violence in which approximately two million people died from famine, disease, and murder. This violence was the result of policies initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge. To date, little research has systematically or empirically studied the geography of specific practices, notably the construction of irrigation schemes, initiated by the CPK that produced those material conditions that resulted in death and deprivation. Using satellite images, aerial photographs, archival records, and field observation, we systematically document and map Khmer Rouge irrigation schemes. Findings indicate that approximately 7,000 kilometers of canals and dikes and over 350 reservoirs were constructed during the genocide. A six-class typology is forwarded, as we argue that local hydrologic and geomorphic conditions did figure in the construction of dams, dikes, canals, and reservoirs.

Often discussed, the spatial extent and scope of the Khmer Rouge irrigation network has not been previously mapped on a national scale. Although low resolution, early Landsat images can identify water features accurately when using vegetation indices. We discuss the methods involved in mapping historic irrigation on a national scale, as well as comparing the performance of several vegetation indices at irrigation detection. Irrigation was a critical component of the Communist Part of Kampuchea (CPK)'s plan to transform Cambodia into an ideal communist society, aimed at providing surplus for the nation by tripling rice production. Of the three indices used, normalized difference, corrected transformed, and Thiam's transformed vegetation indexes, (NDVI, CTVI, and TTVI respectively), the CTVI provided the clearest images of water storage and transport. This method for identifying anthropogenic water features proved highly accurate, despite low spatial resolution. We were successful in locating and identifying both water storage and irrigation canals from the time that the CPK regime was in power. In many areas these canals and reservoirs are no longer visible, even with high resolution modern satellites. Most of the structures built at this time experienced some collapse, either during the CPK regime or soon after, however many have been rehabilitated and are still in use, in at least a partial capacity.

Recent scholarship in hydropolitics and the hydrosocial cycle has emphasised the ways that water and society are co-constitutive, acknowledging the productive entanglement of hydraulic and social actors and processes. In this paper, we apply a hydrosocial framework to understand an infamous waterscape of mass violence.Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge planned and partially implemented an extensive irrigation system to increase rice production in the Cambodian countryside. The programmes of rationing, forced labour, and execution imposed by the government during construction killed up to two million people. We find that these infrastructural projects helped the Khmer Rouge remake water into a technology of capital accumulation and social control. The production of these systems enrolled water as an active agent into new relations of power, providing the state with classification and control over not only water but also the physical bodies of Cambodian men, women, and children. Furthermore, we find the Khmer Rouge's infrastructural violence was predicated on the production of new subjectivitiesones that emerged from a narrow imagination of idealised rice plants and labouring bodies. This case illustrates how a pervasive materialist logic, combined with the imperative of capital accumulation, may evolve into justification for mass murder. K E Y W O R D Shydrosocial, infrastructure, irrigation, materiality, violence, water

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.

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