This paper considers contemporary international tourism to a genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It argues that existing theorisations of ‘dark tourism’ are inadequate for the task of understanding the motivations, actions and experiences of visitors in such a place, or of such sites as contested international institutions. The paper is concerned with the ways in which visiting practices encouraged at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes in the immediate post‐genocide period (the 1980s) continue to affect visiting practices in the present. Moreover, the absence of familiar curatorial practices and technologies of interpretation leads contemporary visitors to conceive of the space of the museum and their visit in unexpected ways. The dutiful comportment of visitors at Tuol Sleng both supports and challenges the moral geographies enacted by contemporary travel.

This article examines the politics of representation around a 1997 exhibition of Cambodian atrocity photographs that were produced by Khmer Rouge perpetrators during the period 1975-9. I discuss the role of the Tuol Sleng archive in Cambodia, and the work of a private group in the preservation and publication of the prisoner portrait photographs. It is argued that responses of visitors and curators to the photographs, displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, provide significant insights into a contemporary propensity to memorialize, rather than specify and politicize, the past violence of ‘peripheral’ states and peoples.

It is often argued that the most commonly assumed visual mode in geopolitics is the objective and disembodied gaze of the master geopolitical tactician. This is a charge that has been levelled at both geopolitical figures such as national leaders, and at academics who write about historical and present‐day geopolitics. However, recent work has diversified the way in which formal, practical and popular geopolitical visions may be examined in critical geopolitical studies. Such work calls for greater attention to be paid to popular visual cultures and to geopolitical practice as a way of envisioning global space that is embodied and subjective.

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