Book Reviews

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 1.7 million people lost their lives in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In The Killing of Cambodia, James Tyner examines the events and ideology that gave rise to the unlikely regime and the subsequent genocide by taking a uniquely geographical perspective on the meaning of space and place. There has been considerable scholarship devoted to the reasoning behind the actions of the Khmer Rouge since it was one of the more systematic and sizeable events of mass human atrocity in the past 35 years. This increase of investigations and publications has been especially prevalent after the 'never again' attitude that prevailed after the Holocaust failed to prevent these deaths in Cambodia from occurring. The bulk of the scholarship on genocide has been undertaken by scholars from the disciplines of political science, sociology, psychology, history and anthropology, and focuses on the thought processes of the perpetrators or the chronology of events that transpired. However, they do so largely without considering how the geographical imaginations of the perpetrators justified their actions in their minds. While there have been spatial examinations of genocides, mapping of mass graves, changes in the make-up of the population and so on, Tyner goes beyond a spatial examination and analyses the social geographical relationships between Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Europe and the US, which contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the geographical imaginations of Pol Pot and the ensuing genocide.In chapter 1 of his work, James Tyner begins with a detailed background of the geographical thought that he employs throughout the book, including an explanation of what geographical imaginations are and how they played a role in the justification of the mass killings of Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge leadership. He brings in the Foucauldian theory of the power -knowledge nexus and elaborates on the notion of 'anti-geography' or the unmaking of space and demonstrates how these ideas play into his empirical study-namely, how the erasure and remaking of space by the Khmer Rouge justified the mass eradication of people. The extensive explanations of Foucault's theories, the debates surrounding the term 'genocide', post-structuralism, imaginative geographies and the discourses of power and knowledge serve to make this work accessible not only to seasoned geographers, but to a wider, general audience. Chapters 2 and 3 take the reader into the decades prior to the genocide where Tyner gives a detailed history of the geopolitical interactions between France and the governments and Space and Polity, Vol. 13, No.