The hydro‐logic of genocide: Remaking land, water, and bodies in democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979

Abstract

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

Critical Physical Geography and the Study of Genocide: Lessons from Cambodia

“…The corpus of work we have undertaken in recent years, which provides the basis for section four here, demonstrates the important collaborative potential embedded in the discipline and inherent to geographical ways of thinking and knowing the world. Our work on the Cambodian genocide begins by assessing the materiality of human-environment relations and utilises contemporary geophysical methods and technology to empirically reconstruct how these relations have changed over time (Coakley et al, 2019;Rice & Tyner, 2017;Rice et al, 2016Rice et al, , 2020Tyner et al, 2018aTyner et al, , 2014Tyner et al, , 2018bTyner & Rice, 2016b;Tyner & Will, 2015). That this critical physical geographic work can enhance genocide studies at large further demonstrates the significant role that thinking spatially and critically can provide, and presents an ongoing example of what Castree (2012), and Barnes and Sheppard (2010) term "engaged pluralism.…”

“…Specifically, we argue, this means that, in the context of Democratic Kampuchea, violence, agriculture, and water cannot be considered as separate "social" or "natural" components of some distinct systems that are either purely geopolitical or physiographic. Instead, following prior work (Rice, 2020;Rice & Tyner, 2017;Rice et al, 2020;Tyner, 2017Tyner, , 2021Tyner et al, 2018aTyner et al, , 2018bTyner & Rice, 2016a, 2016bTyner & Will, 2015), we emphasise the importance of conceptualising violence and genocide in Democratic Kampuchea as internally related to the wider "waterscape" and the changing agrarian landscape of the country. To provide insight to this political relation of geophysical change, in the remainder of this section we discuss the relations of genocide, water, and agriculture in Cambodia from the perspective of a critical physical geography approach.…”

“…CPK leadership sought to triple overall rice productivity, to a national average yield of three tons per hectare per year, through (1) expansion of the total area under cultivation; (2) increasing yields of existing agricultural land; and (3) the addition of a subsequent harvest (double cropping) during the dry season through irrigation. Importantly, these efforts required the implementation of an extensive network of dams, canals, and reservoirs to bring needed water into historically dry regions in order to convert otherwise unproductive land into arable space (Rice & Tyner, 2017; Rice et al, 2020; Tyner & Will, 2015). Through this process, we see that the Khmer Rouge subsumed nature to the dictates of capital, as they attempted to remake Cambodia’s waterscape “to work harder, faster, and better” (Boyd & Prudham, 2017, p. 877).…”

Agrarian Marxism, Animal Geographies, and non-human labor in Democratic Kampuchea

“…This objective was to be accomplished through three simultaneous policies: (i) expanding the total area under cultivation, (ii) increasing the yield per harvest of existing agricultural land, and (iii) adding an additional harvest during the growing year wherever possible, but notably on all new agricultural lands (CPK, 1988a). To facilitate the latter goal, Party officials sought to extend production through large-scale irrigation schemes, whereby an extensive network of dams, canals, and reservoirs was constructed to bring water into historically dry regions (Rice et al, 2020; Tyner et al., 2018).…”