Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives

by Susan E. Cook

Overview

This volume deals with aspects of genocide in Rwandaand Cambodia that have been largely unexplored to date, including the impact of regional politics and the role played by social institutions in perpetrating genocide. Although the "story" of the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and that of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 have been written about in detail, most have focused on how the genocides took place, what the ideas and motives were that led extremist factions to attempt to kill whole sections of their country's population, and who their victims were. This volume builds on our understanding of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda by bringing new issues, sources, and approaches into focus.The chapters in this book are grouped so that a single theme^s explored in both the Cambodian and Rwandan contexts; their ordering is designed to facilitate comparative analysis. The first three chapters emphasize the importance of political discourse in the genocidal process. Chapters 4 and 5 examine social institutions and explore their role in the genocidal process. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the military trajectories of the genocidal regimes in Cambodia and Rwanda after their overthrow, showing that genocide and genocidal intents as a political program do not cease the moment the massacres subside. The final chapters deal with private and public efforts to memorialize the genocides in the months and years following the killing.Drawing on ten years of genocide studies at Yale, this excellent anthology assembles high-quality new research from a variety of continents, disciplines, and languages. It will be an important addition to ongoing research on genocide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412805155
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	09/30/2005
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Susan E. Cook worked at the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University from 1994 to 2001. She is now senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria. She also lived and worked in Botswana from 1989 to 1991.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Peasant Ideology and Genocide in Rwanda Under Habyarimana; The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives; Thailand ’s Response to the Cambodian Genocide; The Endurance of the Cambodian Family Under the Khmer Rouge Regime: An Oral History; Ibitero Means and Motive in the Rwandan Genocide; Second Life, Second Death: The Khmer Rouge After 1978; Rwanda’s Hutu Extremist Insurgency: An Eyewitness Perspective; Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials 1; The Politics of Preservation in Rwanda 1

Editorial Reviews

In Cambodia between 1975 and 1978 approximately 1.7 million people were killed by the radical communist movement led by Pol Pot. In 1994 Hutu extremists in Rwanda killed almost one million Tutsis. There could hardly be a more important intellectual project than to try to comprehend the root causes of these mass slaughters. This tightly edited volume is a product of Yale University's Genocide Studies Program… Some striking parallels are found between the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and that in Rwanda after the death of Hutu leader President Habyarimana: an anti-urban, anti-intellectual ideology combined with the irrational pursuit of total self-reliance… Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers and practitioners.” —R. Marlay, Choice "In Cambodia between 1975 and 1978 approximately 1.7 million people were killed by the radical communist movement led by Pol Pot. In 1994 Hutu extermists in Rwanda killed almost one million Tutsis. There could hardly be a more important intellectual project than to try to comprehend the root causes of these mass slaughters. This tightly edited volume is a product of Yale University's Genocide Studies Program. Five articles deal with Cambodia, four with Rwanda. All are solid and informative." —R. Marlay, Arkansas State University "[I]t deepens our understanding of the horrors of the two largest genocides of the second half of the last century." —Ren Lemarchand, African Studies Review “The stories and especially the first-person narratives are quite moving… [E]ach chapter offers unusual insights into and analyses of sometimes overlooked and understudied dimensions of the genocides in both countries.” —Scott Straus, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin/Madison

From the Publisher