POLI7012 Chap.9 Cambodia and Laos: Revolution, Terror and Transition
Cambodia and Laos: Revolution, Terror and Transition
Three readings on violence and what comes after it
This week places Cambodia and Laos side by side through three very different texts. David Chandler closes his study of S-21, the Khmer Rouge security prison, by asking what kind of explanation can hold its archive. David Roberts follows Cambodian elite politics from the Paris Peace Agreement of October 1991 to the end of the decade.
Vatthana Pholsena moves to Sepon, a district of Savannakhet Province on the Lao border with Vietnam, and asks how war and revolution built a state where no ruler had governed directly.
Read together, they pose one comparative question: when a revolutionary or post-conflict order arrives, which older structures does it destroy, and which does it quietly keep?
Chandler: explaining without excusing
Chandler weighs racial, peasant and Communist accounts of the prison.
Kiernan's emphasis on race helps, because enemies were increasingly labelled Vietnamese after 1977. Vickery's picture of rage from below fails once the methodical confession files are read.
Chandler's answer is that S-21 combined Cambodian, Communist and imported elements, which made it unique as a combination: a jailer from before the revolution would have known the chains and hunger but not the isolation or the mass of paperwork. On perpetrators he draws on Milgram, Browning and Bauman to argue that ordinary people can be drawn into such work.
He still holds the leadership responsible for the killing of some fourteen thousand people.
Roberts: patronage as the engine of breakdown
Roberts tests Rustow's three-phase model of democratisation. The UN mission that ran from November 1991 to September 1993, the largest the organisation had mounted, produced a credible vote, but the losing CPP extracted an equal share of power.
Offices were the reward currency of a patron-client pyramid, and a four-party coalition meant more claimants for the same posts.
When the CPP kept local posts for itself, Ranariddh's following frayed, he adopted a harder line after his party's March 1996 congress, and the coalition ended in armed clashes on 5 and 6 July 1997. Calm returned under a compliant partner and, after the July 1998 election, through a nonelected Senate that created new offices to distribute.
Pholsena: mobilisation and the survival of hierarchy
Pholsena builds her account from villagers' testimonies gathered over repeated field visits.
Sepon lay on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and was bombed with extraordinary intensity; she cites figures that make Laos the most heavily bombed country per head of population. Pathet Lao cadres used that emergency to organise porters, assess household rice contributions and send children north for schooling, and those pupils later staffed the post-1975 state.
Yet the district's teachers and health workers today are drawn mainly from the lowland Phuthai rather than the Bru majority, a precedence that dates back to colonial rule.
Carrying the week into seminar discussion and the term paper
Each reading supplies a portable tool. Chandler models how to adjudicate between rival explanations using the evidence each one can and cannot absorb.
Roberts offers the idea of bounds of the expressible for opposition tolerated by a dominant party. Pholsena shows how to check a claim of revolutionary transformation by asking who actually holds office afterwards.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Chandler's test of racial, peasant and Communist explanations of S-21
- 02
Obedience, the gray zone and the ordinary perpetrator
- 03
Why understanding the prison does not excuse its leaders
- 04
Roberts on Rustow's phases and the Cambodian transition of 1991 to 1999
- 05
Patronage, power sharing and the July 1997 fighting
- 06
Wartime mobilisation and ethnic hierarchy in the Sepon borderland of Laos
Worked example · free
Does Rustow's model explain Cambodia's transition?
- 2Set out the model: a background condition of national unity, then preparatory, decision and habituation phases in which elites first fight, then institutionalise procedure, then learn to trust it.
- 1Show the background condition is met: Roberts notes the population was overwhelmingly ethnically Khmer by 1991, and a long frontier war supplies the preparatory struggle.
- 2Identify the failure at the decision phase: the settlement and the 1993 election were designed by outside powers, so Cambodian leaders accepted procedure for lack of options rather than by choice.
- 2Trace the missing habituation: the CPP forced equal power sharing after losing, patronage demands outran available posts, and trust collapsed into the July 1997 fighting.
- 1Reach a verdict and name Roberts's alternative: stability came from a dominant party setting limits and creating offices, such as the 1998 Senate, rather than from democratic learning.
Key terms
- Total Institution
- A total institution is a closed setting in which every part of inmates' lives is controlled by one authority. Chandler applies the term to S-21 to stress its isolation, discipline and exhaustive record keeping.
- Gray Zone
- The gray zone is Primo Levi's term for the morally blurred space where victims and perpetrators overlap. Chandler argues that S-21 staff lived in it permanently, because any worker could be arrested and become a prisoner.
- Bounds of the Expressible
- Bounds of the expressible names the limits a dominant party sets on tolerated opposition. Roberts borrows the phrase from Chomsky to describe how the CPP accepted criticism after 1997 but met armed challenges with force.
- Patriotic Rice
- Patriotic rice was the official name for the rice each household in Pathet Lao zones had to hand over. Pholsena reports that calling it a tax was forbidden, and that cadres assessed and checked each household's share every year.
- State Effect
- The state effect is Timothy Mitchell's idea that everyday disciplinary practices make the state appear as an abstract entity. Pholsena uses it to read supply marches, rice assessment and schooling as state-making work.
Cambodia and Laos: Revolution, Terror and Transition FAQ
Why does Chandler reject Michael Vickery's peasant rage explanation of S-21?
Chandler grants that peasant anger fuelled some purges in 1975 and harsh treatment of so-called new people, but he says the theory cannot account for the prison's theoretical journals, speeches and methodical confession procedures. The senior interrogators were educated men directing subordinates, so the violence was organised from above rather than pushed up from below.
What was the 1998 Senate in Cambodia and why does Roberts think it mattered?
It was a nonelected upper house of sixty-one members created after the July 1998 election. Roberts argues it eased conflict by giving defeated Funcinpec and Sam Rainsy Party leaders seats and patronage, turning a contest with a single winner into one where rival elites could all reward their followers.
Did the Pathet Lao revolution end ethnic hierarchy in the Sepon district of Laos?
Pholsena finds it did not. Although the Bru are the majority, Phuthai officials dominate district teaching and health posts. Wartime recruiters for schooling were mostly literate Phuthai, a group the French had used as intermediaries, and one long-serving recruiter said none of the pupils he sent north were Bru.
Assessment move
Build a three-column sheet with one column per reading. In each, write the violence or upheaval the author studies, the mechanism the author says produced it, and one structure the author says outlasted it, each with a page reference. Then draft a single comparative sentence linking two columns. Bring that sentence to the weekly reading group and ask a partner to challenge it with evidence from the third reading.
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