The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence
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2017-06-15
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Citation of Original Publication
Rice, S. and Tyner, J. (2017), The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence. Trans Inst Br Geogr, 42: 559-571. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12187
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This is the peer reviewed version of the following article:Rice, S. and Tyner, J. (2017), The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence. Trans Inst Br Geogr, 42: 559-571. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12187, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12187. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.
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Abstract
Over the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban ‘socionatures’, part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re-urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of ‘urbicide’ and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically ‘anti-urban’. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural–urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of ‘dead cities’ and ‘ghost towns’. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city-centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re-urbanisation accompanied re-ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.