The hydro-logic of genocide: remaking land, water, and bodies in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-79

Abstract

Recent scholarship in hydropolitics and the hydrosocial cycle has emphasized 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 programs of rationing, forced labor, 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 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 subjectivities—ones that emerged from a narrow imagination of idealized rice plants and laboring bodies. This case illustrates how a pervasive materialist logic, combined with the imperative of capital accumulation, may evolve into justification for mass murder.