From its inception, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (better known as the Khmer Rouge) emerged as one of the most violent and brutal apparatus of state terror and murder since the Nazi party held power in Germany. Between April 1975 and January 1979, approximately 2 million people died from starvation, disease, exposure, torture, murder, and execution. The dominant interpretation of the Cambodian genocide presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy. From this vantage point, the victims of the regime perished because of misguided and irrational economic policies, a draconian security apparatus implemented to instill terror, and the central leadership’s fanatical belief in the creation of a utopian communist society. It is no so much that previous accounts are inaccurate as much as they are incomplete and theoretically vapid. To this end, I argue that CPK policy pivoted around surplus agricultural production and a selective engagement with the global economy as informed by its allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement. Accordingly, I challenge the standard historiography of the Cambodian genocide by providing an analytical overview of the structures of violence set in place by the Khmer Rouge.