This chapter recounts Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese relations from 1975 to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 as well as Sino-Vietnamese relations during the same period. The chapter also introduces Hun Sen and describes the state of Vietnam–US relations since the end of the Vietnam War.

Although the North Atlantic was plunged into crisis in the early 1970s, radicals proved unable to seize the opportunity as they entered a crisis of their own. In France, to a degree unparalleled elsewhere, prominent former radicals not only disavowed anti-imperialist internationalism but rallied behind the rival human rights internationalism. In so doing, they brought with them a set of experiences, which strengthened human rights activism. Despite their fading fortunes, and the growing strength of their rivals, radicals struggled to reinvent anti-imperialist internationalism. But they found themselves trapped in an uphill battle facing one obstacle after another. One of the most devastating blows was the internecine war between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Revolutionaries in all three countries had developed a revolutionary strategy based in Leninism, joined hands in the struggle against imperialism, and claimed they were transitioning to communism together. Now they slaughtered each other in the name of national self-determination. Although the Third Indochina War did not destroy radicalism, it severely destabilized radical politics. While much of this failure can be traced to deeper histories of colonialism, imperialism, and American intervention in the region, revolutionaries, and the ideas that guided them, played a role as well. In this context, the idea of the right of nations to self-determination specifically, and the Leninist problematic more generally, suffered a terrible blow. The horrific events in Southeast Asia deepened the gnawing crisis of Leninism, which would ultimately bring down the project of anti-imperialist internationalism as such, creating a perfect opportunity for the rival human rights internationalism to take the stage.

International tribunals are often assumed to deliver not only judgments against those guilty of mass crimes, but along the way to bring access to truth, reconciliation, peace, democratization, and the rule of law. This chapter challenges these claims with reference to the international hybrid tribunal in Cambodia, which has as its goals the trying of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the mid-to-late 1970s. The ways that survivors of the regime understood the proceedings in their own terms, with reference to Buddhist beliefs and their relationships with the spirits of the dead, were readily overlooked or misunderstood by a tribunal that was based on secular conceptions of law and judgment. The tribunal hearings in Cambodia offer insights into the ways that law grapples with crimes against humanity and how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways that people articulate meaning and comprehend the world.

This chapter considers ICL’s applicability to a variety of real-world situations involving the production of mass suffering and/or death through relatively slow, unspectacular forms of harm causation. It identifies various examples of situations that, upon careful analysis, appear to have involved the commission of one or more international crimes, yet failed to conform to the atrocity aesthetic. These potential crimes have also been afforded comparatively scant attention, especially in comparison to more spectacular forms of atrocity, despite often being massive in scale and gravity, suggesting that their aesthetic unfamiliarity has contributed to, or at least facilitated their relative invisibility, socially and legally, as potential international crimes.

The backdrop to this chapter is the West’s response to the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1979 and the debates over where, how, and with what partners NGOs should intervene in the region. The chapter argues that states and international organisations played a central role in setting the parameters of the NGO moment. This was visible in how, where and what NGOs could access the region. Oxfam’s decision to collaborate with the Vietnam-backed government in Phnom Penh, for example, left it open to influence from the regime’s priorities. But Cambodia’s most lasting impact on the NGO sector came in the legitimacy it accorded to those organisations. As this chapter shows, their actions in South-East Asia were crucial in convincing donors of the sector’s expertise and efficiency – as well as its ethical authority. This quiet transfiguration had huge implications for NGOs. From the early 1980s onwards, it became impossible to imagine emergency relief in the Third World without a significant NGO contribution.

The backdrop to this chapter is the West’s response to the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1979 and the debates over where, how, and with what partners NGOs should intervene in the region. The chapter argues that states and international organisations played a central role in setting the parameters of the NGO moment. This was visible in how, where and what NGOs could access the region. Oxfam’s decision to collaborate with the Vietnam-backed government in Phnom Penh, for example, left it open to influence from the regime’s priorities. But Cambodia’s most lasting impact on the NGO sector came in the legitimacy it accorded to those organisations. As this chapter shows, their actions in South-East Asia were crucial in convincing donors of the sector’s expertise and efficiency – as well as its ethical authority. This quiet transfiguration had huge implications for NGOs. From the early 1980s onwards, it became impossible to imagine emergency relief in the Third World without a significant NGO contribution.

In the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea and the civil wars that preceded and succeeded it, victims have rebuilt their lives, demonstrating a desire and capacity to survive in the face of extreme hardship. This chapter explores resilience in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Using a social ecological lens, it examines how various systems – and in particular political, legal and economic systems – interact to provide resources that enable and foster resilience among victim populations. It also demonstrates, however, that these systems, individually and in interaction with each other, often remove resources or even undermine resilience. Within this systemic structure, the chapter analyses how transitional justice work in Cambodia has affected resilience. Focused specifically on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, it argues that while the tribunal has the potential to contribute to resilience (and does for some victims), its design and procedures constrain it in this regard, even inadvertently reinforcing broader marginalising systemic dynamics. The key point is that national actors in Cambodia recognise that they can gain significant advantages through corrupt practices and autocratic power, and thus they have used transitional justice strategically to undermine peacebuilding.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was established under Cambodian law in 2004, but also operates pursuant to an agreement with the UN. The ECCC has convicted defendants for charges including genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. This may appear to indicate that Cambodia’s leaders have accepted the norm of international criminal justice, at least for historic crimes. Yet the reality is more complex. This chapter examines the history of international crimes trials in Cambodia. It shows that Cambodia does not provide an example of linear progression towards acceptance of the norm of international criminal justice, but neither is there only stalling or complete rejection of this norm. It then demonstrates how international and Cambodian government actors and civil society have sought to influence Cambodia’s laws and institutions for investigating and prosecuting international crimes, before examining each of these mechanisms. This chapter argues that Cambodia’s interaction with international criminal justice disturbs any assumption that international law norms are diffused over time and from certain locations outside Cambodia (spaces) to within the country (direction).

This chapter studies the work of memory in the domain of non-reconciled human rights, with respect to the cultural representations of the authoritarian Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The work of memory, the author suggests, takes place outside the ambit of international human rights actors such as states and non-governmental organizations, and also that of conventional legal and juridical methods that are used to redress violations. To illustrate this point, she charts the history of the so called “Pol Pot time,” especially by means of a close reading of Rithy Panh’s 2011 memoir, The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields. Bringing these postulations to the present moment, the chapter closes with a discussion of the United Nations/Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

This chapter looks at two nexuses: law-and-literature and human-rights-and-literature. In her analysis of Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Testimony: the United States (1885-1915): Recitative (1978), the author brings the law-and-literature paradigm to bear on literary expression of human rights. She finds in the text overlapping ideations of the procedural and the performative, in its juridical and literary dimensions. On the one hand, the text serves to show the limitations of the law and its technologies such as the trial, which literary performance can help compensate for. On the other hand, Reznikoff's poem also proves the necessity for these technologies as organizing principles, especially in methods like citation and precedent, in order to battle the ever present risk of erasure.