Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia: Subtle Agency and Hidden Narratives (Rethinking Political Violence) 3031139860, 9783031139864

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RETHINKING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia Subtle Agency and Hidden Narratives SungYong Lee

Rethinking Political Violence

Series Editor Roger Mac Ginty, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham, UK

This series provides a new space in which to interrogate and challenge much of the conventional wisdom of political violence. International and multidisciplinary in scope, this series explores the causes, types and effects of contemporary violence connecting key debates on terrorism, insurgency, civil war and peace-making. The timely Rethinking Political Violence offers a sustained and refreshing analysis reappraising some of the fundamental questions facing societies in conflict today and understanding attempts to ameliorate the effects of political violence. This series is indexed by Scopus.

SungYong Lee

Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia Subtle Agency and Hidden Narratives

SungYong Lee University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand

ISSN 2752-8588 ISSN 2752-8596 (electronic) Rethinking Political Violence ISBN 978-3-031-13986-4 ISBN 978-3-031-13987-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: marie cristabern joyce villamor/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

To me, the production of an intellectual work is a process to reflect on and synthesise all the lessons that I have learned from my ancestors, families, colleagues, students, and most importantly the people that I meet during field research. This publication in this regard is a joint work of these people although all faults and inaccurate analysis in this volume are due to me. This page acknowledges a few among numerous people who have contributed to this project. First of all, I would like to express my deep appreciation to Bunly Soeung. Over the past years, Mr Soeung has supported my study on Cambodia, playing multiple roles as a cultural advisor, field work coordinator, information source, and most importantly friend. This book project would not have been completed without his support. Two other friends and colleagues, Sowath Loeurm and Hyeyoung Shin, need to be mentioned. Since I first met them in Phnom Penh in 2006, they have constantly supported all my work in both research and field practice, including this book project. My research in the past decade has been deeply indebted to Rosemary McBryde who has read and refined all my written pieces as my language advisor. Among many students who have given much inspiration, Hyukmin Kang, Obinna Nweke, Ashley Macmillan, Samwel Oando, and Kalika Kastein should be mentioned for the excellent comments given on the previous versions of my research on everyday peace. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my previous and current colleagues at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, for having offered a sound and constructively challenging environment for learning: Richard Jackson, Jenny Te Paa-Daniel, Heather Devere, Katerina Standish, Patrik Johansson, Mariska Kappmeier, Ria Shibata, Rachel Rafferty, and Aidan Gnoth. The journey to develop this project has been a challenging one on many fronts. Some challenges still persist. It is my family that enables me to get through them. Special thanks should go to Eunyoung Judy Cho, Suhyun Lee, Soyul Lee, and a baby girl who will come to this world soon. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to mentors of mine who have taught me how to do research, support students, build teamwork, and live as a peace researcher: Daisaku Ikeda, Kevin Clements, Roger Mac Ginty, Alan Hunter, and Shin-wha Lee. Although I put your names without honorific titles and any order, I want to say how much I love and respect you.

Contents

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Introduction: Exploring Everyday Reconciliation in Cambodia The Framework for Analysis Definitions and Caveats of Key Concepts Field Research Outline of This Volume References

1 4 8 10 12 16

Dealing with the Khmer Rouge History in Cambodia “3 Years, 8 Months, and 20 Days”: The Impact of the KR Rule Dealing with the KR Rule: An Overview Contextual Environment Underlying Everyday Reconciliation Practices Conclusion References

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Exploration of Nonviolent Coexistence Violence Occurred in a Power Vacuum Discouragement of Revenge Healing and Commemoration Direct Engagement with Former KR Leaders

41 42 44 48 54

22 25 31 36 37

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CONTENTS

Discussion: Conceptualising Passivity Conclusion References

57 60 61

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Development and Stabilisation of Social Relationship Contextual Backgrounds Promotion of Passivity Sociality and Reciprocity Solidarity Discussion 1: The Roles of Lost Memory Discussion 2: Pursuit of Emotional Needs Conclusion References

63 64 65 70 75 79 81 84 86

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Plurality and Connectivity Plurality: Presence of Multiple States of Reconciliation Connectivity: Interaction Between Local Communities and External Factors Discussion: Local Actors’ Interaction with External Factors and the Scaling Out of Practice Conclusion References

89 90

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95 105 108 109

Subtlety and Obscurity Indirect and/or Symbolic Forms of Communication Lack of Visibility in the Public Space Practice Integrated into Other Practices Local Approaches Defined Under the Local Contexts Discussions: The Opportunities and Challenges of Subtlety for the Promotion of Peacebuilding Conclusion References

113 114 118 121 124

Everyday Narratives The Narrative of the Political Authority Narratives in Local Communities Narratives Discouraging the Usage of Violence Narratives on Former KR Leaders Marginalisation of KR Leaders’ Narratives

135 136 138 140 144 150

127 129 131

CONTENTS

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Discussion: Bottom-Up Narratives for Conflict Disruption Conclusion References

154 156 158

Conclusion: Unpacking the Nature of Everyday Peace Everyday Practices Mobilised in Local Communities in Cambodia Features of Everyday Peace Practices Development of Everyday Narratives Everyday Peace as an Analytical Framework Significance of Everyday Peace as Peacebuilding References

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Index

162 164 168 170 172 176 179

Abbreviations

CPP ECCC FUNCINPEC KR NGOs PRK YfP

Cambodian People’s Party, The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, The National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia Khmer Rouge, The Non-Governmental Organisations People’s Republic of Kampuchea, The Youth for Peace

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Exploring Everyday Reconciliation in Cambodia

Q:

Are you aware of the ongoing tribunal on the Khmer Rouge leaders? A: I heard of it. Q : Do you know what’s going on in it at the moment? A: Vaguely. Q : Are you not interested in it? A: I don’t know politics. It is probably good to have it. But, it is about politics. —Author’s Interview, December 2019

Over the past ten years, I have come across numerous exchanges similar to the above conversation during my field research in Cambodia. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a tribunal dealing with the Khmer Rouge (KR) history, has operated for almost 15 years with proactive outreach programmes targeting a population of some 500,000 people. Despite such an effort, however, the tribunal system has not had much impact on the social relationships in local communities related to KR issues. There was a clear gap between the institutional arrangement at the state level and everyday practice in local communities. Moreover, it took some 30 years from the time of mass violence by KR before the establishment of the judicial mechanism. In the meantime, Cambodia had few institutional arrangements for facilitating the reconciliation between KR and the survivors of the KR violence. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_1

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Accordingly, an absolute majority of Cambodians in local communities have promoted their own ways to (re)build and determine their relations with former KR leaders in their areas, reflecting the interests and perspectives of community members. However, many conventional studies have neglected the reconciliation occurring in people’s daily lives, where most processes of building and redefining social relationships between individuals and groups take place. Indeed identifying the nature of peace and reconciliation that emerges in post-conflict societies is not straightforward. Over the past decades, many peacebuilding programmes have promoted various institutional arrangements to support the development and consolidation of peace, based on the assumption of a direct and predictable relationship between the institutions and people’s lives (Millar, 2014). Accordingly, extensive debates in Peace and Conflict Studies and Security Studies have been developed to examine the nature and utilities of such institutional arrangements. In post-conflict reconciliation, such institution-centric approaches have set a particular focus on three areas: truth-telling (e.g., truth and reconciliation commissions), trial and persecution (e.g., international tribunals), and compensation and reparation (e.g., government subsidies for reparation). In addition, peacebuilding actors also pay attention to the roles of security, political, economic, and governance structures in supporting good conditions for reconciliation. Hence, many conventional studies have little relevance to those peace processes that lack well-functioning institutional arrangements for reconciliation. According to the PAM dataset, just over half of the peace processes actively incorporate any type of mechanisms for social reconciliation, while the remaining processes either do not have any plan or have achieved limited implementation (Joshi et al., 2015). Moreover, even in cases where such institutional arrangements were promoted, due to the limited scope and capacity, such arrangements usually include only a small percentage of victims in their operations. Partly due to their state-centric nature, these institutions operated largely insulated from the victims and large communities. Although some previously adopted mechanisms endeavoured to make the process more inclusive, such mechanisms often failed to identify and reflect victims’ own perspectives and needs (McEvoy & McGregor, 2008; Nagy, 2008; Shaw & Waldorf, 2010). This means that a majority of the victims and population in conflict-affected societies have had to handle the past atrocities without institutional support (Kent, 2013).

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So, what exactly is happening to these victims and other community members who are outside of such institutional mechanisms? Everyday Reconciliation in Post-conflict Peacebuilding was promoted from this perspective. In this context, more specifically, research questions that will be examined include: What does everyday peace look like?; What forms of everyday practice have community members developed and utilised?; How is the local process for relationship building related to the wider peacebuilding and governance contexts in the country?; and how have community members in Cambodia handled and destabilised the mainstream narratives related to KR in the process? Recent debates on everyday peace have offered the central framework for investigating the research questions of this project. Everyday in these studies denotes “a set of micro-processes of practices in a constant interaction driven by the agency of ordinary people in concrete circumstances” (Chandler, 2015, p. 43). Although details of the argument vary, these studies share a common concern that conventional approaches to peacebuilding focus too much on top-down process for institutionbuilding at the national level, and instead pay attention to the avenues of people’s livelihood such as “local agency, rights, needs, custom and kinship” that provide important context to decision-making, promote active peacebuilding (Richmond, 2010, p. 668). Moreover, they attempt to “accurately reflect the on-the-ground situation in a textured way that is meaningful to local communities” (Mac Ginty, 2013, p. 56). Although they may look “banal, mundane, and unimportant” and often “unrelated to formal peacebuilding initiatives,” everyday forms of peacebuilding, it is argued, can promote more emancipatory and bottom-up processes that more accurately reflect local actors’ perspectives and interests (Autesserre, 2017, p. 124). Accordingly, they acknowledge the importance of the bottom-up strategies for peacebuilding that community residents undertake in their daily practice, and the agency underlying such strategies (Lee, 2021). Since the everyday framework emerged as an important theoretical ground in the mid-2000s, numerous empirical studies have examined bottom-up peace initiatives that are promoted at local community levels. These empirical studies have investigated various aspects of the process and dynamics of peacebuilding, typically paying attention to people’s lives in the post-conflict settings (just as a few recent examples, Baker, 2019; Boege, 2012; Brewer et al., 2018; Chaves et al., 2020; Eschle, 2018; Fridman, 2020; Randazzo, 2016; Vaittinen et al., 2019; Ware & Ware,

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2020). A number of studies including the everyday peace indicator project (Firchow, 2018; Mac Ginty, 2013; Mac Ginty & Firchow, 2016) have proposed analytical methods to systematically examine how peace can be evaluated from local actors’ perspectives based on the concepts relevant to everyday peace.

The Framework for Analysis Defining Everyday Reconciliation To reiterate, this study examines everyday practices for social reconciliation developed in local communities of Cambodia over the history of KR’s rule. Through the examination of everyday reconciliation, furthermore, this study aims to identify and examine the nature of everyday peace. In this regard, reconciliation or social relations between different groups in local communities is utilised as an evaluative indicator for peace. Nevertheless, social reconciliation in post-conflict societies has not been extensively explored from the everyday framework yet. It has been subject to academic debates examining if and how reconciliation can be understood in the contexts of peace. Indeed, the concepts of reconciliation and the everyday reconciliation in the post-violence contexts have their own distinct significance both theoretically and practically (Abe, 2018; Daly & Sarkin, 2007; Nussbaum, 2016). Nevertheless, in the academic discourse on peacebuilding, the promotion of social reconciliation has been understood as a critical element for consolidating peace in the conflict-affected societies (Bar-Tal & Bennink, 2004; Bloomfield, 2006; Lederach, 1997). Moreover, a significant number of studies have adopted variations in reconciliation as the key indicators for peace (e.g., Alfonsín, 1993; Amnesty International, 1998; Rigby, 2001). Related to this, recent studies on the relational approach to peace, that pay attention to relationships between actors or groups as a determinant of peace characteristics, offer a useful conceptual foundation (Söderström et al., 2021). Moreover, there are a number of studies that look at the roles of indigenous resources/leadership in the process of reconciliation (Baines, 2007; Jacobson, 2016) and examine the strategies or processes underpinning how local communities utilise everyday resources for reconciliation (Berents, 2014; Heitmeyer, 2009; Öjendal & Ou, 2015). Compared to the overall academic contention over the framework, nevertheless, the reflection of the everyday framework on

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the practice of reconciliation is still at an early stage and the examination of people’s everyday practice of social reconciliation remains as an area that should be explored further. Hence, a few key concepts related to everyday reconciliation need to adapt conventional definitions to fit the nature of this study. Firstly, this study defines everyday reconciliation as the reconciliatory relationship between former harm-doers and victims (as well as other community members) that are experienced by themselves. Moreover, reconciliation is understood as a process (rather than an end goal) in which different social groups re-engage and strengthen their relations with counterparts. In this regard, this study does not aim to judge whether or not a certain state represents reconciliation. Instead, it assumes that the social interactions in people’s everyday may present different levels of reconciliation and the processes towards reconciliation are neither straightforward nor linear. Assessing the States of Everyday Reconciliation This study aims to do a nuanced investigation of the procedures and practices adopted by community members in their everyday to promote and maintain such reconciliatory relationships as well as the outcomes of such relationship building as of the late 2010s. While the degree of these elements presented in the everyday is difficult to measure on a linear scale, this study will focus on descriptive analysis of how these two components of relational peace have been developed and presented in the local communities in Cambodia. For this purpose, this study critically adopts Mac Ginty (2022)’s everyday peace continuum and utilises the three concepts to distinguish weak, medium, and high level of everyday reconciliation. Moreover, it will attempt to further distinguish sociality into two categories of passivity and sociality to represent the social dynamics in Cambodia (see Fig. 1.1). Mac Ginty (2022)’s everyday peace continuum presents three concepts—sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity—that denote and describe different types of social ‘glue’ to maintain peace. Firstly, sociality means human beings’ (or animals’) tendency to associate in social groups and work/live together. People usually prefer to live and work in groups for practical, economic reasons or often without conscious consideration of its benefits. More often, people’s sociality involves more positive and sophisticated attitudes to other people such as empathy and altruism. While sociality more naturally emerges at intra-group levels (e.g., between

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Passivity

Sociality

Reciprocity

Solidarity

Fig. 1.1 States of everyday reconciliation

family members and friends), it also emerges at inter-group levels. At the inter-group level, sociality involves people’s “recognition of out-group members being valid members of society” at either conscious or subconscious levels (Mac Ginty, 2022, p. 54). Sociality is usually developed and manifested through people’s interaction in the affected realm. In a sense, the victim–harm-doer relations in sociality resonates well with the state of coexistence conceptualised by Staub and Pearlman (2003). They described coexistence as the situation where people (individually or collectively) co-habit in a community involving economic activities they have in common, and share the same vision for the future as parts of the same community. However, coexistence does not necessarily build mutual trust or understanding. In this regard, sociality can be considered as weak everyday peace. Compared to sociality, reciprocity can be considered a higher level of everyday peace in that people appreciate the mutual influence or interaction between them. People assume that “sharing will make life better” (Mac Ginty, 2022, p. 65). Often, such reciprocity can be strategic, motivated by their expectation of reciprocal responses from their counterparts. Hence, in reciprocity, an action taken by one side is likely to result in something being received in return although the forms of the return and the dynamics of generating the return vary. At the individual level, reciprocity can be understood as the exchange of positive actions with the expectation of return. For the wider society, moreover, the repeated exchanges of reciprocal actions between individuals gradually form communal norms in which people can enjoy stability and regularity. Thirdly, solidarity is a feature that directs communities or societies into “a much more definite and action-oriented path” (Mac Ginty, 2022, p. 67) in comparison to reciprocity. People engage in a significantly higher

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level of mutual interaction than simple collaboration, promoting mutual recognition and respect. With solidarity, moreover, people identify themselves with others. The promotion of solidarity often requires “a great deal of long-term institutional work by states or social movements to promote group cohesion” (Malesevic, 2012, cited in Mac Ginty, 2022, p. 54). Reflecting on the theoretical discussions on reconciliation, the features of solidarity are relevant to the types of relationships identified as ‘deep reconciliation’ in many previous studies. Ideally, people in deep reconciliation recognise their counterparts as valued human beings and engage in mutual trust-building actions (Kriesberg, 2001; Theidon, 2007). Reflecting on the objectives of this study, the above three concepts describe well the different levels of mutual engagement between different groups/individuals in a conflict-affected society, which is a key indicator by which to assess everyday reconciliation in this project. Indeed, in Cambodia in the post-KR period, many local communities gradually developed the states relevant to sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity over time, although the social conditions in a community at one particular time often reflect the features of more than one concept. Nevertheless, everyday reconciliation was by and large promoted to shift from a lower level to a higher level. In addition, to make a more nuanced analysis, this study proposes another category of low-level everyday reconciliation: passivity. Passivity describes how people accept physical coexistence with their counterparts but do not recognise their legitimacy. After having experienced massive and chronic violence, people harbour a strong inter-group anxiety but also strongly hope to sustain basic security without the resumption of mass violence. In Cambodia, a large number of community residents had chosen to physically co-inhabit with former KR leaders for this reason although they did not accept the legitimacy of their counterparts. In this regard, passivity can be considered a minimum level of everyday peace that is just enough to maintain the absence of physical violence. Conceptually, it is qualitatively different from other categories of everyday peace in that there is little inter-group interaction or reconciliatory attitudes. Nevertheless, to promote such a minimum level of peace (or security) is an important but challenging goal in many conflict-driven societies. Moreover, to maintain the state of no violence can be a crucial foundation for developing more active types of everyday peace.

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Definitions and Caveats of Key Concepts A few terms that are central to this study, namely community, victims, perpetrators (harm-doers), bystanders, and community members, require some further consideration. Although these terms are widely used in recent debates, their specific meanings are substantially different according to the contexts considered. First, what is it meant by local community? The concept of local communities has been subject to an extensive academic debate due to its elusive nature. While the term is understood in people’s everyday conversation as the entity attached to certain geographical locations, the concept of local is “untwinned from and irrespective of the global and, indeed, in a modality that is not exclusively spatial” (Lambek, 2011 cited in Mac Ginty, 2015, p. 848). Equally elusive is community that is often used as “a catch-all substitute for sub-state levels of governance” (Mac Ginty, 2015, p. 847). Moreover, both concepts of ‘local’ and ‘communities’ have been developed and utilised in Peace and Conflict Studies, especially the critical scholarship on the peacebuilding discourse, to highlight the groups of people who are marginalised in mainstream institutional peacebuilding but maintain the agency to develop their own versions of peacebuilding reflecting their unique locality. The meaning of local community in Cambodia can be defined as “a clearly bound social unit as we are with its broader reference to manifestations of social connectedness at a local level” (Marston, 2011, p. 12). When applying this cultural approach to community, there may be multiple units of community. The most basic unit of community can be phoum (villages or hamlet) in which local leaders (e.g., low-level civil servants, village seniors, women’s group organisers) and communitybased associations (e.g., the committees for dealing with Buddhist ceremonies and monastery operation) are organised by community residents. In many cases, this traditional unit of co-habitation mobilises and determines most activities and the village leaders maintain close interaction with the government officials at the local level. Nevertheless, from a cultural perspective, a cluster of phoums that are affiliated to the same Buddhist monastery (wat community) is an important unit where people mobilise many collective activities related to Buddhist festivals and events. The phoums in the same wat community maintain close relationship with each other. The mutual influence

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between villages linked to the same monastery has played a prominent role in determining the contour of local everyday practices. From an administrative perspective, an important governance unit is khum (translated as commune or sub-district) incorporating several phoums. As the fundamental unit from which the governmental officials are allocated, khums are the frontline bodies that implement most governmental policies on the ground (Marston, 2011). It should be noted that the ways Cambodians approach these social units are substantially different from the concepts of community explained in Western academic debates. The geographical boundary of phoum on the map does not imply that people perceive it as a comprehensive social and cultural unit, which often forms their sense of identity. In this regard, Thion (1999) argued that people drop the “ill-informed and untranslatable word” of community but use phoum or village instead (cited in Ledgerwood, 2011, p. 121). Reflecting on these conceptual discussions, local community in this study is used to denote the basic units of human network that are usually centred on phoum but frequently involve other villages in the same hyperlocal area, both culturally (Buddhist monastery) and administratively (the government administrative units). By doing so, this study intends to present the dynamics of interactions between the local communities that maintain relatively close connections, and between the wider units that keep a relative distance from other equivalent units. Second, in the Cambodian context, the distinction of harm-doer, victim, and other community members is not straightforward since many people were victims, harm-doers, and bystanders at the same time. On the one hand, virtually all of the population living under the regime, including many former KR leaders, have gone through severe challenges. According to a nation-wide survey conducted in 2002, for instance, almost 90% of the respondents lost family members or close relatives due to the KR violence (Linton, 2004, p. 128). Having said this, KR usually adopted “cutting off the family line” for execution. It means that, when a person is determined to be executed, KR usually killed the entire family of the person. Such direction was partly related to the Cambodian cultural model of disproportionate revenge (Hinton, 1998) and to KR’s simplistic and idealised vision for eliminating the elements contaminated by old systems (Harris, 2005). Hence, the close family members of the executed were less likely to have survived the KR rule. In this regard, while the

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majority of the population was indeed victims, the level of victimisation varied. On the other hand, former leaders of KR are usually considered as perpetrators or harm-doers since they had served in this organisation’s extreme campaigns. Nevertheless, most of these leaders were selected by senior leaders to leadership positions regardless of their willingness. Moreover, these leaders had no other options but following the instructions from seniors under the extremely forceful hierarchy of KR that maintained only unilateral communication. Another point for consideration is that a large number of ‘brutal’ leaders who were involved in killing and torturing, were killed by ferocious mobs immediately after the collapse of the KR regime. Most leaders who survived were therefore considered to be more moderate by community residents. In addition, many people who had once been victims were later appointed as local leaders of KR. Thus, they switched their positions from those who carried out the assigned work to those who controlled other people to do the assignments. Moreover, adopting an extreme communist ideology, KR’s political propaganda distinguished the people from urban areas (New People) from the populations in rural areas (Old People). New People were forced to move to rural areas and participate in collective work with Old People, and Old People tended to be treated better by KR. Hence, in some areas, there was a tension between these two groups. In this regard, there is no straightforward way to distinguish the identity of individuals or groups as victims, harm-doers, or bystanders in relation to the KR rule in Cambodia. Having the complexity in mind, this study will use the term former KR leaders (instead of perpetrators) who had served KR as local leaders. Moreover, I will use the term victim to denote the people who were killed by the KR violence. For the people who survived, this study instead will use the terms like survivors and community residents with the acknowledgement that most of them were directly/indirectly influenced by the violence under the KR regime.

Field Research This volume was developed based on the author’s field research between 2018 and 2022. The field research had involved three rounds of field visits as well as a few interim/follow-up interviews conducted via Zoom. The field study was conducted in seven local communities in three locations

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that have presented substantially different social dynamics in the post-KR period: Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Svay Rieng. Firstly, Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia, and most of the population in this area had been evacuated during the KR period. While the city was left empty, the residents had experienced relocations to different areas and had been living in a harsh environment, treated as New People who do not contribute to the KR ‘revolution.’ This study intended to examine the social dynamics which occurred when these groups of people came back and other new migrants moved to the capital after the end of the KR regime. Due to the rapid redevelopment projects in the capital that had progressed over the decades, it was difficult to identify the local communities in which the residents of the 1970s had continued to live in the same area. Eventually, two communities were selected in the northwest of Phnom Penh. This area had been on the outskirts of the city during the 1970s; thus, people in this area had not been in the urban area. Nevertheless, many people in these local communities had been subject to KR’s relocation policies and experienced the influx of new migrants in the 1990s. Secondly, Svay Rieng is in the south-eastern part of Cambodia and shares the border with Vietnam. Many local leaders and soldiers in this area had fled to Vietnam escaping from KR, and later joined the military campaign against KR. When the war against KR started, it was one of the first areas that came under the control of the anti-KR forces due to the geographic proximity to Vietnam. Moreover, this area had maintained a relatively stable security assurance and well established governance system. Hence, through the investigation of Svay Rieng, it was intended to illuminate the social dynamics occurring in areas under the stable leadership of the new PRK regime. Three communities in Svay Rieng province were selected for this research and they are approximately 15 km away from the provincial capital of Svay Rieng. Finally, Battambang is in the north-western part of the country, and shares a border with Thailand. After toppling the KR regime, the military group established an authority called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) in 1979 and the KR leadership established a number of military camps at this border area and continued anti-PRK/Vietnam campaigns throughout the 1980s. While the PRK government had controlled the major towns, KR could easily access many rural areas to conduct their operations. Hence, the security conditions in many locations in Battambang had been unstable until the peace process solidly started in the

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mid-1990s. Hence, the field study in Battambang aimed to identify how local communities manage their relationship (re)building with former KR leaders, under such unstable security conditions. The local areas selected for field visits are located approximately 12 km away from the provincial capital, and the two areas are some 5 km away from each other. One community was close to a forest where some KR groups had mobilised their strongholds. Hence, the residents were under constant fear of KR visits. There are two caveats that should be mentioned. First, this study aims to capture distinct dynamics occurring in different areas of the country, comparing the features of everyday practices developed in the distinct contexts. Consequently, due to this research design, the volume underreports the social dynamics in previous strongholds of KR like Pailin in Pailin province and Anlong Veng in Oddar Meanchey Province. A significant portion of the populations in these locations are former KR associates and their families, hence, the social dynamics in these areas are substantially different to other locations. In this regard, the research findings in this volume are more relevant to the communities where former KR leaders were minor in number and under the strong influence of the current political authority. Second, this volume includes a few quotes from unpublished interview transcripts. The interviews were conducted in 2019 by Mr Bunly Soeung for another project. However, Mr Soeung and the interview participants kindly agreed that the author could include these quotes in this publication. Quotes were incorporated only when the validity of the statements was triangulated by other information sources including the author’s own interviews.

Outline of This Volume This research monograph consists of eight chapters including this introduction. Before moving on to the main empirical studies, Chapter 2 offers background information about the central research subject. It firstly gives a brief overview of the impact of KR rule on people’s lives. Instead of providing a comprehensive and detailed examination of KR’s policies, this section pays attention to describing the policy areas and operational features that people recall as having had the most devastating influences on them. Some of these issues include the party’s unprofessional mismanagement, its attempt to control people through terror, and the attempts to dismantle Cambodia’s fundamental community system. This chapter

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then introduces how the programmes and politics to deal with the KR history have evolved since 1979 primarily through the central government, the Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC, a hybrid tribunal for dealing with the KR leaders’ crimes), and a number of the civil society actors. Finally, this chapter introduces the social and political factors that have laid an important foundation for everyday reconciliation practices: national security conditions, the policies set by the political authority, national economic conditions, and cultural and religious beliefs in local communities. The following two chapters aim to provide a descriptive analysis of the activities developed in local communities of Cambodia in order to redetermine the relations between former KR leaders and community residents. Specifically, Chapter 3 pays particular attention to the activities mobilised in the aftermath of the KR regime. During this period, many local communities attempted to recover and reconstruct their livelihoods and local governance, based on extremely limited social and economic resources. As most of the conventional social institutions that had maintained communal activities during the pre-KR period were completely demolished, community members had to bring about these practices from scratch. Moreover, due to people’s anxiety about KR being still high and fresh, many members of local communities were not ready to rebuild direct relations with former harm-doers. Hence, most activities mobilised in this period focused on preventing vengeance killing against local KR leaders and maintaining basic security. Chapter 3 summarises and re-examines a large number of episodes shared by research participants, roughly categorising these activities into three thematic areas: discouragement of revenge, healing and commemoration, and direct engagement with former KR leaders. In addition to the descriptive analysis, this chapter considers the importance of passivity as a state of social reconciliation. While its significance has been largely underestimated in the conventional studies, it argues that the practices promoting passivity represent local actors’ primary and urgent objectives in the aftermath of mass violence and it offers an important foundation for further reconciliation. The activities examined in Chapter 4 emerged after local communities managed to settle down after the ‘chaos.’ In this period, the Cambodian government had stabilised its governance system and many local communities recovered some key parts of their ‘normal life.’ Hence, many programmes that had been initially organised in the form of projects and

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events became a lot more subtle or were gradually integrated into other activities that are regularly conducted. For instance, as a result of the explicit activities to prevent vengeance killing, some local communities in Cambodia had adopted the practices of social shunning and/or the avoidance of the past in order to maintain a basic level of security. Moreover, community members’ attitudes towards former leaders of KR had become more conciliatory, incorporating them into their social life. In such cases, community members tend to utilise local development projects and Buddhist festivals as venues where former KR leaders are invited to join and mingle with them. Finally, Chapter 4 introduces the cases where a higher level of social reconciliation, conceptualised as solidarity in this study, was presented and explained with some clear indicators to demonstrate it. In terms of the theoretical implications, this chapter illuminates the roles of the ‘absence of discourse’ about the past history as well as the emotional needs of victims and harm-doers in facilitating the platforms for reconciliation. Based on the descriptive introduction in Chapters 3 and 4, the next section revisits some features of everyday reconciliation practices observed in local communities of Cambodia. This section will aggregate different episodes introduced in the previous chapters and interpret their significance, and will engage in more theoretical discussions on the following thematic areas. The main themes of Chapter 5 are plurality and connectivity of everyday reconciliation practices. Regarding plurality, Chapter 5 explains that, after roughly 40 years since the KR regime, local communities of Cambodia present substantially different levels of social reconciliation covering a full range from passivity to solidarity. This chapter adopts six types of social engagement between individuals that represent different levels of reconciliation: agonistic nonviolence, avoidance, efforts to move on, tolerance of coexistence, acknowledgement, and rehumanised relationship. Moreover, it emphasises that such diversity can be found between and within geographical areas and examines different factors that generate such diversity. The second half of Chapter 5 examines everyday practices as the outcomes of the interactions between contextual factors and community agency. It describes how community members mobilise and utilise their inner resources such as local leadership and material resources in order to pursue their objectives under the conditions set by national and local contexts. In the areas where the author’s field studies were undertaken, community members actively accepted the

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government’s policies and attempted to utilise them in the initial period; however, they selected the initiatives that would be sustained within local practices according to their needs and developed more locally-driven initiatives as well. As a concluding discussion, this chapter considers the implication of the empirical examination in this chapter on the ongoing debates on ‘scaling up and out’ of everyday peace. Chapter 6 pays attention to the subtlety of everyday practices. In this study, subtlety is about the situation where practices mobilised by community members are not clearly perceived by people as everyday peace (or reconciliation) practices. This chapter introduces four main reasons underlying such subtlety, which were identified in Cambodia. The first reason is that the reconciliatory behaviour of community members and former KR leaders tends to be indirect and symbolic. Hence, their intention to take such actions may not be clearly identified. Second, the forms of actions are sometimes invisible in the public space. Some actions are undertaken within households or in informal occasions. In other cases, the practices take invisible or inactive forms. Third, many everyday practices for social reconciliation are undertaken as integrative parts of other activities. In such cases, it is difficult to tease out the significance of actions or practices as actions for peacebuilding or reconciliation. Fourth, community members’ interpretation of reconciliation and the ways to reconciliation is promoted, is largely influenced by the cultural and religious understandings in the local communities. Hence, as the chapter discusses, their approaches are often substantially different from the way reconciliation is explained and understood in the Western academic debates. In the concluding discussion, this chapter highlights the positive implications of subtlety for promoting long-term peacebuilding as the mechanisms that offer opportunities (efficiency and sustainability) as well as potential limitations (the risk of accepting social suppression). Chapter 7 delves into the narratives generated within local communities for rebuilding and redetermining the relationship between former KR leaders and other community members. Since 1979, there was one master narrative on KR set by the government. It openly condemned the brutality of KR’s crimes on the one hand but limited the responsibility for KR crime to a small number of top leaders on the other hand. In principle, community members who aimed to promote social reconciliation adopted this master narrative as an unchallengeable ‘truth.’ Nevertheless, they identified gaps in the master narrative and filled the gaps with the

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narratives adopted by themselves. For preventing violence in the early phases, for example, some community members highlighted the narratives like ‘enough is enough,’ ‘let bygones, be bygones,’ and ‘KR leaders’ facing punishment is their destiny in the Buddhist law of cause and effect.’ Moreover, some local leaders attempted to appreciate the good deeds taken by former KR leaders in their local areas. The narratives adopted for this purpose include ‘not all leaders were cruel’ and ‘they are also victims.’ When the process for promoting reconciliation was successful, some people mentioned that ‘we don’t take him as KR anymore’ to express the high level of reconciliation. Nevertheless, Chapter 7 explains, the narratives of former KR leaders were unavoidably marginalised in this process. As a final thought, this chapter considers the implications of the findings in relation to the recent academic studies on subalterns’ narratives for violence disruption. Chapter 8 concludes this volume. In the first part, this chapter revisits and summarises the key findings, focusing on the forms and dynamics of everyday peace practices as well as a few features of everyday peace highlighted in this volume. In addition, it revisits everyday narratives adopted in local communities to prevent vengeance killing and to facilitate the space for rebuilding the relationship between community members and former KR leaders. The second section will bring together the conceptual and theoretical discussions that appeared throughout the previous chapters and weave their practical and theoretical implications by focusing on two broad questions: In what sense does everyday peace offer a new framework for examining peace? Can everyday peace practice offer a new opportunity for building peace?

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Baines, E. K. (2007). The haunting of Alice: Local approaches to justice and reconciliation in Northern Uganda. The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1(1), 91–114. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijm007 Baker, C. (2019). Veteran masculinities and audiovisual popular music in postconflict Croatia: A feminist aesthetic approach to the contested everyday peace. Peacebuilding, 7 (2), 226–242. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259. 2019.1588454 Bar-Tal, D., & Bennink, G. H. (2004). The nature of reconciliation as an outcome and as a process. In Y. Bar-Siman-Tov (Ed.), From conflict resolution to reconciliation (pp. 11–38). Oxford University Press. Berents, H. (2014). “It’s about finding a way”: Children, sites of opportunity, and building everyday peace in Colombia. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 22(2), 361–384. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718182-02202006 Bloomfield, D. (2006). On good terms: Clarifying reconciliation (Report No. 14). Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management. https://ber ghof-foundation.org/library/on-good-terms-clarifying-reconciliation Boege, V. (2012). Hybrid forms of peace and order on a South Sea Island: Experiences from Bougainville (Papua New Guinea). In O. P. Richmond & A. Mitchell (Eds.), Hybrid forms of peace (pp. 88–106). Palgrave Macmillan. Brewer, J. D., Hayes, B. C., Dudgeon, K., Teeney, F., Wijesinghe, S. L., & Mueller-Hirth, N. (2018). The sociology of everyday life peacebuilding. Palgrave Macmillan. Chandler, D. (2015). Resilience and the “everyday”: Beyond the paradox of “liberal peace”. Review of International Studies, 41(1), 27–48. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0260210513000533 Chaves, P., Aarts, N., & van Bommel, S. (2020). Self-organization for everyday peacebuilding: The Guardia Indígena from Northern Cauca, Colombia. Security Dialogue, 51(1), 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/096701061988 9471 Daly, E., & Sarkin, J. (2007). Reconciliation in divided societies: Finding common ground. University of Pennsylvania Press. Eschle, C. (2018). Nuclear (in)security in the everyday: Peace campers as everyday security practitioners. Security Dialogue, 49(4), 289–305. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0967010618762595 Firchow, P. (2018). Reclaiming everyday peace: Local voices in measurement and evaluation after war. Cambridge University Press. Fridman, O. (2020). Peace formation from below: The “mirëdita, dobardan!” festival as an alternative to everyday nationalism. Nations and Nationalism, 26(2), 447–460. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12592 Harris, I. (2005). Cambodian Buddhism. University of Hawai’i Press.

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CHAPTER 2

Dealing with the Khmer Rouge History in Cambodia

It is truism that everything is contextual; however, it is particularly the case for everyday peace. The forms, speed, and procedures for promoting reconciliation examined in this study were determined and transformed according to community members’ consideration of different contextual factors. In a sense, the promotion of everyday practices in Cambodia can be understood as people’s juggling with their desired outcomes, available resources, external/internal restrictions, cultural contexts, and their daily priorities. Hence, in order to have a nuanced understanding of the features of everyday peace, it is vital to consider these contextual factors. This section offers an overview of the past experiences of Cambodians who went through the radical campaigns for social ‘revolution’ conducted by KR. Specifically, it will focus on the nature of the KR movements in practice, often identified as absolutist, dominating, unprofessional, and insensitive, and how this had a multi-layered impact on Cambodians’ everyday life. It will also consider how community members received and reacted to such oppression from the political powers. It then examines the range of events and institutional arrangements operated by the political leadership to deal with the KR history. These politically driven programmes and the narratives on KR generated during these processes have played a particularly important role in determining the environment for the everyday practices at the grassroots level. In addition, it will examine the activities of the Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_2

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Cambodia (ECCC) as well as a number of prominent non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The last section discusses four contextual factors that have influenced the way community members develop everyday practices for re-establishing their relationships with local KR leaders. Although many factors played significant roles, the chapter pays particular attention to the security and economic conditions, the central government’s approaches to the KR issues, and the cultural and religious principles and narratives that many community members considered important.

“3 Years, 8 Months, and 20 Days”: The Impact of the KR Rule KR emerged from the Cambodian communist party, which was formed in 1951 with the support of the Vietnamese communists. The party had gradually built up its military capabilities with support from the communist parties in Vietnam, Laos and China during the 1960s. In the 1970s under the leadership of Pol Pot, the party developed its own unique political ideas reflecting its anti-colonialist propaganda and this direction disconnected itself from Vietnam. After years of war against what it saw as US interference in Cambodia, KR overthrew the pro-American Lon Nol regime in 1975 and established Democratic Kampuchea (Kiernan, 2002, p. 159). During its four years of rule, KR launched radical socialist projects aiming at “the total transformation of Cambodian society” (Tully, 2005, p. 177). The key directions of its rule included promotion of a collective cooperative system, depopulation of cities, prohibition of markets, prevention of all religious activities, expulsion of Vietnamese minorities, and assimilation of all ethnic groups into Khmer (Chandler, 2008, pp. 177–178). Survivors had endured extreme hardships and challenges, which seriously impacted their lives after the regime’s end. The section below will summarise these challenges focusing on three rough categories. Firstly, the massive and ‘revolutionary’ campaign for social change was conducted in an unprofessional, insensitive, and rushed manner. This feature brought about a massive amount of struggle. When it took over the central political power in April 1975, the KR declared it to be ‘Year Zero’ when, following their idealism, the whole society would be completely reshaped into a pure socialist and agrarian utopia. Nevertheless, this military group did not have the capacity to promote the campaign on such a big scale, in terms of planning, manpower, institutional organisation, management

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skills, and external support. Hence, almost the entire population of the country was forced to abide by disorganised, unplanned, and constantly changing campaigns to achieve ambitious targets set by the regime. The issues of mismanagement intensified due to KR’s approach to staffing. The KR would recruit young children and people from poor backgrounds based on the assumption that they were ‘blank’ people who were not contaminated by the old social structure and ideologies. These leaders had had limited educational opportunities and were not familiar with project management or leading groups of people. Under the elusive organisation and structure, mid-/low-rank officials needed to deal with many uncertainties on a daily basis and training or instruction on such practical aspects was almost non-existent. The combined impact of such unprofessionally set objectives, a lack of management skills, and low-quality leadership created an extremely chaotic and mismanaged governance operation. For instance, people had to work from early morning to dusk (until midnight on many occasions) in the collective labour areas to double or triple the production/agricultural outputs ordered by the leadership. Although there were variations according to the labour units and communities, the amount of food distributed was too little to sustain extreme labour. A large number of people died of hunger and malnutrition while survivors would eat anything ranging from any type of plants to insects. Although the figure varies depending on the sources, approximately 1.5 million people died during the KR rule.1 Secondly, the KR regime attempted to control people through generating fear and a sense of terror as well as unilateral communication that demanded total obedience. It was Angkar (the party or the KR regime) that made all decisions and people (including the KR cadres) were not allowed to question the decisions. KR had developed an extensive surveillance system, hiring a large number of intelligence agents called chhlop at each local unit. The role of chhlop was to detect any signs of ‘antirevolutionary actions’ among local residents and chhlops wandered around

1 Although the number of people killed under the DK regime is still disputed, many

sources generally agree with an approximation of between 1.5 million and 2 million. For instance, the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University suggests that 1.7 million died (CGP, n.d.), while Short (2005) argues that the number of victims should be estimated at 1.5 million. Kiernan (1993, 2002) and Heder (1999) also agree with a figure of between 1.5 and 1.7 million deaths.

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local areas every night to do so. The types of misbehaviour reported by the surveillance agents varied, ranging from theft to verbal complaints against the decisions made by seniors. Once reports were made, the interrogation process and the punishment after interrogation were brutal. Most local units had their own detention centres where people accused of such misbehaviour were imprisoned. Every night, many among the prisoners were sent to be executed. People did not know who would be subject to the next execution and why. The family members of the people who were executed and detained were not allowed to question their whereabouts. Even when they learned about the death of their family members, they were not allowed to mourn. Due to these elements, most Cambodians after the KR regime were affected by baksbat (broken courage), which means “a lack of trust in others, submissiveness, feeling fearful, and being ‘mute and deaf’” (Agger, 2015, p. 545). Many people suffered from their mistrust of other villagers and even their own family members, which created a constant fear and sense of isolation (Zucker, 2011). After the KR period, many people felt that “We cannot even tell you the truth because we are afraid that you’re gonna report [to the authority or someone else]. This is so embedded in our mental condition” (Interview XII). Thirdly, adopting the ideology of Khmer nationalism and social ‘revolution,’ KR banned all religious and cultural practices that had been central to many Cambodians. The familial solidarity as well as the fundamental community system in the country were dismantled and incorporated in the collectivised governance units. Family members were often separated and incorporated into the collective work groups for weeks or months. Even in the cases where they returned home, family members spent most time in work teams that were segregated by age and gender (Hinton, 2011). In KR’s idealised social revolution, many cultural elements were considered to be a hindrance to the social transformation. Religious institutions and people’s everyday cultural practices were targeted by the regime in this regard. The regime identified Buddhism as “reactionary” (Keyes, 1990, n. p.) and Islam as “polluted and inferior” (So, 2010, p. 96), and sought to systematically eliminate them from 1976. It closed down all identifiable religious institutions such as Buddhist monasteries, mosques, and affiliated schools. The buildings were used as concentration camps, prisons, warehouses, and military stations, or were dismantled for

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other construction projects. Religious symbols and texts such as Qur’an, muqqadam, Kitab, Buddhist sutras, and Tripitaka were destroyed. Religious leaders were forced to become secularised and to join collective labour work. All religious festivities and rituals were completely banned. Such policies were implemented nation-wide although there was a clear variation in terms of the level of repression depending on the regional leaderships (Harris, 2013). Regarding Buddhist sangha,2 monks were forced to discontinue the spiritual dedication that they had undertaken for most of their life, and the secularisation process did not allow a space for following religious traditions. The number of monks reduced from 65,000–88,000 in the mid-1970s down to insignificant numbers (Kent, 2008). They were forced to join the collective labour which traditionally monks are not meant to carry out, to marry women, and to become involved in military activities. Small signs of non-cooperation resulted in execution in many places. According to some estimates, it is believed that some 12,500 monks were executed by the KR. A small number of monks managed to flee to Thailand before KR fully controlled the entire territory (Lee 2021; Harris, 2013). Moreover, most Buddhist ceremonies and rituals centred on local monasteries were completely discontinued. People were unable to observe important festivities like Khmer New Year, Pchum Ben (commemorating ancestors and deads), Meak Bochea (festival of monks), or participate in the donations for kathin, the annual period in which lay followers express gratitude to Buddhist monks. Moreover, the practice for inviting monks’ blessings and sermons to mark important life stages and community ceremonies were prohibited. Such religious prevention left a deep psychological impact whereby people lost the minimum space for having ontological security and had a serious moral dilemma between a commitment to their fundamental religious principles and the desire for survival.

Dealing with the KR Rule: An Overview On 7 January 1979, the KR regime was toppled by a military group named the Kampuchea United Front for the National Salvation (KUFNS). The key leaders of this group were former KR commanders 2 Sangha denotes Buddhist order or community that usually consists of monks and nuns but occasionally includes lay practitioners.

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and soldiers who had fled to Vietnam where they organised the antiKR military group. KUFNS initiated a massive military campaign against KR in December 1978 with the backing of approximately 150,000 Vietnamese troops. It captured Phnom Penh in the next month and the majority of Cambodia’s territory by early 1979. The new political leadership established a new state called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) while KR re-organised its military troops at the north-western border areas and continued guerrilla warfare. Since then, dealing with the legacy of KR’s rule has been a major issue in contemporary Cambodia. In particular, it was an important task for the PRK regime to consolidate its political power. The government’s policies on the KR history can be roughly divided into two phases. During the first 10 years after the end of the KR regime, a major goal of these initiatives was to enhance the new PRK government’s political legitimacy. While still carrying on a civil war against the alliance of anti-PRK military groups (including KR), the PRK was heavily reliant on human and material support from Vietnam, the country that had long been considered by Cambodians to be an imperialist regional power. People’s perception of the regime was divided; some saw it as liberating the country from the brutal KR rule while others saw it as the proxy of Vietnamese imperialism. Hence, the new regime wanted to solidify its political legitimacy by highlighting the KR’s anti-humanitarian war crimes and identifying PRK as “the saviours of the nation” (Gidley, 2019, p. 44). For this purpose, the government implemented a large number of projects to deal with the KR history, which included judicial processes, truth-finding mechanisms, and memorial programmes for this purpose (Chandler, 2008; Manning, 2015). For instance, in August 1979, the government established the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal to try KR leaders for their “Crimes of Genocide” (PRK’s Decree No. 1, cited in Gidley, 2019, p. 53). The judicial process pronounced death penalties for Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, the two top leaders, in absentia, after a fiveday-long judicial process. While the regime arrested and executed a few thousand key officials of KR without judicial processes, it also took actions to forbid people from carrying out vengeance against the local KR cadres (Guillou, 2012; Pham et al., 2019). In 1983, the government established the Genocide Research Committee to investigate and record the testimonials of the victims and the evidence of the KR violence. Approximately 10,000 documents were collected, which were apparently approved by a million people (Chandler, 2008; Guillou, 2012).

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In addition, the government attempted to preserve the sites that visually highlight KR’s brutal policies. Among others, KR’s execution site in the Cheng-Ek area near Phnom Penh was chosen to be preserved as the Killing Fields. Over 8,800 bodies were found in the subsequent investigations. Moreover, a security prison in Toul Sleng, Phnom Penh, called S-21, remained to demonstrate the cruel torture and killing which targeted an estimated 14,000–20,000 people. The government invited foreign journalists, international delegates and many Cambodians to these sites as the evidence of the cruel torture committed by KR (Manning, 2015). At local levels, memorials were erected at the sites of mass executions across the country. These memorials were designed to store the skulls and bones of the deceased, which had been scattered on the ground. The bone collection projects received an enthusiastic response from community members who wanted to send off the deceased in a proper manner in accordance with their Buddhist rituals and practices. Another important government-led initiative was the designation of commemorative days related to KR. Two most important days were 7 January Liberation Day (the day that PRK overthrew the KR regime) and 20 May as the Day of Rage (the day to remember KR’s crimes). 20 May was particularly relevant to the victims’ experience of the KR violence. On this day every year, a large number of events were hosted by the local authorities to “remind our people and the next generations about the disastrous period full of blood and tears” (Chea Sim, 1983, cited in Gidley, 2019, p. 61). These events usually involve speeches, skits, and performances that condemn the brutality of KR, and often include Buddhist rituals to pray for the deceased victims. This annual commemoration still continues although its name changed to the Day of Commemoration in 2001 and the size of the events has substantially diminished. The direction of dealing with the KR history has shifted in the early 1990s. When the civil war was ‘officially’ terminated by signing the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991, PRK retained its political leadership (in the name of the Cambodian People’s Party, CPP). This time, the government maintained a low-key attitude towards the KR issue, trying to avoid the issues emerging as threats to security stabilisation. Especially after his power consolidation in 1998, Prime Minister Hun Sen reached a series of amnesty deals and mobilised the defections of many KR rank and file. Reflecting this process, a top KR leader Khieu Samphan declared that people should ‘let bygones be bygones’ while Prime Minister Hun Sen

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openly declared that he would “dig a hole and bury the past” (Hun Sen, 1998, cited in Chandler, 2008, p. 356). The government not only ‘pardoned’ the KR core leaders but also adopted many leaders and members of the rank and file of KR into the ruling CPP or the national army (Bultmann, 2018). In the same period, the government suppressed any substantial coverage by mainstream media of the KR issues and removed it from most education curricula so that it did not generate unnecessary social controversies (Chandler, 2008; Pham et al., 2019). The government’s stance has been in principle maintained until the time of writing this book in 2022 although the government has gradually become more explicit in touching upon the KR history in more recent periods. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) The establishment and operation of ECCC, a tribunal that was established to investigate and prosecute the top leaders of KR, is one of the most important initiatives developed in the post-civil war period to deal with the KR history. The process for institutionalising the tribunal started in 1997, when the Cambodian government made an official request to the UN to set up a tribunal in response to international pressure. Firstly, the UN pursued the formation of an international tribunal to ensure its insulation from Cambodian domestic influence and indicted approximately 20 central leaders for investigation. However, this proposal faced strong resistance from the Cambodian government which wanted to put the tribunal under Cambodian jurisdiction and minimise the number of suspects to be investigated. Through multiple negotiations with the UN and other relevant actors, the UN and the Cambodian government agreed to make it a hybrid tribunal under the authority of both the UN and Cambodia and to limit the targets of investigation to a small number of top leaders of the KR. Based on this agreement, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) began its operation in 2006. In terms of its structure, on the judicial side, there are three judicial chambers (Pre-trial, Trial, and Supreme Court Chambers), Office of the Co-investigating Judges, and Office of the Co-prosecutors. Moreover, on the administrative side, ECCC set up the Defense Support Section, Victims Support Section (VSS), and Civil Party Lead Co-lawyers Section, under the office of the director. The composition of ECCC’s staff includes both international and Cambodian personnel in all important positions including judges, prosecutors, and lawyers, although Cambodians make

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up the majority of the staff. Since the first hearing process started in 2007, two (Kang Kek Iew and Nuon Chea) have been found guilty and given life sentences while three others died during proceedings. It should be acknowledged that ECCC has made a lot of effort to make its process accessible to the Cambodian population. Particularly noteworthy is the role of VSS in supporting victims’ participation in the court process and in liaising between the court and the civil society in Cambodia. ECCC also adopted a number of non-judicial measures to support victims’ healing process as well as collective and moral reparations. In addition, one core activity to reach the wider population was to invite a large number of people to introductory tours, the court, and public hearings, as well as providing school lectures about the ECCC process. As of September 2017, over 557,000 Cambodians were involved in these outreach activities (ECCC, n.d.). Due to such efforts, the objectives and activities of ECCC have been widely recognised by Cambodians. In a survey conducted in 2018 targeting the victims of KR violence, for instance, some 43% of the participants responded as having a moderate or high knowledge of ECCC (Williams et al., 2018, p. 9). Despite the achievements, however, how much influence the activities of ECCC had on Cambodian’s perceptions on truth-finding and social reconciliation requires further examination. In recent surveys, respondents usually present positive feedback on the ECCC’s positive contributions to discovering the truth of the KR rule and bringing top leaders to justice (Pham et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the author’s interviews repeatedly confirmed that community members consider the tribunal to be a political process that is less relevant to the reconciliation issues in their own lives (for instance, Interviews II, IV, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and XII). Civil Society Another important layer of the endeavour was the initiatives led by the civil society actors in Cambodia. A large number of civil society actors have been involved in different types of activities over time although the duration and level of their commitment varies depending on the funding availability and structural sustainability within each organisation. Overall, the areas of reconciliation covered by these organisations include truthfinding, public education on the KR history, psychological healing and mental health support, advocacy for reparation, and inter-group dialogue.

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In terms of truth-finding, for example, Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) has played a pivotal role in collecting, archiving, and examining victims’ testimonials since 1995. While it has collected and recorded some one million documents, it has made various efforts to disseminate the analysed information relating to the victims’ genocidal experience within and outside of the country (DC-CAM, n.d.). Another example is Trans-cultural Psychological Organization (TPO) that has continued its mental support and clinical interventions for the victims of violence. While the detailed formats and size of their programmes have changed over time due to their financial struggles, the organisation had maintained its core support (Interview XIII). When the ECCC began to operate, TPO supported the court providing a series of early stakeholder meetings, and training and education on the tribunal-related practices to participating actors. Moreover, TPO’s testimonial therapy was adopted by ECCC as one of its means of providing support to the victims. The Kdei Karuna Organization and the Center for Victims of Torture have also been involved in a range of mental health support to the people who suffered trauma from the KR violence. Some organisations have conducted programmes for raising youth awareness of the KR history and facilitating reconciliatory interactions between descendants of KR associates and other youth. For instance, Youth for Peace (YfP) was active with their outreach programmes for youth in the 2000s. These programmes included training, community dialogues, and facilitation of artwork projects, to offer youth in the local communities the opportunity to learn about the history and express their opinions. Especially, its ‘Transitional Justice and Memory Culture’ programme was conducted for some 3,000 people in seven provinces. In the areas where many former KR associates lived, YfP also facilitated a series of dialogues between the children of these KR associates and the children of the victims to nurture mutual understanding between the two sides (Interview XIV). Bophana Audio-Visual Resources Center has archived various visual and audio materials related to Cambodian history, and has developed education materials to help youth understand the nature of the KR rule including films on the KR history created by Rithy Pan, a co-founder of the Center, as well as a mobile phone app on the KR history created by the Centre which was widely appreciated as a useful educational tool in the Cambodian context (Interview XV). A recent development of the Anlong Veng Peace Center also deserves a

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proper acknowledgement. Being affiliated to DC-CAM’s public education projects, the Peace Center was established in Anlong Veng (Oddar Meanchey Province), one of KR’s strongholds, and had operated education programmes to take students, trainee teachers, and other visitors to different areas relevant to the KR history and explain the history from some former KR associates’ perspectives (Manning et al., 2018). While these organisations’ activities have made important and positive contributions, their programmes were implemented in selected areas and, in many cases, were intermittent due to the amount and stability of funding that they could access. In short, due to its strong impact on Cambodian society, it has been a salient social issue in dealing with the KR history. A range of actors including the central government, international intervenors, and Cambodian civil society organisations have undertaken a range of meaningful activities for discovering the truth, bringing the people responsible to justice, supporting victims of violence, and promoting more reconciliatory relationships between former KR leaders and other community members. However, the influence of these activities on the relationship building and social reconciliation in local communities has been relatively limited. Hence, people in local communities have had to handle their psychological trauma and determine their relationship with former harm-doers without any substantial institutional support.

Contextual Environment Underlying Everyday Reconciliation Practices Another contextual issue that this chapter considers is the environment in which local-level practices for social reconciliation were developed. Among many factors, this section will focus on four areas that many research participants highlighted as important: (1) the policies set by the political authority, (2) security conditions, (3) economic conditions, and (4) cultural and religious principles and beliefs. First, the resources and policy directions set by the government had a critical impact on the everyday practice in local communities. To understand the impact of the political decisions, it is important to note that the political environment relevant to everyday reconciliation was mostly determined at the central level. While conducting a decade-long civil war, the central government led by Hun Sen had made a substantial effort to maintain the loyalty of the elites and military leaders in different provinces, allowing them to

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wield substantial autonomy in managing provincial and local governance issues. At the same time, the political issues that the central government set as a major concern were consistently disseminated and applied throughout the country. In a sense, the politics of Cambodia has been marked by the influence of the centralised administrative process on the official apparatus and patron-client power management on the unofficial governance operations. Within this structure, the programmes and events for dealing with the KR history were considered a high priority for the central government. For instance, in the aftermath of KR’s mass violence, the new government’s policies for preventing revenge killing, programmes for commemorating the deceased victims, and policy of not demanding the prosecution of mid-/low-rank KR leaders had offered community members an important platform on which they could explore their own practices for promoting passivity and sociality. At the same time, the government’s narratives on KR have shaped the master narrative in the country, which clearly delineated broad boundaries for the narratives and activities that local communities could develop. During the 1980s, due to the government’s policy direction, the nature of the KR top leaders’ evil and malicious intention could not be questioned whereas, during the 1990s, public discourse on KR itself was considered a taboo. Multiple research participants confirmed that, while the sub-national units at sub-district (khum/sangkat ), district, and provincial levels were involved in promoting these programmes, their roles were limited to implementing the decisions made by the central government. Accordingly, most programmes, events, and policy directions that had been conducted since the late 1970s were implemented across the country in, by and large, the same manner. Second, changing security conditions especially during the civil war (1979–1991) had a critical impact on determining the social conditions for promoting social reconciliation. The plurality between the regions was particularly due to security conditions. For instance, the states of everyday reconciliation formed in two distinct geographical locations of Battambang and Svay Rieng, have largely been influenced by the dissimilar security conditions in these areas. Due to its physical proximity to Vietnam, Svay Rieng was one of the first provinces that came under the effective control of the new PRK regime and its Vietnamese supporters when the civil war in the country started in 1978. The Vietnamese army had controlled the security in this area even before the joint army moved

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into the capital Phnom Penh, and has never lost its authority since then. The new regime made efforts to suppressed unauthorised violence and illegal actions were constantly applied throughout the 1980s. Victims and other community members obtained relatively more powerful social positions than former leaders of KR. This contextual condition encouraged many former KR leaders to keep a low profile, quickly accepting the master narrative of KR and often joining the ruling party. Hence, community members in Svay Rieng had a relatively better condition to explore the practices for building conciliatory relationships with KR leaders. Battambang, in contrast, was close to the military strongholds of KR within and outside of Cambodia. Many troops that had been defeated by the PRK/Vietnam joint army in other areas fled to the Thai border areas and reorganised themselves to be stationed at military camps. Moreover, KR’s existing strongholds in the north-western areas maintained their control over these areas. Many local communities had been subject to intermittent combat throughout the 1980s. Although the PRK had official governance power in this region, the KR military troops could access local communities closer to the forests. Community members in this situation felt that they had two authorities: the PRK during the day and KR during the night. In this context, many community members still had a strong fear of KR’s military power and had reduced their interaction with former KR leaders in their local areas or other communities in which many former KR associates lived. Hence, although revenge violence settled down within a relatively short period, community members had maintained a low level of social engagement (close to passivity) and many community inhabitants continued to disconnect their relations with former KR leaders whenever possible (Interview II). Third, the dynamics of economic development in the country also played a major role in delineating the environment for local reconciliation. During the 1980s, the Cambodian economy was affected by two main factors: a command economy under a communist structure and ongoing civil war. Although the total collectivisation of the economy under KR was somewhat eased under the new PRK regime to acknowledge privately farmed plots, the economy was under the strong influence of the centralised plan for development and distribution. Moreover, due to the ongoing warfare, the country’s resources were substantially consumed in maintaining the security forces. With limited material support from external advocates like Vietnam, the country had suffered economic hardships (Hughes, 2003). Hence, local communities during this period also

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struggled to mobilise material resources for conducting community-based development programmes (Interviews III, IV, VII and VIII). Nevertheless, after the end of the civil war, the socialist economic system in Cambodia underwent a radical transition into a market economy under the strong influence of the international monetary organisations during the 1990s. The new government proactively conducted initiatives to attract foreign investment and promote labour-intensive industries, in a few selected city areas including Phnom Penh, Takeo, and Kampong Cham. These initiatives generated a significant economic polarisation between urban and rural areas, which encouraged a mass migration within the country. Hence, while community residents gradually enjoyed better financial conditions, the traditional structure of social engagement was subject to major transformation. The influence of conventional leaders in local communities has been substantially reduced. An increasing number of people began to pay more attention to the economic wellbeing of their own families rather than the maintenance of community activities. Many youths left the local community for better work and education opportunities in the urban areas (Chhair & Ung, 2016/2017). Fourth, in developing specific forms of practices and narratives to justify them, religious beliefs within local communities played important roles. In particular, the narratives relying on Buddhist precepts and principles as well as local animistic perceptions provided the type of logics for local narratives on their approaches to KR and local KR leaders (Soeung & Lee, 2017). For instance, the Buddhist precepts of sila and concepts of karma formed an important narrative that discouraged many people from committing physical violence, especially killing. Sila denotes five fundamental precepts that all Buddhists are encouraged to uphold as crucial elements of practice: no killing, no stealing, no misusing sex, no lying, and no abusing intoxicants. For many Cambodians, these precepts are normative indicators by which to judge people’s behaviour. The principle of no killing is particularly important among the five, and breaching it will have serious consequences. Hence, when people talk about how to deal with former KR leaders, it is widely accepted that the bad people who conducted cruel actions will face the consequences under Buddhist law and it does not have to be them who punish the leaders (Bennett, 2018). Karma is a concept that explains Buddhist understanding of ‘cause and effect’ as a certain phenomenon. Although the concepts and their implications on human behaviour have been explored in the Buddhist theoretical discourse in a sophisticated manner, community members’ approaches

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to this concept are quite straightforward: ‘If you do good for others, you will get good rewards. If you harm others, you will see the negative consequences.’ Moreover, people believe that the consequence will be inter-lifetimes. In local communities, people share a large number of stories that explain how some KR leaders experienced misfortunes due to the bad causes they had made. By mingling their thoughts on sila and karma, local seniors generated a narrative that victims should not pay back what they had received from KR leaders as the leaders will be punished by the law of karma anyway and the revenge will only add negative karma to the victims. In addition, it should be noted that Cambodians’ Buddhist practice is intertwined with local animism. Many types of cosmology of local people and belief in the power of spirits have generated taboos and tacit rules for daily life. Many Buddhist monks in local communities adopt and reflect the practices based on such cosmology in their ritualistic ceremonies and sermons (Kent, 2003). Initiatives and practices to handle their trauma and experience of atrocity were also mobilised within such Khmer Buddhist cosmology. Among others, the practices to respect and get blessings from Neak Ta, the guardian spirits in the area, are particularly important (Bennett, 2015). Interview participants confirmed that the everyday practices for social reconciliation were promoted under the combined influence of the aforementioned factors. To summarise, people highlighted the security and economic conditions as the challenges that restricted the scope of the activities that community members could plan. With the unstable circumstances, they could not project where their own community could be placed with a mid-/long-term perspective. Moreover, the policy directions set by the central government delineated a clear boundary of ‘what could be said’ in public venues. Community members developed their approaches to their relations with local KR leaders within such a boundary. Cultural and religious principles and narratives (especially Buddhist thoughts) were important sources from which community members generated different rationales to justify their activities and shaped specific forms of the practices. In Chapters 6 and 7, the roles of these factors and community members’ responses to them will be revisited and further elaborated.

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Conclusion This chapter has reviewed a number of contextual factors that influenced the forms and procedures of everyday practices for social reconciliation in local communities of Cambodia, focusing on the impact of KR’s rule on people’s everyday life, the initiatives and programmes established to deal with the KR history, and the factors that influenced community members’ approaches to their everyday reconciliation practices. In short, while the impact of the KR rule on people’s lives was devastating, investigating KR’s extreme violence and bringing the responsible people to justice has been one of the salient social issues in contemporary Cambodia. However, although a large number of programmes and events have been initiated to address such needs, the influence of these programmes on social reconciliation at local community level has been limited. Hence, community members have mobilised different types of everyday practices to deal with the relationship (re)building with former KR leaders, reflecting the political, economic, security, and cultural contexts. As a caveat, the review in this chapter was by no means comprehensive. This chapter is designed, instead, to offer readers a concise overview of the contextual issues that are most relevant for the discussions introduced in the following sections from the perspectives of the interview participants. The contextual features and factors were selected for review from a wide range of issue areas, which are directly relevant to the topics considered in this study. The review of each feature or factor was rather brief, primarily focusing on the areas that were highlighted as important by interview participants. Interview List Interview II, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2021) Interview III, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview IV, A community leader in Svay Rieng (January 2019) Interview VI, A person who once served as a local KR leader but was discharged later, living in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview VII, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview VIII, A local leader living in Svay Rieng (November 2020)

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Interview IX, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XII, An academic who experienced the KR period near Phnom Penh, currently living in the US (September 2021) Interview XIII, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (December 2018) Interview XIV, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (September 2021) Interview XV, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (December 2020)

References Agger, I. (2015). Calming the mind: Healing after mass atrocity in Cambodia. Transcultural Psychiatry, 52(4), 543–560. https://doi.org/10.1177/136346 1514568336 Bennett, C. (2015). Living with the dead in the killing fields of Cambodia (Doctoral thesis). University of Kent. Bennett, C. (2018). Karma after democratic Kampuchea: Justice outside the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 12(3), 68–82. https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.12.3.1567 Bultmann, D. (2018). The social order of postconflict transformation in Cambodia. Rowman and Littlefield. Chandler, D. (2008). Cambodia deals with its past: Collective memory, demonisation and induced amnesia. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9(2–3), 355–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/14690760802094933 Chhair, S., & Ung, L. (2016/2017). Economic history of industrialization in Cambodia: Learning to complete (Working Paper No. 7). United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/ 07/L2C_WP7_Chhair-and-Ung-v2-1.pdf DC-CAM. (n.d.). Documentation. Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCCAM). http://dccam.org/documentation ECCC. (n.d.). Public affairs outreach figures 2009–2017 . Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). https://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/def ault/files/Outreach%20statestics%20as%20of%20September%202017.pdf Gidley, R. (2019). Illiberal transitional justice and the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Guillou, A. Y. (2012). An alternative memory of the Khmer Rouge genocide: The dead of the mass graves and the land guardian spirits [teak ta]. South East Asia Research, 20(2), 207–226. https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2012.0102 Harris, I. (2013). Buddhism in a dark age: Cambodian monks under Pol Pot. University of Hawai’i Press. Heder, S. (1999). Pol Pot at bay: People’s war and the breakdown of the 1991 Paris Agreements (Doctoral thesis). School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Hinton, A. (2011). ‘Beyond suffering’—Genocidal terror under the Khmer Rouge: A view from the work of May Ebihara. In J. A. Marston (Ed.), Anthropology and community in Cambodia: Reflections on the work of May Ebihara (pp. 59–78). Monash University Press. Hughes, C. (2003). The political economy of Cambodia’s transition, 1991–2001. Routledge. Kent, A. (2003). Recovery of the collective spirit: The role of the revival of Buddhism in Cambodia (Working Paper No. 8). Department of Social Anthropology, Gothenburg University. Kent, A. (2008). Peace, power and pagodas in present-day Cambodia. Contemporary Buddhism, 9(1), 77–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/146399408023 12717 Keyes, C. (1990). Cultural survival quarterly magazine: Buddhism and revolution in Cambodia. Cultural Survival. Retrieved November 16, 2018, from https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarte rly/buddhism-and-revolution-cambodia Kiernan, B. (1993). Genocide and democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the international community. Yale University Press. Kiernan, B. (2002). The Pol Pot regime: Race, power, and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79. Yale University Press. Lee, S. (2021). Understanding everyday peace in Cambodia: Plurality, subtlety, and connectivity. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 16(1), 24–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1542316620974371 Manning, P. (2015). Reconciliation and perpetrator memories in Cambodia. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(3), 386–406. https://doi. org/10.1093/ijtj/ijv015 Manning, P., Ly, S.-K., & Ser, S. (2018, May 16). Changing the story: Whose stories and why?. University of Leeds. https://changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk/ 2018/05/16/changing-the-story-whose-stories-and-why/ Pham, P. N., Balthazard, M., Gibbons, N., & Vinck, P. (2019). Perspectives on memory, forgiveness and reconciliation in Cambodia’s post-Khmer Rouge society. International Review of the Red Cross, 101(910), 125–149. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1816383119000213 Short, P. (2005). Pol pot: The history of a nightmare. John Murray Publishers.

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So, F. (2010). An oral history of Cham Muslim women, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime (Doctoral thesis). Ohio University. Soeung, B., & Lee, S. (2017). The revitalisation of Buddhist peace activism in post-war Cambodia. Conflict, Security & Development, 17 (2), 141–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2017.1300356 The Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP). (n.d.). The CGP 1994–2019. Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University. Retrieved July 3, 2022, from https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/cambodian-genocide-program Tully, J. (2005). A short history of Cambodia: From empire to survival. Allen & Unwin. Williams, T., Bernath, J., Tann, V., & Kum, S. (2018). Justice and reconciliation for the victims of the Khmer Rouge?: Victim participation in Cambodia’s transitional Justice process. Centre for Conflict Studies, Centre for the Study of Humanitarian Law & Swisspeace. Zucker, E. M. (2011). Trust and distrust in a highland Khmer community after thirty years of war. In J. A. Marston (Ed.), Anthropology and community in Cambodia: Reflections on the work of May Ebihara (pp. 79–103). Monash University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Exploration of Nonviolent Coexistence

The current and next chapters aim to offer a descriptive analysis of everyday practices adopted in Cambodian local communities since the end of the KR regime. The primary objective is to help readers gain an overview of ‘what has happened in local communities’ and hear the voices of community members. Moreover, the analysis in this part will offer empirical evidence for the following chapters that do a more in-depth analysis of the features of everyday practices for social reconciliation. To achieve these objectives, the analysis will focus on the forms of activities mobilised and maintained by community members and, whenever possible, will quote directly from the author’s interviews. As the first part of this descriptive analysis, this chapter will introduce the community activities mobilised in the early phase of the post-KR recovery processes. The examination of Cambodia in this period offers readers insights into how local communities can restart their everyday practices for rebuilding social relations. A range of activities for building social relations was newly developed in the (near) absence of existing resources and social conditions. Hence, the practices were in project-like forms, mobilised by community members with relatively clear objectives like violence prevention and commemoration, including Buddhist rituals or project-type activities. Moreover, many of the practices mobilised in this period relied heavily on the initiatives and institutional arrangements set up by the political authorities. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_3

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This chapter will firstly introduce the political, security, and social contexts from which everyday practices for relationship building were promoted. It then introduces and examines specific forms of practices promoted in this period, broadly categorising them into three groups according to the levels of reconciliation that they pursue. Understandably, the most popular types of everyday practices were relevant to passivity, the pursuit of nonviolent coexistence without necessarily recognising the counterparts’ legitimacy. Some community members actively engaged in dialogues for preventing vengeance killing and mobilised the rituals and projects for commemorating the deceased victims. Although the number was less significant, there were activities that pursued higher levels of social relations like sociality and reciprocity, and direct engagement with former KR leaders.

Violence Occurred in a Power Vacuum The timeline roughly covers the period of social reconstruction in the aftermath of the KR period. In this period, local communities had to deal with the immediate consequences of all radical campaigns conducted under KR rule. Most foundations for social relations such as familycentred social relations and freedom of marriage had been severely disrupted. Community members had been banned from upholding many social practices and cultural institutions fundamental to maintaining their ‘normal life,’ ranging from the maintenance of family to religious practices. A large portion of the community leaders, intellectuals, and Buddhist monks died of hunger, malnutrition, extreme labour, or execution by the KR authority. Therefore, building social relations after the KR regime required people to re-establish local practices from scratch with extremely limited resources rather than repairing and enhancing the preexisting social conditions. Among others, the most urgent and important issue related to social relations in local communities was the stabilisation of security. Community members had to deal with such challenges initially started under a power vacuum. While the KR authority in Phnom Penh was toppled in January 1979, the power transition did not happen all at once. It took a while for the new regime to establish its local governance system, ranging between a few weeks and a few months according to geographic areas. During this period, local communities were left without any concrete leadership to manage social stability. Community members’

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first priority was to ensure their survival. They would search in any buildings and houses to look for food, hide it from any military forces passing by, and were occasionally involved in exchanging and selling goods with other community members. These activities were managed by relying on community members’ common sense and careful self-protection. In this context, a major challenge that emerged in this period was revenge violence. Having experienced KR’s genocidal rule, many people sought ways to express their anger and anxiety towards the regime and its associates. A large amount of violence was conducted across the country targeting the former KR cadres who had been considered particularly nasty and brutal to community members. Such violence was spontaneously organised by the people (frequently youths) who had suffered severely under the KR’s rule. They would create some types of selfgoverning security groups, core operations of which were interrogating and killing former KR leaders who remained in the local areas. In the absence of a security authority, such locally mobilised violence was widely carried out without substantial resistance or deterrence. In fear of death, many KR associates temporarily left their hometowns. In 1979, the situation was chaotic. There were no laws in the country. The villagers out of deep anger just killed the former Khmer Rouge lower ranking officials. It was hard to identify who killed whom. I felt so scared and unsecured because I served the Khmer Rouge as a kitchen head in the later stage of the regime. I was worried because I was not sure if the people ate enough food I cooked for them during my serving the regime. (Interview I) Everything was chaotic and uncontrollable. We felt worried at every second. On the way, I eye-witnessed an incident that a man was burned to death. He was a very bad leader during the Khmer Rouge period. The villagers used straw in the rice field to burn him to death. I saw it. (Interview II)

The uncontrolled violence posed an important security threat to local communities. Any people who had once been associated with the KR leadership in whatever roles could be the targets of revenge. While others were not afraid to be targeted, many of them were still concerned about the violence conducted without a reliable leadership. Accordingly, a major concern of most local communities in terms of everyday peace was to

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ensure the prevention of violence (vengeance killing) and the maintenance of basic security. Community members had mobilised various practices that were subtle or evident in form, in order to achieve these objectives. The practices mobilised under these circumstances excelled in some communities when the new government strengthened its governance structure. Community members began to explore ways to utilise the different platforms set by the government to pursue their goals when dealing with former KR leaders in their communities. The types of activities mobilised within local communities could be roughly categorised into three areas: discouragement of revenge, commemoration and healing, and direct engagement with former KR leaders.

Discouragement of Revenge A simple but important form of local practice was to engage in dialogue to discourage people from conducting violent acts of vengeance targeting former KR leaders. Although the detailed dynamics vary between communities, many research participants confirmed that a series of direct dialogues occurred in their own communities to deal with local violence. The targets of such conversations were usually youths in the same communities who had already conducted, or were suspected of planning to commit, violence. Indeed, some youths who had lost close family members and had experienced challenging life conditions during the KR period, had mobilised unofficial security associations or more ganglike groups and attacked former KR leaders who they felt were particularly cruel. The dialogues with these youths were mainly organised by village seniors who had influence over other community members. In many cases, these initiatives were partly supported by the new regime’s attempt to control unauthorised violence in local communities. Sub-national level officials and security forces of the new regime had made multiple visits to local villages and explicitly warned of the punishment that would follow such violence. For instance, one research participant recalls: After the liberation, the new government had new laws and regulations to manage the country and many former Khmer Rouge officials were

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educated and advised.1 The attempt to take revenge against former Khmer Rouge cadres and head of small division was not existent anymore. They complied with the new laws of the country. (…) Whenever there was an attempt to kill Khmer Rouge officials, the authorities just brought all former Khmer Rouge cadres to the commune office or a meeting place in order to give them advice. The villagers who attempted to kill were also brought together to give advice as well. The advice meeting was organized at the security district office. (Interview III)

Taking the government’s action as an opportunity, many community leaders continued to engage in dialogues with community members who might conduct further violence. In their conversations, the community leaders usually emphasised that unauthorised violence would not be tolerated, including the violence against the KR associates. The statement below from a research participant in Svay Rieng offers one such example: Q:

A: Q:

A: Q:

A: Q:

I heard that there were some occasions that people in the village reported the former Khmer Rouge leaders to the Vietnamese army, then Vietnam came in and killed them. Did similar things happen here? No, the people in this village were modest. Nobody was killed. There were many low-rank leaders of the Khmer Rouge who were selected by seniors to serve for them. Did you feel that they were different from senior leaders? It depends on individuals. I used to meet a higher-ranking chief. He survived. People in the village didn’t kill him. So people appreciated the difference between different leaders. It was more about the behaviour of each individual rather than the Khmer Rouge to all as a whole. Yes, if they were not particularly more cruel during the Khmer Rouge [ruling], they were fine. However, there were a few victims of who might have been extremely angry against the Khmer Rouge. When they wanted to take revenge, how did you deal with the issues?

1 The PRK government had brought former KR local leaders into an ‘education’ camp for a substantial period of time. After completing the education course, interview participants mentioned, these KR leaders presented modest and collaborative manners (Interview XVI).

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A:

Q: A:

In this area, not many attempts were made for revenge. I and another commune chief, when we knew that there was a risk, we prohibited it. What do you mean? Did you directly speak to those victims to convince not to commit to revenge? We were aware of the law. The law did not allow any killing. When they kill people, they will be jailed. I highlighted this point many times. (Interview IV)

In addition to such a ‘warning,’ community leaders disseminated the message of ‘let bygones be bygones.’ While the anger that people felt was appreciated, it was emphasised that the damage of violence cannot be undone by another set of violence. In this regard, people frequently used the phrase meaning ‘let them go’ or ‘forget the past’ (in Khmer, such as Bomplech roeung chas chol tov or Choup romleuk roeung chas tov). They also encouraged people to ‘focus on making a better life’ (Interview III). It is noteworthy that the focus of such dialogue was not on the former perpetrators. In other words, community seniors did not aim to acknowledge or incorporate the former KR leaders as part of their communities. Local seniors were well aware of the nasty and brutal actions committed by some leaders and sympathised with the anger of the people who were committed to violence against the KR cadres. Instead, the purpose of local seniors’ efforts in the transitional period was on the prevention of violence highlighting the zero utility or counter-value of violence. In this regard, the pursuit of nonviolent coexistence between former KR leaders and the survivors of the KR violence was most relevant to passivity as introduced in Chapter 1, which accepts the need to physically co-habit with their counterparts in order to sustain basic security. The dialogue to discourage vengeance violence was carried out within households as well. Fathers and mothers in the families engaged in conversations to prevent their children from committing violence and killing. In these cases, the forms of dialogue were more subtle and quiet, involving parts of their everyday communications. For instance, parents often raised such issues while having dinner in the evening or at breaktimes during their agricultural work. Moreover, the conversations usually discouraged their children’s commitment to violence in general rather than discussing particular cases. However, the domestic conversations occasionally became more active, creating tensions between family

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members. One research participant mentioned two particular occasions when his mother prevented revenge killing: Q: A: Q: A:

Q: A:

Did former Khmer Rouge people come back during the civil war after the KR regime? Yes, like Mr Hun and Mr Chen. But when they came back, they look scared so they usually hid themselves in their houses. Do you remember when these people came back? Around 1988 and 1989. When he came back, in the village children asked who he was and some people said that he was the person who killed my father. How did you feel when he firstly came back? I never thought him as a human again. Actually, once, I wanted to see him thinking of doing revenge because he killed my father. But my mother said “don’t do that. It will create a bad karma again. In the previous life, your father must have done something bad to him.” (…) Later, when the Vietnamese Army visited my place, I reported that he was a Khmer Rouge [associate] but my mom did not want another killing and said “no no. he is not.” So the Vietnamese soldiers left him survive. So he was scared and he tried to hide himself. I was angry with my mother as well at that time. (Interview V)

In response, many former KR cadres presented a polite and apologetic manner in the early phases of relationship building. These leaders in many cases hid themselves from public sites. They refrained from any activities that might draw unnecessary attention from the community members, reduced their public commitments unless local communities requested their involvement, and maintained a silent and low-key manner. For instance, one research participant recalls: Immediately after the liberation [from KR], the situation was that they did not like to socially expose themselves to the communities because they simply felt embarrassed and guilty. For the first few months after the liberation, they only stayed at home as if they were hiding. They observed the villagers’ manners towards their presence in the communities. (…) When the villagers hold a party or ceremony, the former Khmer Rouge officials did not join it but their family member joined instead. This did not mean that we discriminated against them, but it was their own opted manner. (Interview VI)

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When making individual encounters with other community members, moreover, KR cadres would look down or away, avoid physical touch, send a polite smile, or take another route to hide them. In the Cambodian cultural contexts, such an indirect and symbolic gesture was usually considered as the method by which to send their apologetic and reconciliatory messages to their counterparts. In Cambodia, public and straightforward acknowledgement or apology for their wrong doings rarely happens. In particular, the seniors and power holders in the communities tend to consider the acknowledgement of wrong doings as losing face or power (more explanation and references). Accordingly, apart from some exceptional cases which occurred immediately after the collapse of the KR regime, direct apology by KR cadres did not happen. Instead, many subtle signs in daily behaviour were utilised in this process, as described in the following statement.

Healing and Commemoration Another type of local practice for facilitating passivity was the facilitation of commemoration for the survivors of KR violence. The significance of commemoration in this period can be understood from two perspectives. Firstly, people needed the opportunity to mourn their past suffering and explore ways to heal the psychological impact. In almost all interviews, research participants described the strong impact of KR’s violence on their mental health but they did not know what could be done to deal with it. Participation in Buddhist rituals was one of the few practices that addressed such psychological impacts. In a sense, moreover, to engage in religious practice in their everyday was a symbolic sign that people had returned to their normal life after the extraordinary period of KR rule, as mentioned in the example below: Q:

A:

You mentioned that you had some deep pain within your heart. How did you deal with it? Could you elaborate some details on this? I felt that a serious anger in me. It is not a metaphor. I really felt that something was stuck in here [pointing his chest]. The feeling became more serious on some days. But, I didn’t know what to do. [after a short pause] Sometimes, I reminded myself with Buddhist teachings, that is “Anyone who do bad things, he will see the consequence of his karma.” I wanted to see and join

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bangskol (commemoration) but it had been prohibited during the KR time. (Interview V)

Secondly, Buddhist rituals for commemoration have been considered the most important way to do merit for the deceased people. In the Cambodian tradition, moreover, the dead are believed to turn into nasty spirits if their bodies are not properly buried or cremated. This meant that the survivors of the KR regime had been denied a peaceful rest or reincarnation (Bennett, 2018; Kent, 2003). Many Cambodians had harboured a sense of guilt that they had not been able to take any actions after their family members were killed under the KR regime. They observed the moments that the beloved people were captured and taken away to be killed, but had to turn blind eyes and deaf ears in order to avoid triggering violence against themselves (McGrew, 2011). When the KR regime collapsed, therefore, the families hoped to help the spirits of the victims to have a peaceful future following their Buddhist beliefs. In the early period of post-KR social reconstruction, people’s desire for healing and commemoration was expressed in two main forms. Firstly, throughout the 1980s, local communities conducted bone collection projects. This practice was initiated by the new PRK government. The government wanted to address people’s desire for commemoration and to reconfirm the brutality of the KR regime by collecting the bones of the victims of mass violence during the KR period (see Chapter 5 for more details). When the initiative started, a large number of community members enthusiastically participated in the collection process. The process for locating and collecting bones was relatively straightforward since the places of mass killing emitted a strong and bad odour from dead bodies. People were not able to confirm the identities of the bodies, and just collected all of the bones and piled them up in one place. Once bones were collected, community members conducted mock funerals or Buddhist rituals to pray for the victims. Although people hoped to make these rituals as close to the Buddhist traditions as possible, the forms and features of them had been simplified due to the restrictions of the period. For instance, while it was the political authority that encouraged local communities to do bone collection, the authority had not offered much by way of resources to conduct them. Moreover, guided by the socialist ideologies, the new regime allowed only a limited range of religious activities. Since almost all monks were killed or disrobed by the KR regime, it was not easy to identify monks who could preside at the rituals. Hence,

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in many cases, the process of collecting and storing bones was led by the people who used to serve as achar wat 2 and community leaders. In the process, “the villagers [whose family members were killed] came to the bone collection sites. They cried with pains, blaming the Khmer Rouge cadres who had killed their family. They described their deep pains and agony mixed with anger” (Interview VII). At the end of such a process, bones were stored in a monument. The forms and structure of the storage monuments vary according to the materials that communities could acquire. While some communities managed to erect proper stupa made of concrete, other communities used existing wooden huts. In this regard, a respondent mentions: Why did we enthusiastically join the bone collection and stupa construction? Traditionally and religiously, we don’t want to see the bones and skulls scattering on the ground anymore. All of us lost siblings or relatives. We exactly did not know where they were killed. However, we either just assumed that some of them would have been killed and buried in the mass graves or we thought of how tragic and painful the people were when the body of their families and relatives was not cremated properly. Their tragedy and pain were ours because we alike lost the family members/relatives. Therefore, we built the stupa to keep those bones and skulls, so that we can hold collective commemoration ceremony. (Interview VIII)

Secondly, in parallel with bone collection, a large number of local communities attempted to re-establish local monasteries and Buddhist sangha.3 In the Cambodian cultural and social traditions, Buddhist monasteries were essential for having most community activities conducted not only for commemoration but for spiritual and social purposes. The restoration of a monastery meant the recovery of a permanent institution that will carry such important activities. Hence, when the restoration of religious practice was partially allowed in the early 1980s, a few hundred local communities started their own projects for rebuilding monasteries. The interview quoted below demonstrates the process conducted in a local community in Battambang:

2 Achar wat denotes lay functionaries who deal with the management of monasteries. 3 Sangha denotes Buddhist order or community that usually consists of professional

priests (monks, nuns) but occasionally includes lay leaders.

3

Q:

A:

Q:

A: Q: A:

Q:

A:

Q: A:

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So, it was 1980 when people started to reconstruct pagoda.4 But, in 1979 the civil war started. Do you mean that the local community wanted to reconstruct pagodas even during the war? Yes. (…) People just wanted to get the older custom of Buddhism back and then restart their religious activity. During the Khmer Rouge time, people had to do prayer early evening or late afternoon [so that no one could see this]. Anyway, at this time, the focus of our activities was not about peace or peacebuilding, but more about getting back the custom of Buddhism. At the time we thought the war was something between the high officials or leaders. Do you mean that, for local people to go to pagoda to bow toward the Buddha statue and to listen to the Buddhist teaching themselves meant a lot? Yes, yes. That’s right. How important was it to the people at the time? To have a pagoda and monks back symbolized increasing the chances of becoming happy. In the Buddhist tradition, people pursue happiness not only in this lifetime but also next lifetime. It may sound selfish, but they wanted to find an opportunity to develop a happy life. The reconstruction of pagoda or school should have costed money. Were there any people who made materials support to you? How did you mobilize the resources? It was the community people especially the chiefs of ten villages within the commune that I was in charge of, that supported the reconstruction projects most. Also, I collaborated with the previous teachers who were teaching before the Khmer Rouge time. At that time the country was under the control of Vietnam but Vietnam did not intervene so much about how the pagodas and schools should be built and operated. They just wanted to use a part of the pagoda building to put soldiers and troops. Are you saying the most resources were donated from the community residents? Fundraising campaign did not start immediately but we first organized a Buddhist committee and I worked with this committee. Fundraising was made only to bring some religious ceremonies. After attending the Buddhist ceremonies in the pagoda, they made

4 In Cambodia, people use the English term pagoda to denote a local monastery.

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Q:

A: Q: A:

some small donations. However, in the early period, we didn’t get to start reconstruction of the physical building. What was the response from the government and Vietnam to your reconstruction project? Did they support or did they just accept? Or, they didn’t care? They didn’t obstruct any of our efforts but they didn’t support either. How did you find monks? Did you find people who used to be monks before the Khmer Rouge time? Well, the selection process was a bit interesting. There were two people who used to be monks in this area but they were not keen to be monks again. We almost like half forced them to do. Without monks, pagoda meant nothing so we needed monks. (Interview XI)

The forms and styles of the restored monasteries varied according to the resources available in local areas. Three key elements that many community members hoped to have were a building with a Buddha statue in, monks, and a building that monks live in. In many cases, the buildings (e.g., storehouse) that had survived the KR period were used as such buildings. Community leaders looked for the people who had served before the KR period as monks and asked local seniors who were familiar with Buddhist practice to lead local rituals (Lee, 2020). Nevertheless, in some local communities in Battambang, people just started their daily practices with a monk (who did not go through a process of re-ordination) and without any proper building. As time went by, the minimum foundation for monastery operation had gradually been stabilised in many local communities. Based on this foundation, community members had further explored and regularised their rituals to commemorate the dead, usually using the Buddhist festivals. In the early stages of post-KR development, the community authorities had conducted a series of ‘Solidarity Village Commemoration,’ Buddhist rituals specifically for the victims of the KR violence. These commemorations were usually conducted at each village once a year after the harvesting season. Many people enthusiastically joined these commemorations, contributing money, rice, and other valuables despite extreme economic hardships (Interview X). After this period, the commemorations for the victims were conducted at the family units (e.g., Bon Pachay Boun) or integrated into regular Buddhist festivals on Cambodian New Year’s Day and Pchum Ben period. Pchum Ben is a festival that

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usually takes place between late September and mid-October. During the festival, people commemorate and do merit-making for their ancestors usually up to seven generations (Guillou, 2012). The rituals which were part of these festivals occasionally occurred at the monuments of the KR victims (Interview VIII). From a conceptual perspective on everyday peace, the practices for healing and commemoration in Cambodia in this particular period are relevant to the facilitation of passivity. The practices of commemoration apparently did not consider their relations with former KR leaders. It was more about dealing with their inner anxiety and sense of loss. Nevertheless, such practices addressing inner anxiety were an important process for reducing people’s violent expression of their anger, i.e., vengeance killing. Having alternative ways to openly mourn and handle their previous pain, which were more in line with their cultural tradition, they had fewer reasons to rely on direct violence. For many people who had a strong sense of guilt towards the dead victims, the revival of commemorative practice offered the opportunity to wash out their sense of guilt as an alternative to the punishment of the harm-doers. Moreover, as the Buddhist practices became more active, the Buddhist teachings that prevent violence and hatred also became more prevalent. Hence, people in these local communities tended to rely on commemoration for the dead (which they believe was practically helpful to the victims) rather than violent aggression against the former KR cadres (which is likely to bring about negative consequence in terms of karma). In this regard, an interview source mentions that “They [the dead] departed without taking Dhamma [Buddhist law or teaching] and religious ceremony. I pray that the spirits of my relatives be at peace. What had happened have passed already. I pray for the happiness of the next generation” (Unpublished interview data, collected by Bunly Soeung, 2019). Moreover, survivors’ involvement in psychological healing is an important part of social reconciliation, laying the mental foundation for survivors to engage in different relations with perpetrators. As Staub and Pearlman (2003) explain, psychological healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness are inter-related processes. Social reconciliation cannot be processed without addressing traumatised people’s mental well-being in order that they are able to cope with the past and accept their counterparts’ points of view. In this regard, the practice of commemoration during Pchum Ben (and other Buddhist festivals) was in a sense “an act

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of mourning, a demonstrative activity expressing grief” that is important for internal healing (Ledgerwood, 2012, p. 191).

Direct Engagement with Former KR Leaders Some local communities had demonstrated early signs of making direct engagement with former KR leaders. Their initiatives were made in a cautious and gradual way, utilising multi-layered and constant communications. The PRK government had carried on a variety of local development campaigns ranging from the construction of local infrastructure to the promotion of new agricultural skills. In these processes, the government officials were encouraged to include former KR associates in the collective labour related to these campaigns. Responding to such calls, some community leaders took explicit but symbolic actions to include former KR cadres in these projects. In the early phase of postKR reconstruction, a large number of infrastructure recovery projects were undertaken in local communities. These projects aimed to repair or reconstruct destroyed roads, irrigation facilities, schools, and local medical centres. The seniors in these community openly and repeatedly highlighted the practical reasons for including former KR leaders in community activities (e.g., ‘we need more labour’ ‘the person (former KR leader) is particularly skilful at this’). Moreover, they informed former KR cadres of the public or religious events occurring in the communities and, if ex-leaders turned up, they quietly allowed space for them to join. Through such processes, many ex-KR leaders were incorporated into the community activities on a regular basis without facing strong resistance from the victims of the KR violence and other community members. Once they were incorporated into community activities, many former KR leaders attempted to make more contributions than others in order to demonstrate their genuine willingness to be good community members. The conciliatory manner presented by some KR leaders was described by a research participant in Battambang: Yes, we could see their nicer attitude in many ways. You know, when they saw us, those former Khmer Rouge commanders in chief or head of cadres greeted us in a very polite way saying “Sampah, chum reap sour”, a formal and respectful greeting that can be offered to the Buddha, parents and old seniors. Second, wherever they lived, they tried to bring happiness to their neighbours. They did not show their pride of having

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been high ranking position under Khmer Rouge. They were not boastful, but down to earth. (…) They practiced Buddhism. Under Khmer Rouge, they were indoctrinated and they forgot about religion. (…) After Khmer Rouge regime collapsed, people’s attitude changed. They turned towards Buddhism again. (Interview XX)

In addition to ‘working together,’ these people engaged in dialogues with former KR leaders on various things during the break times and over lunch or dinner. Although it was rare that they directly talked about KRrelated issues, the participants in my field research mentioned that they sensed the apologetic and regretful manner of these KR leaders during the interaction. These former KR cadres were occasionally invited to informal gatherings at night for socialisation and drink. In some cases, such informal gatherings offered important opportunities to open up their experience during the KR period without galvanising people’s anxiety. While these topic areas were too sensitive to be discussed in public, many community members from both perpetrator and victim sides were able to promote the venue for engaging in dialogues on their experiences. For instance, one community leader in Svay Rieng mentioned that he was able to ask some former KR associates about even some sensitive issues: Q:

A:

Q: A:

Q: A:

Have you had any chance to have a proper talk with a former KR leader about their commitment? For example, have you asked why they had to kill so many people? Yes, I did. Rather than in a serious manner, I tried to make the conversation light. They usually said that they felt bad with their previous actions. Also, they looked sad when they explained that they were ordered to do that. If they hadn’t followed the order, they would have been killed as well. When they came back hometown, did they normally try to hide themselves? Yes the people who came back are usually the people who has not done particularly cruel actions however they were still scared of people and then try to live far away. Has any of them given a clear apology? No. (Interview IV)

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In such conversations, former KR leaders managed to share their own experiences of being victimised by KR. For instance, one former KR associate summarised what he had shared with some community members as below: I never forget about Khmer Rouge regime at all. Under the regime, I lost my grandparents, aunts and uncles and my relatives even though I did not lose any sibling. I lost around 8-10 relatives such as grandparents, aunties, uncles and cousins. I don’t know how other people feel but I am personally not happy with that at all. Because of this regime, I lost my beloved cousins. We were very close and had a lot of good memory. If I am not wrong, I lost around 15 relatives. (Interview XI).

In short, community members promoted the social relations with former KR leaders who were living in the communities. Based on their sympathy for the former leaders, they promoted subtle but collective actions to protect them from potential security threats and gradually incorporated them into community activities. There were still many people who harboured uncomfortable feelings or anxiety towards KR or its local leaders; however, community residents appreciated that the value of maintaining harmonious relationship with them is more important than expressing their anger. Due to these actions, former KR leaders were at least allowed to manage their livelihood and participate in most community activities without worrying about serious discrimination or threat. In this type of relations, although people had strong anxiety against KR’s brutal ruling, they did not particularly attribute it to its local leaders unless these individuals had taken particularly nasty actions. Instead, community leaders had generated and strengthened the narrative identifying them as a ‘forced offender.’ They had been picked up by the KR authority to be a local leader without being given any choice of accepting or declining the appointment. Moreover, all the harsh actions that they committed were enforced by the order of the seniors. One statement from the author’s interviews represents well such an approach: To be honest, it [the anger against KR] was in our heart, but we did not verbally express it. We just tried to build friendship with them as if they were our relatives or sibling. That is why we can live together in harmony. (Interview VII)

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Discussion: Conceptualising Passivity One outstanding feature of everyday reconciliation described in this chapter is the prevalence of passivity. Practices like discouragement of revenge and healing and commemoration are most relevant to this state. As discussed in Chapter 1, the term passivity is adopted to describe the situation where people accept the physical coexistence with their counterparts simply to avoid further violence and sustain basic security. When examined by the conventional framework for measuring reconciliation, the inter-group relationship building in passivity is very moderate. People keep their direct interaction with their counterparts to a minimum and they often do not even recognise the counterparts’ very presence. Hence, the risk of the resumption of violence is still high, and involved parties may feel unsure about their security and social stability. Hence, in many previous studies on social reconciliation and peacebuilding, the inter-group dynamics and social contexts relevant to passivity have been conceptualised as stunted or unfulfilled reconciliation in the society that should be improved further. A number of institutional or programme-based arrangements have been proposed and applied in the previous peacebuilding process in order to promote more prompt social reconciliation and address the factors which prevent social reconciliation. Some examples include activities for truth-finding, punitive, or restorative justice to let the former harm-doers realise their responsibility, and psychological healing (Rigby, 2001; Smyth, 2007). The value of such arrangements needs to be properly acknowledged. At the same time, however, it is a missed opportunity that the value and significance of the state of ‘passivity’ in the previous studies and practices are not fully recognised in the previous studies and practices. Among others, this chapter will highlight two particular discussion points related to the significance of passivity. Firstly, nonviolent coexistence between the parties involved in mass violence is a highly significant step for peacebuilding but is a difficult one to achieve. The maintenance of basic security is a critical factor that enables people to have a stable mental state, often identified as ontological security, with which they can engage in all other social activities including reconciliation (Dupuis, 2012; Harries, 2017; Lee, 2020). Despite its significance, many previous studies on post-conflict reconciliation confirm the difficulty and significance of promoting a shift from violent conflict to mutually accepted nonviolent coexistence. Many

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inter-group dynamics, for instance in Israel–Palestine, Syria, Angola, and the Philippines (Mindanao) had invested long periods to promote and stabilise the mechanisms for nonviolent coexistence. However, it had taken complex processes to reach an agreement on this and they suffered from the fragility of the mechanisms (Arai, 2022). The same level of significance was identified in the promotion of passivity in local communities in Cambodia. After having a long period of mass violence, community members feared an uncertain future under the new PRK regime. They strongly hoped to create a space in which to feel safe and were keen to reduce the violence generated from within their own communities. It was the period when people’s negative emotions visà-vis KR were too ‘raw’ and people had not done the necessary internal processing to make sense of their past experiences. Hence, it was premature to facilitate a high level of inter-group reconciliation between former KR cadres and the survivors. People negatively reacted to any actions that apparently looked like an acknowledgement of KR leaders’ legitimacy or appreciation of the challenges facing the KR leaders. In this regard, although the practices relevant to passivity described above may apparently look insufficient for the promotion of social reconciliation, they represent how community members pursued their primary objectives while dealing with the challenges facing them. In particular, ‘condemning the uselessness or counter-productivity of violence’ was a useful narrative that could convince local youths to withhold the use of violence without intensifying their anxiety. Secondly, in many conflict-affected societies, to have a period of ‘nonrecognition’ offers an important foundation for promoting higher levels of social reconciliation. In this context, Arai (2022)’s recent study on ‘functional coexistence’ shed light on the study of passivity. In this conceptualisation, functional coexistence denotes “a state of non-fighting, which has come into being under the sustained conditions of mutual denial and non-recognition” (Arai, 2022, p. 123). There are many situations where people clearly appreciate the practical utility of ‘nonviolent coexistence’ without necessarily involving conflict resolution or relational reconciliation. Especially when different groups have been involved in historical frictions over a long period, to have such coexistence with mutual non-recognition can be an important element and process so that they can move into the next phase of relationship building or conflict resolution. Importantly, Arai acknowledges that the state of functional coexistence may continue for a long while, even for decades. However,

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Arai (2022, p. 125) argues—referring to Bell and Pospisil (2017) and Feldman (2012)—that, when this process of functional coexistence is effectively utilised (possibly with assistance from external actors), this phase of (non)interaction can lay an important foundation for “longitudinal shifts in the public mindsets on conflict experience.” Examination of the empirical evidence confirms the validity of Arai’s discussions. The practices for promoting higher levels of inter-group interaction could be mobilised only in the communities where passivity was solidly maintained. As Chapters 4 and 5 of this volume will further articulate, for instance, the initiatives for community residents’ direct interaction with former KR leaders in Battambang started substantially later than the communities in Svay Rieng and Phnom Penh, the other two areas where the author conducted case studies. This is mainly due to the level of violence and unstable social governance in Battambang. As a caveat, the social interaction reflecting passivity does not necessarily bring about further promotion of social reconciliation. There are many cases in which the state of passivity returned to violent conflicts. The passivity may continue for decades before making any progress to the next phase of conflict resolution or social reconciliation. Another caveat is that such an acknowledgement should not be used as the conceptual legitimisation of the status quo. The chances for the state of passivity to promote further reconciliation requires a consolidated will of the people and related skills and mechanisms, that are developed to reflect the particular social contexts. In this regard, Arai (2022, p. 144)’s study articulates the importance of acknowledging “(1) the need to stay constructively engaged in an enduring state of nonresolution, (2) the usefulness of building a systemic, multi-layered view of conflict intervention to overcome structural violence and submissive inaction, and (3) the possibility of turning short-term actions into long-term systemic change.” The above case studies demonstrate that a new theoretical discussion can be generated by focusing on the significance of passivity or functional coexistence in the process of conflict resolution and social reconciliation. In local communities, for instance, it may represent community members’ primary and urgent desire to recover normal life and community. Although it may not apparently look similar to the peace or reconciliation of many academic studies (especially the ones adopting positive peace approaches), the value and significance of passivity will need to be recognised from the views of the local communities. Moreover,

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given the acknowledgement of passivity as a step to further reconciliation, this finding may be a warning that peacebuilding efforts to quickly promote a high level of social reconciliation may be counterproductive in some social contexts. When the social grounds is premature, the efforts for facilitating inter-group dialogue may intensify people’s inner pain and inter-group anxiety.

Conclusion Thus far, this chapter has introduced the features of everyday practices which emerged in the early phase of the post-KR period, focusing on three objectives: discouragement of revenge killing, healing and commemoration, and direct engagement with former KR leaders. The practices examined in this chapter appeared in a relatively short period in a particular context immediately after the collapse of the KR regime. The mobilisation of the practices emerged from more explicit actions and was frequently in the form of projects or events. Moreover, it is a unique feature that community members relied so much on the platforms set by the government in order to promote the practices for rebuilding their relationship with local KR leaders. In this regard, the practices in this period are exceptional examples that are distinct from the everyday practices that emerged in the later phases of the post-KR period. In understanding the practices in this period, it should be highlighted that these everyday practices were not promoted through a pre-planned collective action coordinated by a certain leadership. Instead, they are the efforts that many community members made organically in order to deter the kind of uncontrolled violence that only exacerbates chaotic life conditions and prevents further taking of human life, in response to the extremely limited resources available to them. When they had no other tools or resources to use, community seniors decided to speak directly to angry individuals, risking their own safety. There were many people who faced the threat of being killed, while attempting to hide former KR leaders. Then, when a new authority began to function, people sought the opportunity for psychological healing and rebuilding of their relationships with some former KR leaders by utilising the government’s policies and projects. When the short transition became settled, the features of everyday reconciliation practices in local communities gradually transformed. As the resources of local communities slowly increased in terms of local

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leadership, material resources, channels for communication, and cultural practices, community members had better opportunities to mobilise more practices according to their own needs and perspectives. These transformations will be further examined in Chapter 4. Interview List Interview I, A former KR leader in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview II, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2021) Interview III, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview IV, A community leader in Svay Rieng (January 2019) Interview V, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview VI, A person who once served as a local KR leader but was discharged later, living in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview VII, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview VIII, A local leader living in Svay Rieng (November 2020) Interview IX, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XVI, A community leader in Svay Rieng (June 2022) Interview XX, A community leader in Battambang (January 2019)

References Arai, T. (2022). Functional coexistence in intractable conflict: A decades-long view of conflict intervention. Peace and Change, 47 (2), 118–151. https:// doi.org/10.1111/pech.12523 Bell, C., & Pospisil, J. (2017). Navigating inclusion in transitions from conflict: The formalized political unsettlement. Journal of International Development, 29(5), 576–593. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2922470 Bennett, C. (2018). Karma after Democratic Kampuchea: Justice outside the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 12(3), 68–82. https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.12.3.1567 Dupuis, A. (2012). Ontological security. In S. J. Smith, M. Elsinga, L. F. O’Mahony, O. S. Eng, & S. Wachter (Eds.), International encyclopedia of housing and home (Vol. 7, pp. 156–160). Oxford University Press.

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Feldman, L. G. (2012). Germany’s foreign policy of reconciliation: From enmity to amity. Rowman & Littlefield. Guillou, A. Y. (2012). An alternative memory of the Khmer Rouge genocide: The dead of the mass graves and the land guardian spirits [teak ta]. South East Asia Research, 20(2), 207–226. https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2012.0102 Harries, T. (2017). Ontological security and natural hazard. In S. L. Cutter (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of natural hazard science. Oxford University Press. https://oxfordre.com/naturalhazardscience/view/10.1093/acr efore/9780199389407.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389407-e-279 Kent, A. (2003). Recovery of the collective spirit: The role of the revival of Buddhism in Cambodia (Working Paper No. 8). Department of Social Anthropology, Gothenburg University. Ledgerwood, J. (2012). Buddhist ritual and the reordering of social relations in Cambodia. South East Asia Research, 20(2), 191–205. https://doi.org/10. 5367/sear.2012.0100 Lee, S. (2020). Local resilience and the reconstruction of social institutions: Recovery, maintenance and transformation of Buddhist Sangha in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 14(3), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2020.1736448 McGrew, L. (2011). Reconciliation in Cambodia: Victims and perpetrators living together, apart (Doctoral thesis). Coventry University. Pearlman, L. (2003). Healing, reconciliation, and forgiving after genocide and other collective violence. In E. Staub (Ed.), The psychology of good and evil: Why children, adults, and groups help and harm others (pp. 432–450). Cambridge University Press. Rigby, A. (2001). Justice and reconciliation: After the violence. Lynne Rienner. Smyth, M. B. (2007). The function of truth recovery in transitional societies. In M. B. Smyth (Ed.), Truth recovery and justice after conflict: Managing violent pasts (Chapter 2, pp. 6–21). Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Development and Stabilisation of Social Relationship

In Chapter 3, this study examined everyday practices which emerged in the aftermath of the KR regime, with the primary aim of facilitating nonviolent coexistence between former KR leaders and other community members. The practices in the early phases of social reconstruction in the post-KR period were mobilised by community members with relatively clear objectives like violence prevention and commemoration. The forms of the practices were somewhat artificial involving community members’ deliberate engagement in dialogues or mobilisation of special events or projects. These features reflect the social contexts immediately after KR’s mass violence, in which community members had to rebuild almost all social governance from scratch. If there was something that they wanted, they had to create relevant processes and activities based on a minimum material and institutional foundation. Further to the analysis, this chapter pays attention to the stabilisation and further development of everyday practices in the later phases of the post-KR social reconstruction. As time went by, the project-like practices that had been conducted in the earlier periods (e.g., bone collection, the government-led collective commemorations, local development projects) came to an end. Moreover, many local communities gradually recovered their inner resources (e.g., social network, financial capability, cultural institutions) with which they could mobilise more activities on

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their own. Accordingly, the nature of everyday practices for social reconciliation shifted to types that could be integrated into their everyday life and other social activities. The forms of practices which have become more subtle in this regard are, by and large, interlinked with the traditional Buddhist events and festivals that regularly take place (Guillou, 2012). The empirical study in this chapter will descriptively analyse the forms of such everyday practices mobilised in this period and the features of actions and interactions between community members undertaken in this process. It firstly offers a brief overview of the political, security, and social contexts that underly the everyday practices in local communities. It then introduces and examines specific forms of everyday practice, adopting four types of reconciliation—passivity, sociality and reciprocity, and solidarity—as the broad analytical framework.

Contextual Backgrounds The practices introduced in this chapter have been developed since the stabilisation of political power in the local areas in Phnom Penh, Svay Rieng, and Battambang. After a period in which there was a power vacuum, with strong support (or intervention) from Vietnam, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) re-established the state governance system and extended its security and bureaucratic power to most local areas. The regime managed to enhance its local governance mechanisms, appointing government officials in most local areas except for a few KR strongholds. Although the economic conditions were difficult due to the ongoing civil conflicts and the restrictions in international trade, community members in rural areas could maintain substantially more stable livelihoods compared to the KR period. In dealing with KR history, importantly, the PRK government focused only on the responsibility of the top leaders who had the ultimate power to order the ‘genocide’ and encouraged people not to blame low-rank KR cadres for the violence and killings which occurred under KR. From community members’ perspectives, this meant that they now had a political authority to give clear directions about local security and from which to seek help when they had major issues. The more state-like governance system adopted by PRK was largely welcomed by the Cambodians who had suffered from KR’s radical, unprofessional, and unilateral control system.

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Under the more stable environment, many local communities gradually recovered the social interaction and human network that had existed in the pre-KR period. Most of these human networks were maintained in an informal manner, relying on the reciprocal interactions between individual households. Indeed, local villages in rural areas had traditionally adopted different types of exchanges between households such as labour sharing for farming and house building, reciprocal lending of agricultural tools, collective cooking for community feasting, and providing emergency financial support. In mobilising such mutual help systems, community members chose whom to work with based on the preestablished trust. Reciprocal endorsement mechanisms had proved to be an important leverage to encourage or restrict the actions of community members (Collins, 1998; Ledgerwood, 1998; Marston, 1997). In addition, there had been some organised associations that played important roles in local communities. For instance, the pagoda committee usually presents a clear leadership structure with the chiefs and members and is officially affiliated to a local monastery. Community members undertook the process to revitalise such individual and collective forms of the social network over time. Under these social and political conditions, an increasing number of local communities had a better foundation for promoting a higher level of social relations such as sociality and reciprocity although the dynamics of local practices vary area by area. Community members’ aggressive actions towards the KR leaders, whom they considered cruel, gradually transformed into more subtle forms of actions (or non-actions) like social shunning and avoidance. Moreover, the local KR leaders who had been considered modest and sympathetic to community members had better opportunities to re-engage in community activities.

Promotion of Passivity People’s deep trauma and anxiety did not disappear or erode within a short period of time. Then, when such a rampant dynamic settled down, what happened in local communities which still harboured strong anxiety and antagonism towards KR leaders? As an extraordinary time of overt expression of anger had passed, people explored practices that could maintain the balance between expressing people’s anxiety and maintaining non-violent coexistence with former KR leaders at the same time. The forms of practices adopted

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for this purpose were substantially more subtle, in which people could “hide[s] it inside the body” (leak tuk knong kluen), “put[s] (or keep[s]) it in the head” (tuk knong khuor kbal ), or “bur[y] (or hide[s]) it in the heart” (bangkap/leak knong chett ) (Hinton, 1998, p. 356). However, while the forms of these practices may be less explicit, their impact on the relationship between former KR leaders and other community members was still substantial. The practices mobilised for this purpose could be categorised into two types: social shunning and the avoidance of the past. Social Shunning Local communities often sought ways to continue to express their anxiety without critically disrupting local security. One such strategy adopted when many people could not accept coexistence with former KR leaders in the same community was to exclude former perpetrators from the community and minimise interaction with them. The disconnection from the interaction was perceived by local residents as an indirect punishment to the former harm-doers while effectively reducing the security risk that they might face. In terms of the forms, social shunning could be expressed in the form of physical segregation, a mutual process whereby both victims and perpetrators avoid physical interaction. In fear of experiencing revenge or oppression, former KR cadres had run away or settled in an isolated places near their hometowns, building a shelter in places where people do not usually pass by. Community residents do not approach these houses nor invite former KR cadres to any social events in the community. The former cadres and their families do not usually come to the villages unless there are special reasons. One such example was expressed in an interview in Battambang that mentioned “There is a leader of local cooperative during KR. His name is Mr W . He did many bad things to people, and when he came back, he was too scared to come to village. So, he hid himself from people living in a place over there. Other people never sought to see him. We rarely see him, and when he sees us, he behaves as if he lost his confidence. We don’t talk to him” (Interview IX, the name of the former KR leader was anonymised). In some areas in Battambang where many KR associates had lived in groups, the reduction of physical interaction occurred at the village level. Community members stopped interacting with the villages where many

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former KR associates lived together. In such cases, the perception of these KR-dominant communities was a mixture of suspicion and fear. There is a village called S. Most of the villagers are former Khmer Rouge people. After Khmer Rouge [rule], they have lived there. (…) They are different. After the war, we did not dare to go to their area. (...) No, many people still don’t like the KR people. We have to be connected to them for business and work. But we don’t fully trust them. I feel that they are hard and [their motivations are] not fully pure. There is something small in there. (Interview II, the name of the village was anonymised)

In other cases, former KR leaders were allowed to dwell within local villages but their interaction with community members was minimised. In many cases, when necessary, they were able to maintain essential livelihood activities such as shopping and working. They did participate in most of the government-led initiatives or activities such as elections and local development projects. Nevertheless, their participation in social activities was kept to a minimum. They were excluded from most important events in local communities like weddings and funerals. While they could participate in Buddhist festivals, it was rare that they were involved in the preparation process that requires substantial engagement with community members (Interviews I, II, III and V). The quotes below come from two interviews conducted in Battambang which describe such internal shunning process: Q:

A:

Q: A: Q: A: Q:

In general, the action for punishing the Khmer Rouge has not taken so much. Nobody actually cared your pain. Many Khmer Rouge people still survive. How did you manage the situation? I was angry but I didn’t know what to do. If I kill him [the KR leader] I would be a criminal. Also, we relied on Buddha teaching. In Buddhism, people eventually receive the consequence of what they do. When they came back at least did they show some apologetic manner? He behaved normally but he tried to hide himself. How did village member treat him and his family? They didn’t treat them bad. The people in this village are very modest. Are the former Khmer Rouge invited to weddings and other events?

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A:

People did not invite them. We didn’t participate in their funerals. Step-by-step Mr Hun and his family all died and then the house was left empty. Now the house was removed and the land was given to a monk. (Interview V)

Q:

How do community residents deal with them? Do they invite the former Khmer Rouge leaders to their ceremonies like wedding? Yes occasionally. But not many people do that. Do community members present similar attitudes toward the family members of those former Khmer Rouge leaders? The former Khmer Rouge didn’t attempt to join public activities. Sometimes people in the village invited them but they never turned up. When people don’t invite the Khmer Rouge people, they don’t invite their families either because they don’t like them. (Interview XVII)

A: Q: A:

Although there are cases where it was adopted more as a particular victim or community member’s individual action, social shunning in more cases should be understood as a collective action (or non-action) adopted by many community members and a practice that has been embedded in their everyday life. Although no one explicitly imposes social isolation on the targeted KR leaders, people take such a practice as a tacit norm within their own communities. Often, children who do not understand the underlying reasons follow what other adults do (Interview XVIII). In this regard, compared to the examples of passivity introduced in Chapter 3, social shunning is more subtle in its form but more stable and sustainable in its impact. Avoidance of the Past The sense of passivity was often presented as victims’ desire to stay away from the KR-related issues. Their avoidance of the past usually reflects community members’ sense of exhaustion or helplessness after suffering the long-term psychological consequences of the KR violence without having the chance to address them. Apparently, the actions and nonactions based on this type of motivation may look tolerant (or even reconciliatory) as people usually carry on their everyday life without taking any particular actions against former KR cadres. The cadres are freely involved in social activities like Buddhist festivals. When they operate businesses, community members do not mind using their services.

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When the communities require collective labour, the families of former KR cadres are requested to contribute. Nevertheless, when asked about the motivations lying behind such tolerance-like actions, respondents in this category do not express sympathetic emotions vis-à-vis the KR leaders. Instead, avoidance represents people’s survival strategy when the social conditions for dealing with their past suffering are not suitable. As they cannot see immediately available resources with which they can address their pain, they decide to turn their attention away from the issue. The situation in Cambodia is a good representation of such social conditions. Most of these victims and community members had gone through economic hardships often combined with security instability. When the government’s policy to “dig a hole and bury the past” (Hun Sen 1998, cited in Chandler, 2008, p. 356) was adopted after the civil war, community members had limited space for talking about the past. Under such circumstances, many community residents decided to move on from the painful memory and trauma. These people tend to avoid any commitment to activities related to the KR issues and “just follow what is going on” and believe “everything has gone like the disappearing flame of fire” (Interview I). From this perspective, a number of research participants responded that their lives were too busy to keep thinking of the KR issues, as expressed in the following quotes: During the Khmer Rouge, I lost one of my uncles. But my mother never asked who killed him. She just came back to life and then worked hard to get rice. Reconciliation at individual person’s life was like that. When they were hungry, it was difficult for them to discuss who killed whom. (Interview XVII) I think that it is useless to talk about it. Time by time, the history just disappeared. It is not new, but it happened more than 40 years ago. We all feel tired of it. (Interview XI) They didn’t want to forgive. But they didn’t have energy to commit to revenge. (Interview IX)

Victims’ avoidance of the past may require a lot of effort in the cases where former KR leaders, who had done a lot of harm to them, are present in their everyday lives. In this process, a large number of victims consciously or unconsciously attempt to undervalue the significance of

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their experience during the KR period or the impact of seeing former KR leaders. In response to the author’s question on how they felt about former KR leaders, a number of interview participants mentioned that while the former KR leaders in their communities were not forgiven, they did not consider them important to their lives. For instance, while explaining why he allowed a harm-doer in his community, one interview participant mentioned “I don’t take him human and don’t care whether he is there. When a bloodsucker bites you, do you spend so much time to bite back?” (Interview XIX). While the statement itself sounds like he ignores the presence of the harm-doer, the respondent significantly raised his voice, uncomfortably smiled, and looked away from the interviewer, which demonstrates that the issue still had an emotional impact on the respondent.

Sociality and Reciprocity There were a few types of local activities adopted for promoting a more conciliatory relationship with former KR leaders. Community members have promoted various types of relations with KR associates that are broadly relevant to both sociality and reciprocity. In the early stages of governance recovery after KR, community leaders encouraged people to acknowledge former KR leaders whose behaviour during the KR rule had been moderate. In these cases, although there was usually a period of cautious and passive re-engagement, both former KR cadres and other community members tended to recover a collaborative relationship without strong resistance. Both sides had exchanged symbolic and/or indirect signals to express their good intentions to each other. As time went by, such collaborative and inclusive relations gradually settled into various states. In some cases, for example, former harm-doers were able to participate in official activities (especially those organised by the government) and engage in economic activities (e.g., selling products at markets, providing labour service) without significant discrimination or restriction. Community members enhanced the opportunities for mutual interactions between them and former KR cadres in their local areas, by inviting them into these cultural and social events. As mentioned by a research participant, participation in such community-oriented activities is a crucial element for mobilising a sense of community:

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In our culture and traditions, we have many rituals and traditional events including the wedding ceremony. This strengthens our sense of solidarity. We joined together according to our own available resources. We can contribute and share the money, labour and materials. The participation in these cultural and religious events made us more solidarity and made us to realize that there is nothing more important than unity in the community. (Interview XX)

Then, how did community residents initiate their first engagement with former KR leaders and what platforms did they utilise to further enhance the sense of community? While community members in the early phase of the post-KR period relied on many one-off events mobilised by the government or communities, people gradually shifted the forms of practices to utilise the events and rituals that occur in their local areas, which were not apparently relevant to social reconciliation. In other words, everyday practices for incorporating former KR leaders into community activities in this period are more integrated into the wider everyday practices. Among others, many interview participants emphasised the importance of annual Buddhist festivals and locally mobilised social events, as the platforms utilised by themselves for this purpose. When these activities were successfully implemented, these activities often generated the dynamics relevant to sociality or reciprocity defined by Mac Ginty (2022). Utilisation of Buddhist Festivals Chapter 3 introduced community members’ adoption of Buddhist rituals primarily for healing and commemoration, and discussed the significance of Buddhist practices primarily in relation to the promotion of passivity. Further to this analysis, it is important to acknowledge that the utility of such religious activities as peacebuilding measures has gradually expanded and diversified over the time. After the most turbulent period passed, many communities managed more stable social interactions in which community members felt more safe and normal. Especially in the communities where promotion of passivity was successfully implemented, the space for a higher level of social relations like sociality had also increased. Community members became more interested in mingling with former KR leaders whom they thought acceptable. In such cases, Buddhist ceremonies and rituals were considered the most natural venues

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to start “a process to restore the disrupted social relations” that link survivors, former KR leaders, and the deceased victims (Ledgerwood, 2012, p. 191). Coincidently, since the observance of Buddhist festivals was granted under the new regime, Cambodians have continued commemorative rituals for the dead and expanded the number of Buddhist festivals that they observe. As the number of regular festivals increased, the opportunities for mutual interactions between former harm-doers and other community members also increased. Pchum Ben festival is particularly important in this context. Pchum Ben is an annual festival occurring between September and October, to make offerings to pret (hungry ghost) that is unable to go on to rebirth, usually due to unusual causes of death or death without a proper funeral or burial. In the Cambodian tradition, pret was believed to do harm to living humans if they do not conduct merit-making rituals for them. Hence, Cambodian Buddhists tend to do regular rituals for the deceased ancestors and family members. The activities during Pchum Ben usually carry on for 15 days in which people collectively cook food, offer it to monks, and collectively share it with other community members. Importantly, community members exchange the stories of the ancestors for whom they particularly pray for, which generates the opportunity for commemoration and trauma healing. As this festival is meant to be an event for all community members, people tend to invite and welcome people who might not attend other smaller-scale events. Moreover, over repeated occasions of collective labour and food sharing, community members and former KR cadres had good opportunities to employ ‘everyday tactics’ to express their good intention to each other. These everyday tactics can incorporate verbal communication, symbolic gesture, or even being present in the same place and silence. However, the messages lying behind such subtle and episodic actions are usually well received by former KR leaders and other community members. For instance, a quote from Ledgerwood (2012) captures well a moment where a community members’ action turns her passivity towards a KR leader into sociality: Mrs Bo had been telling me stories all week of the surviving Khmer Rouge cadre who still lived in the village – about how he was universally despised, and how no-one had forgotten his cruelty during those years. He had been married, but his wife had left him and taken the children years before. She said people had as little to do with him and his widowed mother as they

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could. But at Pchum Ben, the man and his mother attended and made food offerings. When everyone sat to eat after the offerings to the monks, Mrs Bo caught my eye. She very deliberately walked over to where the food was, took two desserts and served them to the cadre and his mother. It was a purposeful and ritualized act of reconciliation. (Ledgerwood, 2012, pp. 200–201)

Offering Practical Reasons for Invitation In analysing these types of everyday practices in Cambodia, another important feature observed is related to ‘how’ community leaders and members invited KR leaders. In the later phases of the post-KR reconstruction process, there are many local communities that took more proactive actions to acknowledge and value the former KR leaders as members of the community. Nevertheless, in such a process of invitation, it is rare that people engage in straightforward communication for apology and forgiveness. Instead, community leaders frequently give practical reasons for inviting them to certain events or rituals. It usually has two functions: one is ‘face saving’ of some community members who disagree with the inclusion of former KR leaders, and the second is making former KR leaders feel easier about joining. For instance, a community in Phnom Penh mentioned that they lacked human labour and needed to incorporate more people’s contributions into community development projects: We [seniors in my village] let them [former KR cadres] know that we do need their helps. This made them feel warmly socialized. [We said that] they had their skills as a chef or a house builder and we need their skills. If we had not talked to them about our needs for helps, they would have been lonely and disliked. But during the ceremony we invited them to lead or to preside over the ceremony. Nowadays, they have rights and liberty as equal as us. (Interview VIII)

For many people, the specific reasons that were officially given did not really matter as they knew the intention behind the invitation. Considering the former, for instance, such recognition was sometimes expressed in the way that acknowledged each other’s valuable contribution to the communities:

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We exactly knew who the former Khmer Rouge officials and kitchen chief were, but followed a sort of win-win practice. We did not do something terrible against them. We forgave them. We have lived together as community members. Some of former cooperative head or kitchen head became achar wat, house builder, and chef etc. When we hold a party or a ceremony, we need a chef. Then, they cook foods for us. When we want to build a house, they help to build the house for us. When there is a funeral, they make a coffin for the deceased person and led the processing ceremony. (Interview VIII)

As such, local communities’ sociality and reciprocity are usually expressed and perceived in a subtle manner and often one action of the invitation set multiple objectives (Lee, 2021). Hence, community members may not consciously recognise and appreciate the significance of their daily conversations and practices relevant to them. However, when they were specifically asked the meanings of such indirect reasonings, most community members clearly articulated their significance and intention to incorporate former harm-doers into social activities. In this context, the interpretation of one research participant on an episode which occurred in his community is a good demonstration of this: A:

Q: A:

Q: A:

There was a time that the tribunal [the tribunal on the KR leaders’ war crimes] requested us to send people to join a study tour to the court. At that time, our village leader selected Mr H [former KR leaders] to join the first tour. Did he explain why? No. But everybody knew why. He [the village leader] wanted to help him [the former KR leader]. After visiting ECCC, people could become angry again and could be nasty to Mr H . So, did Mr H go? Yes. He looked happy to join it. And when he came back [from the visit], he talked about his experience everywhere. We knew why he was doing that. (Interview XVI, the name of the former KR leader was anonymised)

In response to such invitation, many KR leaders offered reciprocal actions to demonstrate their willingness to engage with other community members, usually in the form of active, and long-term commitment to, community service. The level of these individuals’ commitment was substantially more than the average amount of work that other community members offered. For instance, relatively wealthy KR leaders would

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host community events that were costly but highly regarded by community members. One research participant referred to his commitment while explaining the impact of ‘enthusiastic and voluntary’ contribution, as explained in the below quote. By constantly demonstrating their willing and humble commitment, some former KR leaders managed to establish their reputation as a trustworthy and reliable persons. Almost every year, I hold commemoration ceremony for those who were killed under Khmer Rouge era. Each family usually holds it individually. I invited many villagers to join the ceremonies that I organized. You can ask them if you don’t believe me. (Interview I)

Solidarity Solidarity in Mac Ginty (2022)’s conceptualisation is the most positive type of human interaction that can be mobilised in a society. In the state of solidarity, people share a sense of common identity and group cohesion, as well as engage in a high level of mutual interaction based on the recognition of their counterparts’ legitimacy. It is difficult to promote such a high level of social reconciliation in divided societies that have gone through massive violence and/or chronic warfare. Cambodia was no exception. Examples relevant to solidarity were rarely identified during the field research. During the author’s field research, it was tricky to analyse everyday ‘practices’ that were adopted to promote solidarity, which are distinct from the practices relevant to sociality and reciprocity. The chain of actions referred to by interview participants as the practices relevant to solidarity were in similar forms with the examples of sociality, like community-oriented initiatives or activities (e.g., Buddhist ceremonies, collective labour for local development) and reciprocal collaboration between households (e.g., labour exchanges for agricultural work) was frequently coordinated by community leaders. In fact, it is difficult or unrealistic to identify perfectly verifiable examples from local communities’ everyday practices that may represent different degrees of reconciliation on a linear scale. In this regard, some community members explained that there was no particular form of action that had been especially mobilised for promoting solidarity. Instead, a higher level of social relation has gradually been promoted through the continued exchanges of the same types

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of positive interactions. In some successful cases, there was a virtuous cycle where one party’s trust-based action strengthened the counterpart’s acknowledgement that triggered another exchange of positive interaction. How then, in the continuation of similar types of everyday practices, can people discern if they have moved into a higher level of social reconciliation? Upon this question, a significant number of research participants shared some episodes that, they believe, were strong indicators of solidarity. Although the detailed stories vary, these examples can be broadly categorised into two forms of mutuality. Firstly, when things developed in a positive way, these former harmdoers chose to assume special roles highly regarded by community members or join mainstream political parties to demonstrate their genuine intention. Achar wat, lay functionaries who deal with the management of monasteries, is one such role that many former KR leaders assumed (Zucker, 2009). In Phnom Penh and Svay Rieng, it was not uncommon that mutual trust had been strengthened to the point that community members appointed former KR leaders to local leadership roles such as village leader and government officer. Appointment to these leadership roles requires strong support from core community leaders and the acceptance of most members. In this process, the actions of the former harm-doers to gain the community’s trust are a particularly important factor. Starting from the community rituals and commemorations, some former KR leaders gradually gained the opportunities to expand their community participation. I think villagers supported me to be a village chief because of my genuine kindness to them. Fortunately, since 1979, there has not been any forms of discrimination verbally or physically or attempts to attack me at all. I also joined the funeral of the villagers and of those who are relatives of the victims killed during Khmer Rouge regime. Almost every year, I have held commemoration ceremony for those who were killed under Khmer Rouge era. Each family usually holds it individually. I invited many villagers to join the ceremonies that I organized. (...) Later, villagers wanted me to be a village chief. You know, I was not happy with that position. Actually, I did not contact or talk with anyone to seek for their supports. I did not want to be amongst the village chief candidates at all frankly speaking because I knew that such work is very difficult based on my experience. During the Khmer Rouge time, I used to serve as a unit leader and I had to take too much responsibility on my

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shoulders. But, since people supported me to become a chief, I just carried on the role. Personally, my feeling was just normal. I just follow what is going on. I did not recall the past. (Interview I)

In short, while these leaders’ voluntary commitment to be an achar wat is a gesture to contribute to the local community activities, it is a clear sign that community members’ trust is high enough to accept them playing such an important role. Another strong indicator demonstrating solidarity was people’s willingness to include former KR leaders as part of their families. A number of interview participants shared examples of how some community members decided to arrange marriages between their children and former KR leaders or their family members. In these stories, the interview participants highlighted the importance of building a family relationship and explained how some former KR leaders had mobilised their reputation as trustworthy people to the point where they could get married to community members. The following quote from an interview describes how community members dealt with a former KR leader in a case where the mutual trust was raised to the level of solidarity. Moreover, it also describes that the former KR leader had continued his effort to make more positive contributions to the community activities after engaging in a marriage with a community member. When I received a proposal for marriage, I knew that he was a former head of kitchen. During the Khmer Rouge time, I would see him distributing foods to other people. I was not worried about him. I knew that he was a nice man. People said that he had not been cruel [during the KR time]. However, he was a widower of six children while I was single. So, it took time before I finally accepted him. Actually, at first I rejected his marriage proposal. It was my parents and other relatives convinced me to accept the proposal. They tried so hard. They said “He has a very nice mind, is diligent, and is skilful in many things. You will like him.” I pitied my parents who tried hard to convince me. They told me a lot about his good deeds. Finally, I decided to accept him into my life. In marriage life, skirmish is unavoidable. No one is perfect. Sometimes, we had verbal small conflict, but we are fine.

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I felt very happy when my husband became a member of the pagoda committee. He can serve the villagers who are Lord Buddha followers, leading and organizing religious ceremonies in the community. He became nicer and much nicer. Now, we have totally twelve children. Of them, six are from his former wife and the other six from me as a mother. One of his six children got married and lived in separate house while now eleven children live with us as a big family. (Interview XXI)

In some occasions, the foundation for solidarity had been built even under the KR period mainly based on individuals’ extraordinarily positive experiences with their counterparts (McGrew, 2011). This implies that the perspectives relevant to solidarity exist more as individual choices in Cambodia rather than as a social phenomenon that represents collective social dynamics. The respondents who expressed solidarity-related views shared particular experiences that had transformed their perspectives on the KR or the historical atrocities in the country. For instance, a person who had fought against the KR as a PRK soldier had some critical experiences of observing the humanitarian actions of a group of KR soldiers. When he and his comrades were wounded in the battlefields, to his surprise, KR soldiers came and helped them to escape. In response to his question of why they were helping him, a KR solider mentioned “I am a Khmer before being a Khmer Rouge. You are also a Khmer.” On other occasions, he was assigned to control KR war prisoners, and he was shocked that the war prisoners had the exactly same type of challenges and sense of fear. Through such an experience, he concluded that “There is nothing to forgive. We are all same Khmer and we happened to belong to different groups led by different leaders. We were forced to fight against each other” (Interview XXIV). Another example was shared by a community member in Svay Rieng. He knew a local KR security leader who had always been kind to the community members. According to him, the leader “never did violence or torture against us despite the Khmer Rouge’s very strict and tough policy. They even helped [them] sometimes. Therefore, after the collapse of Khmer Rouge regime, the villagers felt pity on them and just liked them” (Interview VII). He was particularly grateful that a couple of leaders mobilised the courage to alter the decision to kill some community members, which put their own lives at risk.

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Discussion 1: The Roles of Lost Memory When examining everyday practices regarding the KR history in Cambodia, an important factor that influences local dynamics is the intergenerational gap between the seniors in the communities and the youths who were born after the end of the civil war. As described above, the Cambodian government had suppressed open and public debates on the KR history roughly between the mid-1990s and late 2000s. The KRrelated issues had disappeared from most mass media coverage, education curricula, and other public debates. Apart from some episodic reports on the international tribunal on KR, little information has been seriously disseminated. Hence, the generation born since the early 1990s has grown up without having good opportunities to learn a comprehensive KR history. During the author’s interviews, multiple informants confirmed that they had barely heard of the KR issues. While they heard negative comments about KR, these comments were usually made briefly in the course of a wider conversation. Although some heard particular episodes about the KR rule from their family members and relatives, they had rare opportunities to get a comprehensive story about what happened and how it happened. Accordingly, most youths “know little or nothing about the Khmer Rouge years” (Mydans, 2009). For instance, one research participant mentioned: I think it depends on the situation of family education. If the family who experienced the Khmer Rouge regime shared the real life-story with their members, somehow the family members are interested in the Khmer Rouge history. However, I do not think many families do so. Most younger generation don’t believe what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime. During the last political campaign, not many of them joined us. (Interview IX)

Similar dynamics can be found in two nation-wide surveys conducted in 2008 and 2010. In these surveys, over 80% of the respondents who were born in the post-KR period had little knowledge about the KR regime and its human rights abuses (Pham et al., 2019). Now the number of young people who are ignorant about the KR history has significantly increased. As of 2022, approximately 70 per cent of the total population was below age 40 (Population Info, 2022). In short, a large portion of the population in Cambodia does not have a memory of the KR.

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Then, what influence did the inter-generational perception gap (or the ignorance of youth) have on the changing dynamics of local reconciliation? In the conventional studies, the people’s ignorance of past history was described as a challenge to justice and reconciliation, and the truthfinding and education about the past are considered as the first steps to social reconciliation (Gibson, 2005; Mydans, 2009; Smyth, 2007). Some interview participants presented similar views, depicting it as a problem or missed opportunity to lose the social memory on KR history (Interview XII). Based on the same notion, a number of non-governmental organisations have implemented various projects to re-educate the new generations on KR history, offering outreach education programmes, developing a mobile application, and adopting supplementary textbooks that cover the KR history. However, the author’s field research calls for a more careful examination of its impact. In some cases, this period of ‘silence’ offered an important foundation on which to promote a common social identity which includes former KR associates. Due to their ignorance, youths in the local communities had not been significantly affected by the social relations maintained between the people in the older generation. Hence, youths in local communities engage in their relationship with the descendants of former KR leaders without strong prejudice. Even in the communities where passivity is more prevalent, the youths in these communities had often not noticed the negative dynamics. While they occasionally sensed the uncollaborative relationship between households, some interview participants mentioned that they did not take it so seriously. Hence, the relationship between the children of different households has been developed regardless of the households’ association with KR. Reciprocity and solidarity were more prevalent among youths in most local communities in which the field research was conducted, in comparison to older generations. Under this circumstance, the external initiatives for promoting social reconciliation were well incorporated into the local communities’ own practices. There have been a large number of community-based reconciliation programmes promoted by national and international NGOs. In particular, since the establishment of ECCC, a number of Cambodian NGOs including Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, Kdei Kruna, Bophana Audiovisual Resources Centre, and Youth for Peace have conducted programmes for the community directly or indirectly associated with the tribunal’s operation. Most programmes initiated

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by these NGOs aim to reintroduce the KR history into local communities, promote psychological healing of victims, and facilitate reconciliatory dialogues between different groups. For most youths who participate in these programmes, it was the first opportunity to properly learn about the KR history and hear the testimonials of their community seniors. Some youths realised that their parents or grandparents were KR associates, and engaged in dialogues on this with their friends. As most programmes aimed to facilitate a ‘conciliatory’ space for the community, these youths had a better chance to incorporate these messages into their peer conversations, based on the pre-established trust between them (Interviews XIV and XV). To be clear, the above observation should not be simply interpreted to advocate for the utility of avoidance of the past. During the author’s interviews, a significant number of research participants communicated the pain of harbouring emotional anxiety without being able to express it. Many participants also expressed their hope to see a more systematic investigation of the crimes of KR (Interviews III and XII). Nevertheless, when focusing on community actors’ everyday practices for reducing inter-group anxiety, the increasing impact of new generations who are not subject to the existing inter-group stereotypes may bring about new social conditions. At least concerning the communities where the author’s field research was conducted, the foundation for social relationship has significantly changed over the time, particularly with the emergence of a new generation who do not know much about the KR atrocities.

Discussion 2: Pursuit of Emotional Needs The significant role of emotional needs in determining the dynamics of relationship building is another discussion point relevant to the above findings. Over the past decades, a large number of studies have explored how people’s emotional needs are important for promoting social reconciliation. Among others, the so-called ‘needs-based models of reconciliation’ has attracted keen academic attention. Although the detailed discussions vary, the researchers upholding these models single out agency and moral acceptance as the primary needs of victims and harm-doers, respectively (Abele et al., 2008; Abele & Wojciszke, 2013; Shnabel & Nadler, 2008; Shnabel et al., 2008, 2009). In the inter-group interactions, according to these studies, victims desire to rebound from their

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vulnerability by recovering and enhancing their agency whereas harmdoers want to gain social acceptance as moral social members. Based on this understanding, extensive findings have figured out how such emotional needs are conceptualised by the parties involved and how the recovery of the emotional needs affect the dynamics of social reconciliˇ ations in different social contexts (Cehaji´ c-Clancy et al., 2016; Shnabel, 2018; Shnabel & Nadler, 2010; SimanTov-Nachlieli & Shnabel, 2013; Woodyatt & Wenzel, 2014). While empirical studies on the needs-based models rely on quantitative data often constructed through field experiments or surveys, an area that has not been extensively analysed is the dynamics of intergroup interactions for gaining such emotional needs (Kang & Lee, 2022; Shnabel & Nadler, 2015). Hence, the question of ‘how different emotional needs of victims and harm-doers are perceived and pursued in the real settings of post-conflict reconciliation?’ has been left as an area for further research. In this regard, the above examination offers rare empirical evidence that demonstrates how victims and alleged perpetrators in mass violence pursue agency and moral acceptance, respectively, in the process of relationship recovery in local communities. Former KR leaders and their counterparts perceived the recovery of ‘moral acceptance’ and ‘agency’ as an important requirement for building a reciprocal and peaceful coexistence between them. Most survivors of KR violence had suffered from the symptoms of psychological trauma that usually appear after tragic shocks which apply “threats to lives or bodies; produce terror and feelings of helplessness; overwhelm an individual’s or group’s ability to cope or respond to the threat; lead to a sense of loss of control; and challenge a persons’ or group’s sense that life is meaningful and orderly” (Yoder, 2005, p. 10). Accordingly, in the post-KR period, it was important for these survivors to feel ‘empowered’ to pursue what had been prohibited, and to sense that they have a stronger position than the KR associates. The actions of vengeance killing and social shunning described in Chapters 3 and 4 largely reflect such desires, prioritising community members’ agency over former harm-doers. Moreover, a number of research participants confirmed that they had experienced a desire to feel their agency over KR leaders, making statements like: “He [a former KR leader] didn’t dare to come back to the village. He hid himself in his house in the area that is far. We were modest. We saw that he was scared and didn’t do any harm” (Interview V); “He is a bloodsucker to me. When a bloodsucker bites me, we don’t bite back” (Interview XXII);

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and “He [a former KR leader] was so committed to all Buddhist rituals. When we came across him, he always showed a very polite gesture to us. Yes, we liked his modest behaviour” (Interview XXIII). While being indirect, these comments demonstrate that victims and other community members felt it was easier to extend more inclusive and conciliatory actions to former KR leaders when they felt they had agency over the leaders. On the other hand, former KR leaders were aware of the types of moral stigmatisation imposed on them. People’s anger against KR was politically legitimised by the new PRK government that had openly condemned KR’s anti-humanitarian crimes. Many KR leaders were clearly aware of such negative perceptions of KR and its associates, and had attempted to demonstrate their morality. A few types of narrative that they highlighted for this purpose include (1) the emphasis on KR’s enforcing recruitment process, (2) their good behaviour while serving as KR leaders, (3) legitimacy of KR’s propaganda, and (4) positive contributions of KR’s policies or individual KR leaders’ activities. Moreover, when they attempted to resume their interaction with other community members, they sought to get recognition from others as being trustworthy and good-hearted. In this process. former KR leaders had to withhold their views (especially on KR-related issues) that were different from the mainstream narratives. Research participants confirmed KR leaders’ engagement in local reconciliation required the ‘silence’ on their own narratives while accepting the mainstream notion on KR (see Chapter 7 for more details). One former KR leader’s statement summarises such a dynamic: It took around one year that people changed their mind and perspective towards me. I tried to expose myself to the outside world. I mean outside my home. I tried to build and maintain good friendship with the local authorities and the villagers. They hired me to be a chef to cook foods for a party of 200 or 300 participants. Actually, so far I have not had any opportunity to share my experiences related to Khmer Rouge with the villagers at all, but I think they could understand the fact themselves. They may understand how the situation looked like at the time because during the Khmer Rouge regime most people realized that people were forced to do things that they did not want to. It was very different from today’s situation. Today, you have some kinds of examination or recruitments to be the officials but during Khmer Rouge regime we did not have the opportunity to decide. As for me, I did not work from my own will or purpose, but I was forced. I think most villagers knew that. They knew

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that I was supposed to do the work that I was assigned to. (Interview XIX)

The data collected from the author’s field research confirm the validity of the aforementioned assumptions on the most important emotional needs of victims and perpetrators: agency and social acceptance, respectively. Moreover, it demonstrates that, when direct interaction between them was gradually initiated, KR leaders and community members promoted their own strategies for pursuing these emotional needs, reflect the political, security, and social contexts.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced how everyday practices for dealing with the KR issues have settled into local activities over time, with three different foci of analysis. It firstly highlighted that many project-type activities adopted in the early stages of the post-KR period were replaced with or integrated into the activities that are undertaken in people’s everyday lives. As representative examples, it examined local communities’ social shunning of former KR leaders and people’s attempt to avoid the past. Secondly, it demonstrated selected examples of how community residents and former KR leaders took the first steps towards direct interaction with each other. Frequently undertaken were indirect and often symbolic actions that do not explicitly address the past atrocity but do present their willingness for engagement. Finally, it illustrated what types of attitudes community members demonstrate when a higher level of relationship building relevant to solidarity is achieved in a community. It explained that people do not identify former KR leaders with their previous affiliation with KR, but support them to be the leaders of their own communities, and occasionally engage in family relations through marriage. As a concluding remark, it is worth noting that the examples introduced in this chapter are directly relevant to the pre-political nature of ‘everyday-ness.’ Recent research in Peace and Conflict Studies has explored the agency of subalterns that are presented in mundane, episodic, and/or fluid forms in their everyday life. The exploration of everyday peace in a sense can be understood as one such effort. Nevertheless, while many studies have focused on the activities that have political

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motivations or political impact, the pre-political nature of everyday practices has been understudied (Millar, 2020, p. 317). Although the analysis presented above is by no means a comprehensive review of the features of everyday practices in Cambodia, it offers a glimpse into what community members have pursued in their relationship (re)building with former KR leaders, what resources they have attempted to utilise, and what processes they have adopted to pursue it. After an extraordinary period of extreme insecurity and poverty, Cambodian society has regained a certain level of stability and more secure livelihoods. Accordingly, community members were able to develop everyday practices for relationship building with former KR leaders in their own ways. Some features of these practices include the actions that incorporate subtlety and indirectness, the prioritisation of everyday livelihood in addressing emotional needs, the incorporation of relationship building practices into other social and cultural events. As such, in (re)building their relations with former KR leaders, community members in Cambodia did not aim to generate any political implications from their actions. In contrast, many people feared that their actions might be interpreted as political actions, and carefully navigated the avenues that they could utilise without attracting the attention of the government. Such a motivation is apparently less relevant to the vision for and practices of social reconciliation that many conventional studies have explained as post-conflict reconciliation. However, the impact of these practices in local communities have played critical roles in laying the foundation for nonviolent coexistence as well as further relationship building between former KR leaders and the survivors of the KR violence. Interview List Interview I, A former KR leader in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview II, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2021) Interview III, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview V, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview VIII, A local leader living in Svay Rieng (November 2020) Interview IX, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019)

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Interview XI, A person who once served as a local KR leader but was discharged later, living in Phnom Penh (December 2020) Interview XII, An academic who experienced the KR period near Phnom Penh, currently living in the US (September 2021) Interview XIV, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (September 2021) Interview XV, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (December 2020) Interview XVII, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XVIII, An academic living in Phnom Penh (January 2019) Interview XIX, A survivor who once served as a local KR leader near Phnom Penh (October 2020) Interview XX, A community leader in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XXI, A survivor of the KR violence (December 2020) Interview XXII, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (January 2019) Interview XXIII, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (December 2020)

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CHAPTER 5

Plurality and Connectivity

The previous two chapters described the types of everyday practices mobilised in local communities in Cambodia, focusing on the practices seen in the early period and the changing features of the practices over time. Based on this understanding, the next section will tease out a few distinct features of these practices and the types of social reconciliation that community members experience as the result of such practices. The specific questions that will be covered include: What levels and states of social reconciliation have been promoted in the local communities of Cambodia as of the early 2020s?; What factors have influenced the formation of the everyday peace in local communities? How have community residents responded to these factors? Related to the previous point, what narratives have been generated and how have they transformed over time, in order to create and expand the space for conciliatory social relations? As the first part of this analysis section, this chapter focuses on two features of everyday reconciliation: plurality and connectivity. In terms of plurality, this chapter will demonstrate that, 40 years on from the end of the KR regime, a wide variation in the states of social reconciliation has been promoted in the local communities in three locations where the author’s field study was conducted. Although the conditions relevant to sociality and reciprocity are more frequently identified than others, the communities in sum presented the full scale from passivity to solidarity. From a theoretical perspective, this finding implies that a post-conflict © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_5

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society is likely to present a variety of everyday peace states, which was assessed in this study by the level of social reconciliation; hence, the attempt to define the peace in a society risks an over-generalisation of its complex nature. The examination which follows will focus on connectivity, considering how the everyday peace practices in a local community are connected or interlinked to the external conditions. It will explain that the range of actors/units that influence local practice (the scope of inbound influence) is quite large and includes national level policies and support from the extended family in overseas countries. However, the areas that local communities may influence (the scope of outbound influence) are mostly limited to the hyper-community. Moreover, the outbound influence of local practices is usually promoted through organic scale-out of local practices to areas in the vicinity through word of mouth or benchmarks. This finding offers some empirical evidence that contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion on the potentials and limits of everyday peace for scaling up/scaling out.

Plurality: Presence of Multiple States of Reconciliation The social relations between former KR leaders and other community residents in the three locations in Battambang, Phnom Penh, and Svay Rieng present various states of social reconciliation (Lee, 2021). Considering the typology of passivity, sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity, the responses of community residents represented the full scale between passivity and solidarity. Table 5.1 was conceptualised to demonstrate such plurality in everyday reconciliation. It presents six types of actions in which community residents engage, which are largely relevant to passivity, sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity. Some forms of action are utilised by community members for multiple purposes. For instance, ‘healing and commemoration’ is an important method for seeking their own inner peace, which is mostly relevant to passivity. At the same time, however, the events for commemoration offer venues where former KR leaders and other community members can physically interact with each other, which is relevant to sociality. Hence, the distinction between these categories cannot be clearly delineated and these categories are by no means mutually exclusive. Community members’ everyday practices vis-à-vis former KR leaders frequently represent more than one state of relationship at

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Table 5.1 Types of social relations in Cambodia Passivity Agonistic nonviolence

Sociality Avoidance of the past

Reciprocity

Healing and Tolerance of commemora- coexistence tion

Solidarity

Acknowledgement Rehumanised of counterparts’ relationship good will/value

the same time. Hence, the categorisations below should be understood as rough indicators. Firstly, a significant number of respondents confirmed that they still harboured antagonism and mistrust towards harm-doers but were reluctant to express the anxiety in an explicit or violent manner. This type of attitude that is relevant to passivity is conceptualised as agonistic nonviolence in this chapter. A number of interview participants mentioned that they had considered multiple times if/how they could commit vengeance killing of the KR local leaders. However, their desire to adopt violence had been discouraged by their own family members, village leaders, or the security forces. It remained a long-standing anxiety without them having the opportunity to explicitly express their anger. For instance, an interview participant from this standpoint mentioned: “I never thought him [a former KR leader] as a human being again. (…) Yes, I am still angry” (Interview II). Another interview participant who also expressed strong antagonism doubted that reconciliation “can be ever possible” (Interview XI). Although the contexts in which the cases are observed are somewhat different, a report on a case in Kampot province in 2011 is a good illustration of such relations: [T]wo women in the first village believed that a Khmer Rouge cadre living in the other village had executed the husband of one of the women and the father of the other after arresting them. The events took place during Pol Pot’s murderous 1970s’ rule. For 30 years, the two women had not spoken to him. (…) I asked one of the victims: “Do you want to meet him?” And she said, “I don’t want to see him not even his footprints.” (Carmichael, 2014, n. p.)

When focusing on the types of actions taken by community members, agonistic nonviolence represents the lowest level of social relations where community residents have no willingness to acknowledge the former

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harm-doers as part of the same society. The level of mistrust towards them is extreme. Nevertheless, community residents chose (were enforced) to withhold any violence against the counterparts and accept physical co-habitation in the same geographical location. While this type of nonviolent coexistence does not represent conciliatory attitudes, it may have many positive functions in facilitating the process and environment that people need to have in order to reach the point of exploring more conciliatory relations. Moreover, avoidance of the past denotes the cases where people attempt to forget and downplay the previous atrocity. Many of them try not to think about the experience during the KR period as it is emotionally too painful to be reminded of the memory (Pham et al., 2019). In other cases, victims of mass violence need to prioritise their everyday tasks and survival over dealing with the past (Mollica, 2006). Female-headed households, in particular, are more likely to face extreme economic hardship due to the restricted economic activities in which women can engage. They sometimes had to ask for other people’s help to simply get opportunities for work (Frieson, 2011). Hence, they attempt not to deeply engage in dealing with the past atrocity but instead carry on the work more important for their livelihood. People’s actions relevant to avoidance of the past may look as though it represents higher levels of social relationship. For instance, one research participant in Svay Rieng had been living with a neighbour who had been considered as quite a ‘cruel’ KR leader, but had never expressed any negative emotion to him (Interview XIX). Nevertheless, the examples of avoidance do not indicate people’s willingness to voluntarily accept coexistence with former KR leaders. Instead, they represent their strong desire not to let their daily life be swayed by the past memory (Interviews IX, XI, and XVII). Moreover, there were a number of interviews where respondents presented the states of agonistic nonviolence and avoidance of the past at the same time. While on most days of the year they did not think about the KR history, they became emotional when they came across any events that galvanised their anxiety (usually former KR associates’ arrogant behaviour). Healing and commemoration are the practices that are relevant to passivity and sociality. Many community members have conducted activities as a way of moving on from the past, through internal healing and commemorating the deceased during the KR period. These practices had been developed, in most cases, interlinked with the traditional Khmer

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religious system. Most importantly, a number of Buddhist rituals and merit-making practices were conducted to pray for the smooth transition of the deceased to their next lives, in accordance with Buddhist traditions. By being involved in such events, people take regular opportunities to help the deceased and wash away their own sense of guilt towards these victims. With the limited institutional support for psychological healing in Cambodia, the practice of such Buddhist rituals has been almost the only way for community members to address their psychological anxiety. Guillou (2012) called such practices victims’ relief devices from social suffering and memory devices to internally process the past atrocity. At the same time, these activities were often utilised as important venues for bringing former KR leaders and other community residents into the same place. For community leaders who want to incorporate former KR leaders into the community, such cultural events are considered to be natural occasions where their presence is more tolerated by other community members. Both tolerance of coexistence and acknowledgement of counterparts’ good will/value denote that community members allow former KR leaders to be involved in most public activities in the local areas. In reality, the distinction between the actions relevant to tolerance and acknowledgement is not clear in that, in both cases, people invite former harm-doers to most public events (e.g., community development meetings organised by local government offices). Moreover, when former KR associates operate businesses, community members tolerate such operations and use their services as well. However, in the cases of tolerance, community members’ attitudes are more about acquiescence towards former KR leaders’ involvement. In the cases of acknowledgement of counterparts’ good will/value, community members present a more positive response to former KR leaders’ association with community activities. In the author’s interviews, for instance, respondents expressed their acceptance with simple statements like “We don’t have a problem with them [KR leaders]” (Interview IV) and “To be honest, it [an anxiety against KR] was in our heart, but we did not verbally express it. We just tried to build friendship [with former KR leaders]” (Interview VII). Some participants offer more detailed expressions of their willingness to accept like “He (a former KR associate) is skilful in making fences. So, I ask for his help when I need to fix my fences” (Interview VIII). In further conversations, respondents often highlighted the low-key attitude and willing commitment that former

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harm-doers presented during community events, as an important factor that influenced the respondents’ perception of the former harm-doers. For instance, one interview participant mentioned “In my view, they [former KR leaders] were not aggressive at all but gentle and nicer. They were like toothless tigers. They tried to collaborate with us and to be kind to us. Time by time, we felt that we were the same” (Interview XX). However, this acceptance and acknowledgement do not necessarily mean that victims have trust in the former KR leaders or a deep understanding of the challenges that the harm-doers faced during the KR period. In the cases of more conciliatory relations, while community members still identify former KR leaders with their KR association, people express sympathetic and empathetic emotions towards them. They often engage in dialogue with former KR leaders on why and how they had been involved in KR’s brutal violence, to nurture a better understanding of the challenging situations that the former leaders had faced. One such an example can be found in the following quote. He [a former KR leader] said, “Yes, I committed to that because higher officers commanded to do so.” Also, we used to know each other and I remembered him as honest person. But he did not have knowledge, he just followed orders. I understood that. However, I could not develop deep relationship with him. He knew what he had committed and he did not attempt to be closer [to me]. (Interview XXIV)

Finally, there are cases where community members do not identify former KR leaders with their past association with KR. This indicates that former KR leaders managed to mobilise a high level of trust as an integrated member of the community through their long-term commitment to community activities. Rehumanised relations were identified in some local communities. At the individual level, there were examples of former KR leaders who were elected by local communities as local leaders or civil servants, who assumed respected community roles like achar wat based on their communities’ support, and who engaged in marriage relationships with community members. All of these cases confirm that former KR associates could promote a highly conciliatory relationship with local communities through their individual efforts. In this context, a significant number of interview participants mentioned that they did not identify the former KR leaders with their former KR association any longer. Although the multi-layered meaning of this statement needs to be

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carefully unpacked (see Chapter 6 for more details), it is an explicit indication that the local residents had nurtured a common sense of identity that integrated former KR leaders into the community. In short, it was identified during the author’s field research in the early 2020s that local communities in Cambodia present a wide range of types of social reconciliation vis-à-vis local KR cadres, which covers the full scale between passivity and solidarity. While the number of cases that represent the status of sociality and reciprocity is somewhat bigger, the cases representing other states like passivity or solidarity also make up quite a large portion, respectively. More comprehensive research is required to confirm if this finding can represent other areas of the country.1 However, it is noteworthy that the most passive forms of social relations like agonistic nonviolence have been maintained in many local communities for more than four decades since the end of the KR rule. Importantly, moreover, the plurality in the social relationship between former KR leaders and other community members is found both between as well as within geographical locations. Different social and security factors are involved in influencing the dynamics of everyday practices for relationship building.

Connectivity: Interaction Between Local Communities and External Factors Despite the diversity and plurality examined in the previous section, local communities in Cambodia have adopted similar practices that present extraordinarily unique features. Researchers can find more common features between different communities in terms of the types of everyday practices adopted by community members and the resources nurtured and utilised during this process. For instance, the forms of actions adopted by former KR leaders to express their goodwill present similar types of 1 Some empirical studies in fact present somewhat different findings. For instance, the report of a national survey in 2010 requires careful consideration. In the report, some 83% of the respondents who had survived the KR regime expressed “feelings of hatred towards KR members responsible for violence” and some 39% mentioned that they wish they “could take revenge on those responsible” (Pham et al., 2019, p. 142). This figure presents the level of ‘persistent antagonism’ that is significantly higher than what the author had identified during field studies in the three locations. As the report acknowledged, a part of the reason behind this discrepancy is that “the survey questions did not distinguish between perpetrators with different levels of responsibility” (Pham et al., 2019, p. 141).

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subtle and indirect actions (e.g., turning up at major community events like Buddhist commemorations, making material contributions more than normal practice, and maintaining a low profile and polite manners). Moreover, the processes for mobilising community members’ collective actions vis-à-vis former KR leaders present similar patterns across the country (Lee, 2021). Then, how are the everyday practices in local communities interrelated to the social conditions and factors outside of the communities? Regarding the interaction between external factors and local communities, in fact, various types of factors have facilitated the environment in which everyday practice for reconciliation could be promoted and the types of resources that community members could access in this process. As introduced in detail in Chapter 2, for instance, many research participants confirmed that the government’s policies adopted for addressing the KR history have had a critical impact on their promotion of everyday practices. The security conditions that changed over time were another important factor, which often differentiated the level of social reconciliation presented in dissimilar geographical locations. The economic conditions in the society were a major environmental issue that had influenced the availability of resources in local communities, with which everyday practices could be mobilised. The cultural and religious beliefs prevalent in the local areas offer important foundations for community members to develop narratives and forms of practice in relation to social reconciliation. Everyday practices for social reconciliation have been generated and transformed depending on how community residents responded to the external factors and utilised the available resources. Community members have attempted to accept and adapt these influences in ways that maximise the benefits and make the practice more sustainable. Building on the key contextual factors introduced in Chapter 2, this section demonstrates how the mutual interaction between these external factors and local communities’ responses can be shaped, using a broad concept of ‘connectivity.’ Specifically, it examines questions like: What influence do these external factors have on the nature of everyday practices? Vice versa, what actions have local communities promoted in response to such contextual factors? What factors influence the capacity of local communities for generating such everyday practices?

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The Interactions Between Contextual Factors and Community Agency To offer an illustrative examination of community members’ responses to external/contextual factors, this section will look into a particular example of community residents’ responses to the government’s policy of ‘bone collection’ as a form with which to commemorate the victims. The bone collection project conducted throughout the 1980s is an example that captures this dynamic. The bone collection project was initiated by the PRK government’s decree in 1982 as a key initiative to confirm KR’s inhumane crimes and to commemorate the deceased victims. KR had conducted mass executions and there were sites where the victims’ bodies were buried in most local areas. The government encouraged community residents to collect the bones from these execution sites and erect memorials. This bone collection project was implemented in most local areas across the country in the early 1980s. This initiative addressed a keen desire of most local communities. Almost every community member had lost close relatives during the KR, and they were unable to identify the locations of the bones of the deceased. In the Cambodian cultural contexts, “in cases of violent or accidental death it is widely believed that the spirit of the deceased remains in the place of death as a spirit or ghost, instead of moving on to the realm of re-birth” (Bennett, 2015, p. 104). Then, how did community members respond to this policy? The responses from the research participants confirmed three patterns that were adopted in different phases of implementation. Firstly, in the early stage of its implementation, the response that people presented was acceptance. Indeed, an absolute majority of the participants mentioned that they were “happy” and “relieved” (Interviews VII and XXIII). In most cases, it was local government officials who had initiated plans for the project and announced it to village leaders. However, the plans tended to be brief with the broad objective being to erect a bone storage by a vague due period; little material support was offered. Despite such limited external encouragement and support, the responses from villagers were mostly positive and enthusiastic in many local communities. For instance, in a local community in Battambang, almost all men in the village participated in the bone collection project over a period of a week. Many community members also looked for materials that could be used for building a store case for the collected bones. It should be acknowledged that people’s fear of authority was one factor that encouraged them to join these projects. However, a large number

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of people perceived this project as an opportunity to help their deceased relatives gain rebirth. They also feared that their angry spirits might do harm to the survivors. Our family actually supported us to join the bone collecting project because they had great pain in their chest over the Khmer Rouge regime. We put aside our work and just spent time to assist in the project. We collected the bones and keep them properly in order that we can remember and pay respects to them. The pain remains in my heart. (Interview VII)

Secondly, during these projects, community members applied adaptation of the format of the operations to better fit their own needs in terms of local reconciliation. In this regard, the government’s permission for conducting Buddhist rituals, which had been completely prohibited during the KR period, offered an important avenue of which they could take advantage. Community members explored methods to make the whole process as ‘properly Buddhist’ as possible. The store case was built in the form of chedi, a Buddhist stupa that keeps the bones of deceased, in the communities that were able to mobilise resources; other communities made cabin-like wooden houses. Moreover, when relocating bones to the store cases, community members made efforts to invite achar wats or someone who had good Buddhist knowledge to preside over the ceremonies and pray for the good fortune of the deceased. Across the country, people conducted hundreds of thousands of funeral rituals, usually led by the relatives of the victims (Guillou, 2012). However, the rituals could not follow the exact protocols as people could not identify which bones belonged to whom and could not mobilise all resources necessary for the rituals. Hence, they had to modify and simplify the protocols while ensuring the meaning of the events. For instance, “the offering of a piece of clothing to the monks [was] simply perceived as producing merit, which is sent along to the dead” (Guillou, 2012, p. 217). In addition to commemorating the dead, it was equally important that community members were given the opportunity to openly mourn together with other people for the first time since the KR regime. The PRK government was a socialist regime and did not support the propagation of religious activities; however, it had accepted Buddhist practices at a limited level mainly acknowledging people’s strong desire for them (Harris, 2013).

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Third, as time went by, community members mobilised the capacity to promote the replacement of the government-led projects with locally driven practices. For instance, a large number of memorials/statues established under the supervision of the state were abandoned in the absence of the government’s promotion. Many of them were formed to reflect on the ideological and cultural contexts of the Cold War period, and as people did not relate to these memorials, they lost their interest in repairing or looking after them (Guillou, 2012). In particular, when the annual Buddhist festival was re-institutionalised in the early 1990s, many of the small-sized rituals that had been conducted were integrated into these major Buddhist events. From Cambodia’s perspective, it was much more natural and appropriate to do merit-making and commemoration for the deceased victims, on the days that have significance in their cultural and religious traditions. In this regard, the resumption of the annual Buddhist festival was “a huge relief” among the population (Guillou, 2012, p. 218). Moreover, people prefer Buddhist ceremonies where they can make merits specifically to their deceased families, rather than the events that commemorate all victims at the same time, as mentioned by one research participant: We usually pay our attention to our respective family members or relatives who were killed at the time. We commemorate for their souls at the pagoda by calling on their specific names and dedicated our merit-making to their souls. With this, we hope our dedication would reach them. At the local stupa [erected through a bone collection project], there are too many victims who were killed. It was a collective commemoration, so not many people join it. We don’t know who is who [in the stupa]. Therefore, we didn’t pay much attention on the events [that took place at the stupa] anymore. (Interview IX)

It should be remembered that, during the 1980s, Cambodia was under highly restrictive government leadership and local communities did not have many choices regarding activities but had to accept the policies promoted by the government. Hence, most local communities’ activities might apparently look to follow the instructions given by the authority. Nevertheless, the above example illustrates that the levels of local participation and the forms and procedures to implement the politically promoted programmes could be significantly influenced by local actors’ willingness. In short, the above examination reveals that, when

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the government promoted a particular type of project as a main method for dealing with the KR history, the residents of many local communities responded in three ways. Firstly, they appreciated the utilities of the programmes as a rare opportunity to commemorate the deceased victims and actively accepted the project. Secondly, they attempted to adapt and develop the forms of operation to be more reflective of their own cultural perspectives. Thirdly, when community members had better opportunities to develop the practices that fitted their desire and cultural understanding, they gradually replaced the government-driven programmes with their own practices over time. Determinants of Intra-Community Dynamics While the forms of practices adopted for dealing with the KR history were similar across local areas, the dynamics of mobilising such local-established practices vary widely community by community. The differences could be substantial even between two communities that are geographically close to each other and which therefore share similar security, economic, and political environments. Hence, I had enquired about what the research participants consider to be major factors within their own communities that influence the promotion of everyday practices for building relationships with former KR leaders. A large number of respondents highlighted the availability of intra-community leadership and financial resources as critical factors. In addition, this section will pay attention to the mutual interactions between the people from different villages utilising wat community, a hyper-community network. Although the direct contribution of this hyper network to the promotion of everyday practices is related to social reconciliation, its importance as a platform for exchanging information and strengthening a sense of solidarity between neighbouring communities was identified. Intra-Community Resources There are multiple resources that determine the capacity and agency of local communities in building different social activities, which include the breath of engaged population, cohesion of social networks, social capital, and the level of interaction with external actors (Wright, 2022, pp. 52–59). The dynamics of relationship building between the local communities in the same geographical locations often became divergent partly depending on the material and non-material resources that each

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community could utilise. The Cambodian case studies also confirm that the everyday practices for social reconciliation were largely affected by the availability of intra-community resources. On the question of the most important resources, research participants highlighted two factors: (1) the availability of active local seniors (as a non-material resource) and (2) funding for event mobilisation (as a material resource). Firstly, the interview participants highlighted the roles of (official or unofficial) local seniors as being critical in promoting and maintaining these resources. For instance, in promoting coherence and a sense of unity, the Cambodian human network frequently relies on reciprocity between individual households (rather than collective and coordinated institution-building). Trust and friendship have been built and enhanced by repeated exchanges of agricultural labour, financial support, and help with household tasks, over a long period of time (Sedra, 2011). Local seniors are the key people who are indirectly promoting, coordinating, and expanding the local platforms for maintaining such reciprocal support activities. Moreover, wat communities, one of the most important networks in local areas, in different locations present various features in terms of the level of organisation and types of engagement, according to local leaders’ engagement (Thion, 1999, p. 28). Nevertheless, as many seniors who had played important roles in communities were killed during the KR rule, the number of people who could assume such leadership roles varied village by village. For instance, two closely located local communities in Battambang present striking examples. In Samaki (alias), many local seniors, who had established personal kudos during the pre-KR period, survived until the end of the KR regime. A few of these local seniors had been promoted to villagelevel leadership positions in the final phases of the KR rule; however, the period of their involvement was short. Hence, when the KR regime was toppled, this group of local seniors had maintained fairly strong influence over public opinion and they had the experience of engaging with some local leaders of KR who had been senior to them in the hierarchy. During the turbulent time immediately after the collapse of the KR regime, these local seniors naturally organised informal gatherings between community members and mobilised unofficial practices to deter violence. Such an unofficial but effective network between these seniors in practice had substantial power for mobilising community members’ collective actions towards certain goals. Moreover, their previous experience of working with some senior leaders of KR had enabled these community seniors

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to come up with various ‘reasons’ to accept into community activities the leaders whose behaviour during the KR period had been moderate (Interview IX). Krang Thom village (alias) is a village only 10 minutes away from Samaki village by car. Nevertheless, the governance of this village had been seriously influenced by the politics and tensions within the KR structure. While its neighbouring village was closely associated with a few prominent leaders of KR who later were executed by their political rivals, the local leaders and community members in Krang Thom had been subject to multiple rounds of execution. Between 1977 and 1978, local leadership positions had continuously been filled by new faces who soon were subject to execution. Hence, when the KR regime was toppled, almost all people who had played leadership roles prior to the KR period had been killed. Moreover, a large number of people in the village had been under constant fear and mutual mistrust. Hence, when the PRK regime came into the village and attempted to re-establish the local governance structure, there were few who were willing to serve the community (Interview XXIV). Secondly, when community members organise local activities related to commemoration and Buddhist rituals, they require material resources. Although these resources are usually donated from all households in the relevant villages, such donations hardly meet the expected amount. Many from the diaspora return to their hometowns for visits; in such cases, they usually do many activities for the communities. In this context, community members often rely on financial support from wealthy relatives living in urban areas or foreign countries. Hence, the size, forms, and operational features of commemorations and other rituals can be substantially different depending on the amount of external donations that a community could attract. Importantly, the more they rely on such external donations, the stronger the influence these relatives exert on the forms and features of these commemorations. If a donor has a strong objective to achieve in a particular event organised in a local community, the event organisers are likely to reflect this desire in their planning. This type of dynamic occasionally tweaks or changes the significance of the event as well. For instance, there have been Cambodian diasporas in the US who have donated a substantial amount of funding to help their hometown communities organise Buddhist events commemorating the victims of KR. On

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some occasions, these diasporas request that their own families’ victimisation or good contributions are highlighted during the ceremonies (Interview XVI). Things become more significant in cases where these donors’ close family members were associated with controversies such as KR activities; the donors’ influence could affect the way community members generate narratives on the controversies or people involved, and could cause social tensions between the supporters and critics of these donors (Ledgerwood, 2012). Mutual Interaction Within Hyper-Communities The everyday practices for social reconciliation were also influenced by the mutual interaction between local villages. It is rare that members from different villages set specific venues for the exchange of ideas and practices; however, villages in the same vicinity have multiple opportunities for mingling with each other. Regarding the rebuilding of social relations, their collective involvement in various cultural festivals often plays important roles in disseminating and exchanging everyday practices between different villages. In Cambodia, village (phoum) is considered to be the fundamental unit of community life. It is usually comprised of dozens of households within a geographic area. Although it is not recognised as the official governance or administrative unit, each village usually has one village leader who looks after village activities. Traditionally, these villages are often geographically distant from other villages; hence, the residents in the same village are destined to organise and develop most economic (agricultural), social, and cultural activities in collaboration with each other. Outside the basic unit of village, moreover, a wat community (Chomnos Cheung Wat, which means villages surrounding a local monastery) is also an important cultural unit in which a few villages get together to support a local Buddhist monastery. The representatives of the villages participate in the monastery operational committee. While the primary objective of this operational committee is to discuss and decide how to organise Buddhist events and to support the operation of the monastery, frequently gatherings of this committee offered an important venue where the people from nearby communities catch up and share information on various issues. Ebihara (1966, p. 187)’s statement captures well the importance of the Buddhist monastery as the hub of social life: “The temple serves obviously as a moral-religious focal point,

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integrating the village within its congregation into a religious community through shared norms and common participation in rituals” (see Chapter 1 for a relevant discussion on the local community). This hyper-community centred on the local monastery is an important unit in which local populations reconfirm the sense of solidarity, and exchange and benchmark the practices for social reconciliation between different villages. People who are more committed to the Buddhist practices usually go to a local monastery once a week to offer food and other materials to monks. Moreover, for important Buddhist events like monastic ordination, Kathin (a Buddhist festival praying for the deceased ancestors), and Bang kak chmab (a ceremony where children thank midwives who attended their birth), many community members exchange help for organisations. For instance, the annual Pchum Ben festival has become “a central memoriali[s]ing ritual for those who died in the DK [KR] period” (Ledgerwood, 2012, p. 196) and community members’ healing, requires the commitment of almost the entire membership of the villages connected to a monastery. Prior to the festival period, the representatives of each village discuss the distribution of labour between villages and between the households within families and are involved in the preparation periods for weeks. The festival runs for two weeks during which participating community members are involved in various activities: cleaning monasteries and event venues, setting flags and banners, and cooking and distributing food (usually rice cake) to be offered at the festival. Through such frequent and long-term interactions, the people from neighbouring villages reconfirm their solidarity “as a group of donors with overlapping but different groups of people, highlighting and reinforcing different webs of social connections” (Ledgerwood, 2012, p. 195). From a practical perspective, they also offer important venues where people share news from different villages and their thoughts on social issues. When the Buddhist events were particularly relevant to the deceased ancestors (e.g., funerals or Pchum Ben), people would talk about their memories of deceased relatives and their views on particular KR leaders in their local areas. Although it is unlikely that people deliberately encourage other communities to adopt any forms of relationship building, such catch-ups and the update of the social dynamics in other villages would occasionally offer the opportunity to community members to reconsider their own practices (Interview XVI). In this regard, one research participant mentioned: “We usually spend a lot of time together to prepare food

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for monks and other guest, and chat with each other for long. At Pchum Ben, we talked about our families who were killed during the KR period. Sometimes, former KR leaders attended the Pchum Ben celebration, and when we see them, we also talked about these people. [Knowing that my husband was once a KR kitchen unit chief], other people in my village said good things about my husband” (Interview XXI). During the author’s field visit, it was difficult to verify how much influence such inter-village gatherings had in forming everyday practices in local communities. In fact, research participants did not recall if they benchmarked any practices adopted in other villages or if they were influenced by the social relations, vis-à-vis former KR leaders, adopted in other communities. Nevertheless, community members repeatedly acknowledged the importance of the wat community as a platform for exchanging information and opinions on practical, social, and normative issues including the KR history. The existence and active utilisation of such a hyper-community network by local actors imply that the practices which emerge in a community are likely to influence other communities that are dealing with similar social issues although such influence may not be consciously perceived by the community members.

Discussion: Local Actors’ Interaction with External Factors and the Scaling Out of Practice The above examination of Cambodian local communities’ multi-layered interactions with external factors and other communities offers some insights related to the ongoing academic debates on ‘scaling up and scaling out of everyday peace.’ While the practices of the everyday peace framework provide a lot of detail about a particular geographic location, many people questioned what everyday peace can tell us about the wider society or the country. So, can everyday peace be scaled-up? In response to this question, Mac Ginty (2019) calls for the transformation of our approach to this connectivity from a focus on ‘scaling up’ to more of a focus on ‘scaling out.’ Furthermore, he proposes the concept of circuitry as a framework through which people can understand the links between everyday peace activities and the wider levels of society (e.g., community, state, and international levels). Based on a

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number of previous studies that acknowledge the complexity of peacebuilding and that reflect the factors at different levels (de Coning, 2016; Hafner-Burton et al., 2009), Mac Ginty (2022, p. 36) argues that such connections between people’s everyday and the wider society should be understood not as linear and coherent layers but as a “mix of the formal and the informal, the national and the local, the top-down and the bottom-up all coalescing to form a jumble.” The debates on this topic present a great deal of opportunity for further conceptualisation and investigation. Related to this debate, the examples in Cambodia demonstrate the ways in which community activities are exchanging influences with the actors and factors outside of their locations. Firstly, the ways in which local communities respond to external influence were clarified. In the conflict-affected social conditions under the authoritarian political regime, local practice for social reconciliation has been heavily influenced by the security, political, and economic conditions in the wider society. These external actors played critical roles in offering resources for mobilising local practices and restricting the scope of such activities. Due to the strong external influence, the types of practices adopted in local communities across the country are by and large similar (e.g., Buddhist commemorations, the government-led commemorative events, making material contributions more than normal practice, and maintaining a low profile and polite manners). Second, in response to such external factors, community residents mobilise detailed features of everyday practices by actively accepting, adapting, and reforming the influence of such external features. In the Cambodian context after the civil war, the roles of local seniors and financial resources were two critical factors that determined the amount of local agency for making such responses. Although the types of everyday peace may look similar; accordingly, their detailed features in terms of timing and speed of implementation, power to influence people’s behaviour, and sustainability varied substantially according to communities. All of these features are important factors that determine the level of everyday peace that community members experience in their life (see Chapter 6 for more discussions). Local communities’ capacity for adaptation and reformation gradually increases as the social conditions become more stable over time. In a sense, the contour of everyday peace practice was partly determined based on the interaction between community members and the wider contextual factors.

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Third, local seniors who had promoted community-oriented everyday practice for social reconciliation had multiple opportunities to work together with the seniors and leaders from other villages. An especially important venue was wat community, a hyper-local community that organised many Buddhist events and festivals based on the collective contribution from multiple villages in the vicinity. The preparation process usually requires senior members from different villages to spend weeks on planning and discussion. Moreover, other village members mingle with the people from other villages for 1–2 weeks during each of the festival periods. As these events usually involve merit-making for deceased people and food sharing between them, community members had natural opportunities to talk about their experiences with former KR leaders in their own villages and share some positive outcomes in relationship building with them. Nevertheless, a more proactive process of scaling out everyday practice was not identified. This limited mutual interaction regarding everyday practice for social reconciliation is largely related to the nature of everyday practices. Many practices are in subtle forms that are organically formed through interaction; moreover, many community members may not define and conduct these practices consciously considering their significance. For instance, while the inclusion of a former KR leader in the reciprocal labour exchange network is certainly meaningful as a form of relationship enhancement, it also has a practical motivation to make their agricultural activities more effective and sustainable. In addition, while the inclusion of these former KR leaders certainly reflects community members’ social acceptance of the leaders, this usually does not involve a deliberate and conscious process to acknowledge these leaders. Hence, in interactions about their relationship with former KR leaders, community members do not often consider the labour exchange network as something worth talking about. All in all, the above finding encourages us to pay attention to a new dimension for understanding the scaling out of everyday practices. Indeed, local communities in different parts of Cambodia had mobilised quite similar types of everyday practices. However, the similarities of local practices in different locations are not due to mutual interaction between different communities. In the author’s interviews, most people who had mobilised such activities had not been aware of (or had not cared) what practices were undertaken in other areas. Instead, while they brought about their own ways of working under similar structural restrictions

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and based on similar social and cultural resources, they ended up with similar types of activities which looked like the ‘most suitable but realistic options’ for them. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the type of practices that people highly value had become more widespread across the country within a short period (Lee, 2020). In short, some dynamics of the scaling out of everyday practice in Cambodia were the aggregation of individual practices that reflect community members’ pursuit of a common desire under similar contextual factors.

Conclusion This chapter introduced two features of everyday practices in local communities in Cambodia and examined their theoretical implications. Firstly, it demonstrated that local communities demonstrate substantially different states of social reconciliation with former KR leaders. Although the states relevant to sociality and reciprocity are more widely observed, they present many cases relevant to passivity and solidarity as well. Based on this finding, this chapter discussed the utility of everyday peace as a framework for a nuanced examination of the complex nature of peace and reconciliation in a society. When applying the everyday framework, researchers can be in a better position to acknowledge and analyse the coexistence of multiple levels/types of peace(s) and, hence, to come up with a range of methods for addressing dissimilar challenges faced by different units of a society. Secondly, using the term connectivity, this chapter examined how everyday practices in local communities are inter-related with other social factors. While the members of local communities in Cambodia were under the influence of the political authority, they had explored ways to accept, adapt, and reform the programmes initiated by the government over time. Moreover, the ability of local communities to mobilise their own everyday practices was influenced by the availability of local resources (in terms of local leadership and material resources) and indirectly inspired by mutual interaction with other villages in the same hyper-communities. From a theoretical perspective, the findings relevant to connectively offer a set of empirical evidence related to recent academic debates on scale-up and scale-out of everyday peace practices. All in all, it demonstrates that everyday reconciliation in the Cambodian local communities has developed in substantially dissimilar ways through the interaction between the external factors and the responses of

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community members to them. This implies that, in order to have a thorough understanding of everyday peace, researchers need to examine the mutual influence between the actors and social factors at different levels of analysis, a local capacity that is produced as a result of such interaction, and the forms of practices that community members choose, reflecting both their capacity and cultural background. Interview List Interview II, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2021) Interview IV, A community leader in Svay Rieng (January 2019) Interview VII, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview XIII, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (December 2018) Interview IX, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XI, A person who once served as a local KR leader but was discharged later, living in Phnom Penh (December 2020) Interview XVI, A community leader in Svay Rieng (June 2022) Interview XVII, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XIX, A survivor who once served as a local KR leader near Phnom Penh (October 2020) Interview XX, A community leader in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XXIII, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (December 2020) Interview XXIV, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019)

References Bennett, C. (2015). To live amongst the dead: An ethnographic exploration of mass graves in Cambodia (Doctoral thesis). School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent.

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Carmichael, R. (2014, October 2). Reconciliation in Cambodia—A low priority for government and donors. Deutsche Welle (DW). https://www.dw.com/ en/reconciliation-in-cambodia-a-low-priority-for-government-and-donors/a17970060 de Coning, C. (2016). Implications of complexity for peacebuilding policies and practices. In C. de Coning, E. Brusset, & B. Hughes (Eds.), Complexity thinking for peacebuilding practice and evaluation (pp. 19–48). Palgrave Macmillan. Ebihara, M., et al. (1966). Interrelations between Buddhism and social systems in Cambodian peasant culture. In M. Nash (Ed.), Anthropological studies in Theravada Buddhism (pp. 175–196). Yale University Southeast Asia Studies. Frieson, K. G. (2011). No longer a ‘happy balance’: The decline of female status in Khmer village culture. In J. A. Marston (Ed.), Anthropology and community in Cambodia: Reflections on the work of May Ebihara (pp. 172–188). Monash University Press. Guillou, A. Y. (2012). An alternative memory of the Khmer Rouge genocide: The dead of the mass graves and the land guardian spirits [neak ta]. South East Asia Research, 20(2), 207–226. https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2012.0102 Hafner-Burton, E., Kahler, M., & Montgomery, A. (2009). Network analysis for international relations. International Organization, 63(3), 559–592. Harris, I. (2013). Buddhism in a dark age: Cambodian monks under Pol Pot. University of Hawai’i Press. Ledgerwood, J. (2012). Buddhist ritual and the reordering of social relations in Cambodia. South East Asia Research, 20(2), 191–205. https://doi.org/10. 5367/sear.2012.0100 Lee, S. (2021). Between forgiveness and revenge. In K.Clements & S. Lee (Eds.), Multi-level reconciliation and peacebuilding. (pp. 170–186). Routledge. Lee, S. Y. (2020). Local resilience and the reconstruction of social institutions: Recovery, maintenance and transformation of Buddhist Sangha in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 14(3), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2020.1736448 Mac Ginty, R. (2019). Circuits, the everyday and international relations: Connecting the home to the international and transnational. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 234–253. Mac Ginty, R. (2022). Everyday peace. Oxford University Press. Mollica, R. F. (2006). Healing invisible wounds: Paths to hope and recovery in a violent world. Harcourt. Pham, P. N., Balthazard, M., Gibbons, N., & Vinck, P. (2019). Perspectives on memory, forgiveness and reconciliation in Cambodia’s post-Khmer Rouge society. International Review of the Red Cross, 101(910), 125–149. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1816383119000213

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Sedra, M. (2011). Afghanistan and the folly of apolitical demilitarisation. Conflict, Security and Development, 11(4), 473–496. https://doi.org/10.1080/146 78802.2011.614129 Thion, S. (1999). Summary and concluding remarks. Working Group on Social Organization in Cambodia. Conference on the meaning of community in Cambodia, Volume 1. Wright, K. (2022). Community resilience: A critical approach. Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Subtlety and Obscurity

Thus far, this study has introduced the significance of everyday practices in developing a conciliatory and nonviolent environment for relationship building in local communities in Cambodia. Everyday practices are generated by reflecting the social restrictions, community members’ level of enthusiasm, and the opportunities offered by other actors. Many such practices are sustained for a long time and play important roles as indirect symbols of the current relations and promoters of gradually transformed/enhanced social relations. Despite such significance, however, everyday practices for peacebuilding in local communities are not always well acknowledged in the conventional studies. A group of studies has highlighted this problem, partly attributing it to the mundaneness and episodic nature of everyday peace. Risking over-simplification, these studies explain that researchers from outside the local society (frequently from the global north) fail to accurately identify and examine the subtle practices that are taken as part of the communities’ everyday activities (Randazzo, 2016; Millar, 2020; Lee, 2021; Mac Ginty, 2013, 2022). Why then are mundane practices for reconciliation and peacebuilding difficult to recognise? In other words, what types of mundaneness prevent researchers from getting an accurate understanding of everyday practices for promoting peace? Is ‘mundaneness’ the only reason for this issue? This chapter will address these questions by unpacking the features of everyday practice. It will use the terms of subtlety and obscurity to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_6

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denote the cases where the meanings and significance of local communities’ everyday practices for relationship building are not explicitly and immediately observable. Specifically, it will focus on the following four features. Firstly, in terms of the communication system, Cambodians frequently adopt actions that address their concerns in an indirect and symbolic manner. This is a typical feature of a high-context communication culture, which often obscures the real intentions underlying certain actions taken by people (Chua & Gudykunst, 1987; Nishimura et al., 2008). Secondly, regarding the forms of practices, there are many practices that are undertaken in private settings (e.g., family dialogues) or are in the form of non-action (e.g., social shunning). These types of actions (or non-actions) cannot be identified in the public venues which external actors can access. Thirdly, everyday practices for social reconciliation are rarely mobilised as standalone events or activities. They usually happen in conjunction with other social practices that take place for other purposes. Hence, it is not straightforward to distinguish their meaning as peacebuilding practices. Finally, the ways community members mobilise their practices, reflect the cultural and religious understandings in the local areas, which are often difficult for external actors to comprehend.

Indirect and/or Symbolic Forms of Communication In Cambodia, the subtlety of everyday peace practices is often related to the indirect and symbolic forms of inter-individual or inter-group interactions. Cambodians’ behaviour by and large reflects the features of a high-context communication system. When facing issues to resolve, people in a high-context communication system pay more attention to the long-term consequences of their behaviour in terms of relationship building, rather than focusing primarily on addressing the immediate issues. The exchanges of messages rely on symbolic, indirect and/or non-verbal communications. The power-relations in the hierarchical social structure play important roles in determining the forms and procedures of mutual interaction (Hall, 1976; Kimmel, 1994). These cultural features were seriously reflected in local practices for relationship building in post-KR Cambodia. The actions from both community residents and former KR leaders have rarely adopted explicit and direct actions to address the KR atrocities. There were few apologies or public admissions for committing violence, from former KR leaders.

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It is unusual for other community members to explicitly express their forgiveness or acceptance of the former KR associates. An open dialogue on the details of the KR violence does not usually exist in most communities. In the Cambodian local contexts, such verbal and straightforward communications were considered unnatural and odd. Some people even thought that such apologies were adopted only in the public meetings under the Khmer Rouge regime.1 Instead, people chose actions that may indirectly express their emotion and attitude vis-à-vis their counterparts. Many former KR cadres and their family members reduced their presence in public places and were modest when meeting people, in the hope of showing their fear and an apologetic manner. For instance, one research participant mentioned: When the villagers hold a party or ceremony, the former Khmer Rouge officials did not join it but their family member joined instead. This was not meant that we discriminate them, but it was their own opted manner. (Interview VI)

Even when they felt they were unfairly treated, they refrained from making a complaint or being confrontational. Moreover, once they had maintained more frequent communications with other community members, they deliberately adopted silence or ambivalent attitudes when they were asked questions about the KR rule and their actions during the period. Even in cases where the dominant narratives contradict the truth that they believe, they did not want to challenge them. Hence, many community members recalled that “[a]fter 1979 (…) former KR

1 There are some exceptions to this trend. Although it is somewhat out of context, the example in Svay Rieng is worthy of a detailed introduction. In the aftermath of the KR regime’s collapse, some regional and provincial authorities in Svay Rieng had facilitated KR leaders’ apology as a way to reduce revenge violence. Although the details of the arrangements vary depending on local areas, these apologies were usually encouraged by high-level security officials to calm down mobs who were angry with former KR associates. The process involves a unilateral statement of acknowledgement and contrition made publicly by KR leaders or a conversational interaction between the former leaders and the people who had attempted to kill them. The security officials had usually observed and supervised the whole process. In some cases, after the exchanges of mutual apologies, both parties were required to spend the night in the same room. The intention of this arrangement was to allow them to learn and understand each other (Interviews VI and XVI). However, this is an exceptional type of practice led by the political authorities rather than unilateral decisions.

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officials were very humble. Most people knew their past activities were cruel. Sometimes, people asked about their past activities, and they didn’t respond” (Interview XXV). When the space for their commitment to local activities expanded, some former KR leaders were more proactive about enhancing their relationship with other community residents; however, they still took indirect actions to express their willingness to contribute to the community. They would turn up at major community events like Buddhist commemorations, weddings and funerals, often without invitation, and make material contributions more than normal practice. Through these actions, former KR leaders aimed to regain the communities’ trust in them to be ‘acceptable.’ From my part, I tried to approach them first before they approached me. I tried to be friendly as much as I could. I tried to show that I am generous and good hearted. I tried to express that I want to build a good relationship and friendship. Day by day, they tried to understand me and build good relationship. (Interview VIII)

Although the actions had not delivered an explicit message of apology for their previous deeds, most community members clearly sensed what these actions implied. In fact, community members were more appreciative of the value of the continuation of such humble behaviour in the long-term rather than a one-off verbal apology. The quotes below present a few examples of the responses: Actually, so far I have not had any opportunity to share my experiences related to Khmer Rouge with them, but I think they could understand the fact themselves. They may understand how the situation looked like at the time because during the Khmer Rouge regime most people realized that people were forced to do things that they did not want to. (Interview VIII) We felt that those former Khmer Rouge officials’ contribution and activities to the infrastructure in the communities was to compensate or to redress what they have done in Khmer Rouge time. We felt like that. Even today, there is a man who used to work as a member of small division of Khmer Rouge. Now, he is an achar wat working with me. (Interview IX)

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Let me share with you the human perspective. I personally think that it is the nature of the people who committed the wrongdoing to try to do good deed as much as possible. I think this applied to our Khmer culture. I observe that they even do good deed much more than we do to redress their past wrongdoing. They make merit as much as possible. They wanted to be socialized in the communities. Apparently, they were more participative and more active in the communities than we were. This is their motivations. In the past, they committed bad deed while later on they do good deed. (Interview VI)

Vice versa, the community members’ actions for promoting further reconciliation had also adopted indirect and symbolic forms. It was rare that the community leaders explicitly expressed their forgiveness or allowed the inclusion of former KR leaders in their communities. Instead, local leaders took gradual and indirect steps to include them. They utilised more practical reasons or excuses to engage with former KR leaders, such as the practical skills or labour value that these KR leaders could offer. These reasons made it easier for both former KR leaders and other community members to accept such an invitation (Interview III). For instance, former KR leaders mentioned how they were called in to a community activity for the first time since the collapse of the KR regime as below. The commune chief knew me very well since the Sangkum Reastr Niyum era [in the 1950s]. He was a doctor after serving as a military. [When he invited me to local meetings], he said that he was not good at writing. I could write and do calculations very well and fast. My handwriting is pretty good. In the meetings, I took notes very fast. (Interview VI)

Nevertheless, the former KR leaders clearly understood the significance of such gestures. They knew that the opportunities given to them were a lot more significant than simple work requests, and took actions to take these opportunities. In some local communities, such indirect exchange of ‘acceptance’ and ‘positive commitment’ had generated virtual cycles that enhanced the mutual trust between former KR leaders and their counterparts. In short, the mutual interactions between former KR cadres and other community members frequently adopt indirect or symbolic actions. Community members capture and interpret the unspoken messages

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behind their counterparts’ actions and, when possible, undertake reciprocal actions. Although the exchanges of such actions between community members are clearly noticed, the significance of them as actions for social reconciliation and peacebuilding may not be clearly identified by outsiders, especially those who are from low-context communication systems.

Lack of Visibility in the Public Space Everyday practice for social reconciliation is frequently invisible in the public sphere. In Cambodian local communities, two features particularly contribute to this invisibility. Firstly, many important communications occur in private settings or through informal individual interaction. It is common in local communities in the country that many decisions or practices are discussed and determined between community members in informal settings before they are officially announced in public events. Moreover, although it is usually a government civil servant, villager leader, or local (male) senior who officially announces the decisions, a large number of people are directly or indirectly involved in the discourse process ‘behind the scenes’ before an agenda or proposal is officially put into the public discourse. Some venues where such informal communication is made are social drinking in the evening, work-related gatherings, discourse within households, and cultural events. For instance, one important venue for generating a community’s narrative on former KR leaders was the household (Carrer, 2022). The narratives and stories about particular KR leaders in the local communities were quietly shared and regenerated through the conversations between family members within each household. During the interviews, many participants mentioned how mothers had discouraged their children from taking revenge violence, by engaging in verbal conversation, hiding agricultural tools that could be used as weapons, or even reporting the plans for revenge in advance. In other cases, mothers shared the stories of some KR leaders’ violent actions with their children who did not remember the KR rule so that these children would not forget the atrocities in their own communities. At night, my mother spoke about the horrible experiences that she [had] had during the Khmer Rouge period. I felt scared and thought that she might be lying. At the end of these stories, she often mentioned “It is what

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I experienced. You should not forget. Khmer Rouge is sly. Never believe them.” (Interview XVIII)

The inter-generational interaction within each household was a critical factor that had influenced the social dynamics in local communities in the aftermath of the KR regime. In recent nation-wide surveys, approximately 80% of young respondents highlighted ‘family and friends’ as the main information source from which they learn about KR history (Pham et al., 2019). In the absence of more public resources, the ‘word of mouth’ within households has a dominant power; moreover, the information produced in this process unavoidably reflects a limited range of personal experience and can be distorted over time by people’s incomplete memory. In this regard, Munyas (2008) confirms that Cambodian youths are exposed to substantially inconsistent information by their parents. All of these events occurred in a ‘silent’ manner within each family’s private sphere. Another example is informal gatherings of community members that were utilised for enhancing their sociality. Until the late 1990s, people frequently got together in the evening to do some light work or socialisation. After the ice-breaking stage, some community members in Svay Rieng would invite former KR leaders to these informal social events. Although they tend to avoid sensitive topics in these occasions, such continued interaction played an important role in developing an emotional bond between them. There were occasions where the conversation touched upon their experience during the KR rule. In such cases, former KR leaders usually “[kept] quiet” and showed that they “[felt] ashamed.” In some cases, they even pretended to have “[forgotten] that they used to be KR officials.” (An unpublished interview data, recorded by Bunly Soeung, 2019)

In other cases, community members invited former KR leaders to share their experiences. Yes, I had asked questions about why they did that, when we drank together. (...) Rather than in a serious manner, I tried to make the conversation light. They usually said that they felt bad with their previous actions. Also, they looked sad when they explained that they were ordered to do that. If they hadn’t followed the order, they would have been killed as well. (Interview IV)

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Secondly, there are many cases where the forms of everyday practice are inactive thus people cannot see them when they focus on action. The internal and unofficial planning processes for promoting everyday practice in many cases are conducted outside of the public space adopting rather ‘quiet’ communication methods. One such example introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 is social shunning adopted by some local communities in order to maintain nonviolent coexistence with former KR leaders while people’s anxiety is still acute. The exclusion of certain individuals from their social activities is a clear expression of anxiety and antagonism, and requires a serious, long-term, and collective commitment of most community members. As time goes by, the form of relationship building (or relationship cutting) with former KR leaders settles in as a new norm in local communities. While few explicitly condemn or do harm to these former perpetrators, most people were aware of the tacit rule of ignoring their presence in their villages. The significance of this practice is clearly perceived by former KR leaders, which generates some level of responses from them. When the former KR associates were not welcomed by a certain family, the associates’ children and grandchildren were often treated in a similar manner. Through the process, the antagonism expressed by the older generation can carry on to the next generations (Interviews IV and XVIIII). Nevertheless, when focusing on the action itself, social shunning is expressed in the form of non-action such as non-invitation, noninteraction, and even non-recognition of their presence. When community members plan for important social events like weddings, for example, the action of social shunning involves the omission of former KR leaders from their invitation list. On the occasions where they come across former KR leaders on the street, all they do is present that they do not recognise the KR leaders. Moreover, the decision to socially shun was not something that community members publicly discussed and agreed on. Instead, as discussed above, the stories about the former KR leaders’ misbehaviour were shared through the conversations within private or informal settings often within each family. There is no official and explicit barrier that prevents former KR cadres’ social participation. Instead, it is a form of practice that is based on a shared notion within local communities to recognise the former KR leaders and their families as the banished. Another example is the subtle expression of social acceptance that is made in an episodic and mundane manner usually through individual communication. In response to the author’s question of ‘how you sensed

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that you were better accepted by the community members,’ for instance, some former KR leaders would share episodes of their personal interactions with local people. The responses were mostly brief, like “Their eye contacts changed” (Interview XXV) and “He [a community member] talked to me more often” (Interview XX). Nevertheless, these actions usually occur episodically in a moment of life without any plan. Moreover, community members usually take these actions without deeply thinking over the message that they want to deliver through the actions. Hence, even though they were asked about the significance of such actions, interview participants were not able to give further details. Although it is not exactly about the social relationship between former KR leaders and other community members, Zucker (2011, p. 98)’s description of how she was accepted by elderly women in a local community presents more details of such a process: She took me along to visit some of the other elderly women in the village and to the forest river to bathe and surrounded by her peers at a wedding she showered me with affection. And so I was welcomed into the community of elderly women. Later on, another elderly woman from a neighbouring village made a similar gesture by placing her arm around me in the taxi truck for the entire length of the 30-kilometre journey to the market town.

In short, despite the significance of these practices, important parts of everyday practices in local communities are difficult for external researchers to examine. Outsiders usually have a limited opportunity to access the private settings. Even in cases where they are invited, moreover, the dynamics of socialisation or communication between local actors are substantially influenced by the presence of the outsiders. In other cases, the forms of actions are quite subtle or inactive and occur in an episodic manner. Hence, it is difficult for outsiders to observe or experience these practices. Although researchers may get relevant information by asking questions about the practice, they cannot ask specific questions about the practices unless they know what has happened.

Practice Integrated into Other Practices It is important to acknowledge that community members have many tasks to deal with in their everyday life. Social reconciliation and peacebuilding

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can be part of their interests; however, it is extremely rare that community residents consider such things as their primary or important life objectives. Accordingly, everyday practices for social reconciliation are not usually mobilised as stand-alone events that require a substantial amount of extra energy and time from community members. Instead, the practices for social reconciliation are adopted into other types of social, cultural, or economic activities that community members conduct. However, it is often not straightforward to distinguish the peacebuilding elements from the practices that incorporate elements of reconciliation while apparently pursuing other types of objectives. Hence, the significance of these practices as everyday peacebuilding may not be clearly identified unless particular attention is paid (Eastmond & Selimovic, 2012; Lee, 2015; Visoka, 2016). In fact, there were a few stand-alone projects mobilised in the aftermath of the KR regime because it was an urgent social need to acknowledge people’s painful memories, prevent revenge violence, and reduce the risk of violence resumption. However, many of these events were gradually discontinued as time went by. While the government’s interest in these events was weakened, local communities did not have the capacity to maintain these initiatives as stand-alone events. Hence, many of these events were gradually integrated into other forms of social activities. A number of relevant examples have been introduced in Chapters 3 and 4. For instance, a major platform for relationship building in the 1980s was local development projects led by the government. Community members expressed their willingness to accept former KR leaders by inviting (or acquiescing to) the KR leaders’ participation in the projects and, vice versa, former KR leaders tried to demonstrate their goodwill by actively contributing to these projects. For instance, in Battambang, a large number of community development projects were conducted in the early 1990s to address various issues ranging from the reconstruction of local monasteries to the repair of the local irrigation facilities. These projects were conducted mostly relying on the community members’ collective labour. Another example is the Buddhist rituals in which most community members participate to commemorate the deceased family members who were killed during the KR period. In the aftermath of the KR regime, a large number of funerals and commemorative events were mobilised across the country, following the Cambodian Buddhist traditions. These commemorations offered the survivors of the KR violence

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the venues for psychological healing that symbolises ‘reconciling the relations with the dead.’ Many research participants confirmed the importance of such collective work and religious rituals as a platform for nurturing the mutual understanding and interaction between former KR leaders and other community members. Through these events, former KR leaders (and their family members) had the opportunities to spend a substantial amount of time with other community members and indirectly express their goodwill for engagement (see Chapter 3 for more details). However, most of these special events for commemoration had discontinued and therefore community members’ activities for commemoration had also been discontinued. One reason behind this change was the increase in the number of opportunities to conduct annual Buddhist festivals. A particularly important one in this regard is Pchum Ben, a period during which people offer merit to the dead who were unable to be reborn. From a cultural perspective, people felt it more natural and appropriate to join the Pchum Ben practices than to organise special commemorations, in order to do merit-making for the victims of the KR violence. From a practical perspective, it was challenging for many households to initiate and organise separate rituals for the family members who were victims of the KR rule. Accordingly, community members chose to use these regular Buddhist festivals as the venues to commemorate the KR victims (Bennett, 2015). The below interview quote explains how important it was for her to regularly contribute to these rituals for her prayer for the KR victims. Yes, I always remembered them [the family member who were killed by KR] when I celebrated religious ceremony. I dedicated my good deeds and merit making to them. My life was so hard in the past and now I devote myself to Buddhism. (Unpublished interview data, collected by Bunly Soeung, 2019)

The integration of everyday practices into other types of communityled activities is a practically sustainable and culturally legitimate way of pursuing community residents’ objectives. Especially in regard to sustainability, everyday practices are required to be something community members can continue to apply without incurring extra costs. Due to such integration, however, it can be difficult for external people to distinguish the meanings and significance of the incorporated practices

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for reconciliation. Local actors also often are often unclear with the implications of their activities in terms of social reconciliation. For instance, the rituals conducted during the annual Buddhist festivals commemorate not only the victims of the KR violence but all deceased ancestors. Hence, while the commemoration of the KR victims is an important part of their motivations, the meaning of these Buddhist rituals as part of the post-KR social reconciliation is not easy to distinguish, as one research participant mentioned: In fact, we did not differentiate between the commemoration ceremony for those who were killed during Khmer Rouge regime and that for those who generally passed away. In any country, law is adopted based on tradition or religion. I think religious law is the same. (Interview III)

Local Approaches Defined Under the Local Contexts The obscurity of the significance can be caused by the difference in the cultural backgrounds between community members and researchers. It is an axiom that community members develop everyday practices for peace and reconciliation, reflecting their cultural backgrounds. The meanings of reconciliation and the ways to achieve such reconciliation that local communities identify can be substantially different from outsiders’ understandings. The obscurity caused by such cultural differences can manifest in very practical issues like the interpretation of simple terms or concepts. One such example identified in the author’s field research was related to the expressions of ‘family-like relations’ or ‘family-like harmony’ that research participants used to describe the level of reconciliation in their own communities. When focusing on the literal meaning of these phrases in English, the statements made by these research participants may be interpreted to represent a high level of trust and bond, something to the level of (or beyond) solidarity. Nevertheless, in other parts of the conversations, the same interview participants mentioned things that were contradictory to this expression. For instance, one research participant mentioned “we are already one family” upon the question on the relationship between former KR leaders and other community members, but later mentioned that “I can never forget what they had done” and “it cannot be forgiven as if nothing had happened” (Interview III). This example

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presents that, in the aforementioned context in Cambodia, the meaning of ‘family’ in this context should be carefully interpreted. In the Cambodian cultural contexts, ‘family’ is a term that is frequently used to denote a community/organisation in which people usually share some sense of belonging. Hence, the term should not be automatically interpreted as the close social relations that nurture the highest level of unity, love, and mutual support. In other cases, confusion and obscurity may be caused by more fundamental issues like the difference in people’s approach to peace or reconciliation. One such example can be found in the rituals and meritmaking that many community members undertake for the victims who lost their lives during the KR period. In many local communities across the globe, people believe that the spirits of the dead may remain in the community areas playing roles as part of a community. The spirit is in a sense an actant, and the reconciliation with the spirit often becomes an important element of post-violence reconciliation. In this process, both religion and custom are adopted to provide “the parameters for appropriate interpretation of death and the rituals required in order to maintain the mutual care between living and the spirits of the dead” (Grenfell, 2021, p. 147). Moreover, reconciliation after mass violence frequently constitutes a spiritual relationship with the dead (Boege, 2018). In the Cambodian local communities, some forms of commemoration of the victims were important for many community members to address their sense of guilt at not having been able to intervene in the killing or to bury their bodies. These actions include burying the bones of the victims following the Buddhist rituals, doing merit-making praying for the victims’ smooth move to their next lives, and making offerings to the spirits of the dead. Nevertheless, when understanding the significance and meanings of these events, community members more often refer to their belief that “Buddhism and animism narrate and conceptualise the period [under KR]” (Bennett, 2015, p. 2). Many Buddhist practices in local communities are intertwined with animistic beliefs that acknowledge the presence of various kinds of spirits (including the spirits of ancestors). The dead including the victims of KR violence are not just ‘victims’ for whom people feel sad and sorry, but may be spirits with a bad death who could influence the living humans. In this regard, the dead are “still connected to the living” and are believed to send messages via the dreams of the living and the supra-natural power that these spirits have over the living (Guillou, 2012, p. 218). When community members had

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unexpected accidents or health issues, people frequently attribute them to haunting by ghosts and such a belief is backed up by local religious leaders. In this context, merit-making for the dead in the local narratives is often described as an action that has a practical purpose to prevent any curse from hungry ghosts (Kent, 2003; Ledgerwood, 2012). The process of reconciliation with the dead is developed based on this understanding. When they first perceive the actions of the spirits of KR victims, moreover, community members usually faced “fear, confusion, and massive displacement” and tended to present rather negative reactions of distrust and fear. In other words, many people experience the dead as coexisting with the experiences and lives of the living, and perceive and accept ghosts as “socially salient beings” (Bennett, 2015, p. 129). Nevertheless, while communicating with other community members over these haunting issues, people gradually began to appreciate the ‘reciprocal’ relationship with the dead (Bennett, 2015, p. 153). During this process, the commemoration and merit-making for the victims may not necessarily present as mourning the experience of victimisation, and expressing their love to the deceased people, which many external people may expect to see. Sometimes, the names of individual victims might not be even mentioned during these events. However, this culturally oriented process of the reconciliation with the dead requires examination through the specific cultural framework (Guillou, 2012). In short, Buddhist rituals for commemorating victims are an important element of people’s everyday practices which deal with the KR history. In almost all interviews, research participants singled out such Buddhist rituals as the primary venue where their anxiety over the KR history is addressed and washed away. Nevertheless, external researchers may not be able to identify the significance of such rituals in facilitating the healing and social reconciliation in local communities as the forms of rituals and people’s behaviour during these events may not demonstrate the value of reconciliation in the ways that externals expect. Moreover, community members’ own interpretation of the meanings of these rituals and events is not a straightforward way of addressing the value of reconciliation defined in the Western academic studies.

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Discussions: The Opportunities and Challenges of Subtlety for the Promotion of Peacebuilding It should be noted that the subtlety and obscurity examined above reflect the nature of local actors’ practices in their everyday lives. As people have developed everyday practices for relationship building in ways that feel comfortable and natural, their practices incorporate and reflect this accordingly. Then, what do subtlety and obscurity imply in the peacebuilding process? Firstly, in terms of opportunity, the subtlety in the forms of everyday peace enables local populations to explore and utilise various spaces for pursuing their goals of peace and reconciliation, while avoiding unnecessary social and political tensions. In Cambodia, there are politically imposed restrictions towards social reconciliation vis-à-vis the KR issues in terms of the narratives which define the nature of the KR organisation and practical approaches to dealing with the history. People are aware that narratives and actions that go beyond the boundaries are likely to attract attention from the authority (see Chapters 4 and 7 for more details). Moreover, in the areas where the number of former KR cadres is substantial, overt criticisms against KR might have put community members in difficult situations, in both security and social senses. Facing such a restricted environment, community members have identified and utilised the non-political space for expressing victims’ pain, for reconstructing social relations between former harm-doers and the wider communities, and for exchanging symbolic actions for apology and forgiveness. Hence, while nothing seems to have happened on the surface, the community members have explored and consolidated a sort of balanced social relationship to maintain peace in the communities. Moreover, the features of subtlety may enable everyday peace to be more sustainable in local areas. Everyday practices for social reconciliation have gone through the processes of formation, selection, and adaptation within local communities over the past four decades since the collapse of the KR regime. During this process, importantly, everyday practice for peacebuilding is usually mobilised as a part of their life, to the extent that it does not require extraordinary and artificial effort. Indeed, for many survivors of state violence in different parts of the world, the priority has been given to daily tasks and survival rather than dealing with the past. For instance, in the national surveys conducted in 2008 and 2010, the priorities of the respondents were “the economy, jobs and poverty reduction (83% and 98% in 2008 and 2010 respectively); infrastructure (48%

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and 50% in 2008 and 2010 respectively); and services such as health and food” (Pham et al., 2019, p. 136). Hence, everyday practices have been developed and adapted in ways that allow community members to realise their desire in a more costeffective manner. Many stand-alone initiatives conducted in the aftermath of the KR regime gradually perished. Instead, the rituals and practices that have survived are those that, to community members, feel ‘natural’ and they have been integrated into the types of social and economic activities that are being carried out in local areas. In particular, the rituals and gatherings from commemoration are integrated into annual Buddhist festivals in which the majority of Cambodians continue to be involved. Moreover, the practices for inter-personal reconciliation are done through exchanges of indirect and symbolic actions at the individual level. The types of activities introduced in this study are the ones that have survived such processes of selection and adaptation, reflecting community members’ own needs and desires. Hence, although the forms may look subtle, they are more likely to be sustained in the future, continuing their role in facilitating the platform for enhancing social relations between community members. On the flip side, the same features relevant to subtlety and obscurity could be challenges to the mobilisation of more proactive and organised practices. In their everyday practices, people may not be willing to join actions that require extra effort and commitment, which can be a big social and practical burden on them. Moreover, many practices are organically mobilised and conducted. The people who adopt such practices may not consciously consider the significance of their own actions for relationship building with former KR cadres. These factors may discourage people to overtly set a peacebuilding theme as an objective in their own local area. For instance, in a village where ‘concealed antagonism’ is socially embedded, the actions relevant to higher-level reconciliation (e.g., to go out with former KR leaders for drinking at night) may require extraordinary courage in order for individuals to resist the prevalent practice and notions in their local communities. Moreover, if a former KR leader is being advocated by a local elite who has strong influence, community members need to carefully consider the consequences of their actions vis-à-vis the KR leader. This implies that, from a short-term perspective, everyday peace is less likely to generate major social activities for transforming social conditions in ways that are compatible with the emancipatory peace conceptualised by academics in Peace and Conflict Studies.

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In some contexts, furthermore, actions that reflect the social and cultural contexts in the community may unintentionally sustain and intensify the social suppression against some social groups or even themselves. Community members’ choices following the notion or cultural norm prevalent in the local area may contribute to the justification of such suppression and mismanagement. For instance, local communities across Cambodia were actively committed to the reconstruction of local Buddhist monasteries in order to regain the platforms for their everyday religious practices. However, as soon as the minimum foundation for monastery operation was set, most community members stepped aside from the remaining process for further organisation and operation of Buddhist activities, expecting that monks would handle them. It is perfectly normal in Cambodian society that the work of local monasteries is meant to be determined by the religious and community leaders. Nevertheless, many monks (and local and political elites with whom these monks are associated) did not necessarily have the same interests and perspectives as community populations. There are many monasteries established as part of people’s endeavour for social reconciliation, which now support and legitimise the politicisation of sangha. Moreover, some monks’ vehement nationalism against Vietnam is considered to be inappropriate as a future vision for the peace of Cambodia (Lee, 2020).

Conclusion Many strategies for peacebuilding are promoted and exercised in people’s everyday life and frequently look insignificant and less visible. This chapter has examined one aspect of such banality focusing on the subtle forms of everyday strategies. The analysis in the above section presented four aspects of subtlety and obscurity that occur in many everyday practices for building of social relations, namely, indirect and/or symbolic forms of communication, a lack of visibility in the public space, practice integrated into other practices, and local approaches defined under the local contexts. To summarise, an important feature of subtlety and obscurity is the indirect or symbolic forms of inter-personal and inter-group interactions, which Cambodians usually adopt. In the process of mobilising sociality and solidarity, former KR cadres and other community members had not used explicit expressions of apology, acknowledgement, or forgiveness. However, the indirect actions to express their good will

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were mutually appreciated by their counterparts and, in some cases, generated mutually positive responses. Secondly, some practices of Cambodian local communities were implemented primarily in private settings and often looked inactive. Hence, when focusing on the actions emerging at the public level, nothing may seem to happen in local communities. However, the actions that are quietly mobilised usually have a strong influence over the behaviour and attitude of the majority population in local areas. In some cases, everyday practices for social reconciliation are undertaken as part of wider social practices that apparently have different objectives. One social or cultural event in this regard may reflect multiple objectives that community members want to pursue. Hence, to tease out the layer relevant to reconciliation from such social practices is often not straightforward. Finally, this chapter highlighted that local actors’ approach to reconciliation (or other peace-related virtues) based on their cultural background, and such local approaches and interpretation, may be substantially different from external actors’ cultural views. Hence, many actions undertaken to address community residents’ desire to address KR atrocity may not be well recognised by outsiders as forms of social reconciliation. As a final note, subtlety of everyday practices calls for alternative/supplementary approaches to gain knowledge on the local contexts. These external actors, especially when they make occasional short visits to local areas, find it difficult to gain a nuanced understanding of the banal practices in people’s everyday. They may end up with distorted and/or partial information about the everyday peace, which will substantially affect their opportunities to come with realistic and effective peacebuilding practices. While it is unrealistic for externals to completely avoid this risk, researchers and practitioners need to come up with new approaches with specific objectives to examine everyday practices. In this regard, it is a welcome addition that a number of recent studies in Peace and Conflict Studies and Development Studies have attempted to adopt more ethnographic and participatory approaches to field research (Hennings, 2018; Millar, 2020; Schulz, 2020; Williams, 2018). Interview List Interview III, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020)

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Interview VI, A person who once served as a local KR leader but was discharged later, living in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview VIII, A local leader living in Svay Rieng (November 2020) Interview XI, A person who once served as a local KR leader but was discharged later, living in Phnom Penh (December 2020) Interview XVI, A community leader in Svay Rieng. (June 2022) Interview XXV, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (January 2019)

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Kimmel, P. R. (1994). Cultural perspectives on international negotiations. Journal of Social Issues, 50(1), 179–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15404560.1994.tb02404.x Ledgerwood, J. (2012). Buddhist ritual and the reordering of social relations in Cambodia. South East Asia Research, 20(2), 191–205. https://doi.org/10. 5367/sear.2012.0100 Lee, S. (2015). Motivations for local resistance in international peacebuilding. Third World Quarterly, 36(8), 1437–1452. https://doi.org/10.1080/014 36597.2015.1052063 Lee, S. (2020). Local resilience and the reconstruction of social institutions: Recovery, maintenance and transformation of Buddhist Sangha in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 14(3), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2020.1736448 Lee, S. (2021). Understanding everyday peace in Cambodia: Plurality, subtlety, and connectivity. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 16(1), 24–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1542316620974371 Mac Ginty, R. (2013). Indicators+: A proposal for everyday peace indicators. Evaluation and Program Planning, 36(1), 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.evalprogplan.2012.07.001 Mac Ginty, R. (2022). Everyday peace. Oxford University Press. Millar, G. (2020). Preserving the everyday: Pre-political agency in peacebuilding theory. Cooperation and Conflict, 55(3), 310–325. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0010836720904390 Munyas, B. (2008). Genocide in the minds of Cambodian youth: Transmitting (hi)stories of genocide to second and third generations in Cambodia. Journal of Genocide Research, 10(3), 413–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/146235208 02305768 Nishimura, S., Nevgi, A., & Tella, S. (2008). Communication style and cultural features in high/low context communication cultures: A case study of Finland, Japan and India. In A. Kallioniemi (Ed.), Uudistuva ja kehittyvä ainedidaktiikka: Ainedidaktinen symposiumi 8.2.2008 Helsingissä. Osa 2 (pp. 783–796). (Tutkimuksia/Helsingin soveltavan kasvatustieteen laitos; No. 299). Helsingin yliopisto. Pham, P. N., Balthazard, M., Gibbons, N., & Vinck, P. (2019). Perspectives on memory, forgiveness and reconciliation in Cambodia’s post-Khmer Rouge society. International Review of the Red Cross, 101(910), 125–149. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1816383119000213 Randazzo, E. (2016). The paradoxes of the “everyday”. Third World Quarterly, 37 (8), 1351–1370. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1120154 Schulz, P. (2020). Recognizing research participants’ fluid positionalities in (post)conflict zones. Qualitative Research, 21(4), 550–567. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1468794120904882

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Visoka, G. (2016). Peace is what we make of it? Peace-shaping events and “nonevents”. Peacebuilding, 4(1), 54–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259. 2015.1040607 Williams, T. (2018). Visiting the tiger zone – methodological, conceptual and ethical challenges of ethnographic research on perpetrators. International Peacekeeping, 25(5), 610–629. https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2017. 1326288 Zucker, E. M. (2011). Trust and distrust in a highland Khmer community after thirty years of war. In J. A. Marston (Ed.), Anthropology and community in Cambodia: Reflections on the work of May Ebihara (pp. 79–104). Monash University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Everyday Narratives

Many post-conflict societies experience limited space for narrative development about past atrocities. Political powers tend to produce and control a master narrative that defines the meaning of the past, and utilises it as a means to strengthen their legitimacy and power. In this process, the narratives of minority groups, which differ compared to the master version, tend to be muted. This enforced silence often provokes and intensifies social conflicts. For pursuing social reconciliation, to deal with such division intensifying narratives is an important and challenging task (Edkins, 2003; Lessa, 2013). Cambodia was not an exception. Under the current government that has identified itself as the liberator from the KR massacre, the public discourse has defined KR as a homogeneous, absolutist, and brutal party (Sirik, 2020) whose anti-humanitarian actions should be brought to justice through a proper legal process. In many cases, however, community members have developed and shared the so-called ‘everyday narratives’ almost in parallel. These everyday narratives reflect community members’ effort to “describe their own reality” (Mac Ginty & Firchow, 2016, p. 313) and to “(re)create meaning, identities and social relations in a shattered world” (Kolind, 2008, p. 42). These everyday narratives may be hidden in the public discourse about past atrocities. Instead, they are produced, shared, and reformed through the everyday (verbal or non-verbal) interactions within and between social groups. People’s memory and the interpretation of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_7

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such memory are “both deeply personal and constantly reconstructed through social frameworks” and, hence, play important roles as “the key site for the moral adjudication of experiences of conflict and atrocity, and the social relationships that emerge on that basis” (Manning, 2015, p. 392). Then, how did the community members respond to the politically driven master narrative in the process of expanding the social space for reconciliation in the contexts of post-KR Cambodia? This chapter will delve into this question. Firstly, it will introduce the master narrative of the KR history defined by the Cambodian government as well as the contextual backgrounds lying behind such narratives. It then will analyse the narratives generated within local communities in different phases of the post-KR period, focusing on the narrative that aims to highlight the low utility or inappropriateness of violence as a tool to realise justice and one that de-constructs the simple identification of all KR leaders as harmdoers. In the last section, this chapter will acknowledge and introduce the KR cadres’ narratives that have been marginalised in the local practices for relationship building.

The Narrative of the Political Authority When the PRK leadership gained the central power of the country in 1979, dealing with the KR’s brutal violence was considered an urgent issue for different reasons. From a political perspective, the authority needed to quickly stabilise its political power so that it could effectively carry on the war against KR and other resistance groups. KR’s military forces were still strong, and it was reorganising its capacity at the border areas with Thailand, with material support from China and other external actors. Moreover, for the PRK leaders, its reliance on Vietnamese military support had the potential to be a handicap in terms of mobilising its legitimacy since Vietnam had been perceived by most Cambodians as an external aggressor. From an individual perspective, most leaders of the PRK had once been associated with KR as soldiers and leaders. However, these leaders had been suppressed in KR’s internal power struggles; many of their families had been killed in this process and their own lives were under threat until they fled to Vietnam. Hence, many PRK leaders had a personal abhorrence of KR leaders. Against this backdrop, the new regime immediately declared KR to be a “draconian, dictatorial and fascist regime” (Phnom Penh Domestic

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Service, 1979, cited in Gidley, 2019, p. 48), and attempted to define itself as the saviour of the nation who protected people from the inhumane disasters caused by KR. In almost all political statements, the regime had condemned the extreme violence and radical social disruptions which occurred during the KR period. Following this narrative, the regime had mobilised various initiatives to demonstrate and criticise the violence of KR throughout the 1980s, which included the operation of a tribunal, the collection and investigation of victims’ testimonials, the preservation of the sites of mass killing, and the designation of commemoration dates. At the same time, the regime needed to address the concern of local populations regarding further violence in the local areas. There were a large number of people who had served KR in different roles at different levels. These people and their family members were in fear of execution. Moreover, after having experienced a long period of mass violence, other community members also feared that they might be accused as KR associates for whatever reasons. Hence, from a political perspective, in order to strengthen its own legitimacy and effectively control the population, the new regime needed to reduce people’s sense of fear and uncertainty. At the same time, as the PRK leaders were once KR associates, they were clearly aware of the risk of ‘setting the wide targets for punitive justice’ on themselves who had once been KR leaders or commanders. Hence, the government carefully managed its messages on ‘who should be responsible for the KR violence.’ In principle, it separated KR’s top leaders from all other associates, portraying KR’s campaign as “a magnificent revolution subverted by a small group of evil doers” (Hinton, 2008, cited in Gidley, 2019, p. 48). In other words, the responsibility of all antihumanitarian actions was due to a small group of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary Clique, and other associates who worked under this group were exempt from primary responsibility for all the crimes committed by KR (Long & Reeves, 2008; Manning et al., 2018; Sirik, 2020). In short, a master narrative that had been developed under the PRK government was that “a handful of genocidal leaders could be blamed for hijacking an otherwise benign revolution” and “lower-level members of the Khmer Rouge should expect reintegration and exculpation” (Gottesman, 2003, cited in Manning, 2017, p. 46). However, the points of emphasis in this narrative changed over time. While the civil war was ongoing, for instance, the PRK government kept highlighting the ‘evilness’ of the KR regime so that it could gain popular support within Cambodia and place itself in a higher morality

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than KR in the realm of international diplomacy. In this process, although the unauthorised killing of or overt violence towards former KR cadres was banned, different forms of stigmatisation of them had largely been tacitly accepted. Nevertheless, the government’s position towards the KR issue shifted in the early 1990s when the country moved into post-war reconstruction. Calling for national reconciliation, the CPP government (led by former PRK leaders) demonstrated a ‘forget and forgive’ attitude towards low-ranking KR leaders. Prime Minister Hun Sen granted umbrella amnesty to most KR associates and adopted many KR soldiers and leaders into the national military forces as well as the ruling CPP party. Moreover, the central authority emphasised the need for peace and reconciliation to prevent further conflicts, and suppressed public discourse on KR to ‘dig a hole and bury the past in it’ (Chandler, 2008, p. 356). As part of this process, the government decided to exclude the history related to KR from the entire school curricula. Moreover, detailed discussions and critique on the KR issues have disappeared in most media coverage and public education (Bennett, 2015).

Narratives in Local Communities How then were such master narratives perceived by community members? In the author’s interviews, it was clear that the condemnation of KR’s mass violence resonated well with most Cambodians’ thoughts. The level of suffering during the KR rule was beyond description for almost all Cambodians and people needed a clear acknowledgement of their suffering and the opportunity to express their anxiety. However, people’s responses to the government making an exception for mid-/lowranking leaders’ responsibility seemed to receive mixed responses in the initial period. Some people supported the direction as the quote below mentions: I had asked myself, “Why do we hate and kill each other while we are actually relatives?” (…) Eventually, I reached the conclusion that it was because of the top leaders. There are millions of former KR military but very few top leaders. It was the small number of leaders who followed the ideology, that forced people to commit such actions. (…) Cambodia has always been like that. Look at (what’s happening) now. (Interview XXVI)

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However, there were people who believed in the responsibilities of some local leaders. I thought commune chiefs should be responsible for the killings. They were able to give commandments to kill. They were the one who reported the exact names of persons to be killed to the higher-ranking Khmer Rouge and who gave the commandments to village chiefs. Those who were in higher positions than commune level did not exactly know which mistake is made by whom. The village chiefs could never refuse implementing those commandments at all. Commune chief decidedly dealt with the killings. The nice commune chief did not exaggerate the mistake but they, if possible, tried to hide it and protect their members. Those members could survive, you know. (Interview V) Yes, they were ordered to follow the instructions. However, there were many people who did more than what they were assigned to do. When they were ordered to do one, some tried to do two. (Interview XXII)

Having different responses to the master narrative, local communities had gradually developed their own narratives to approach the KR history and the responsibilities of local KR leaders in generating violence. In a sense, there has been competition between narratives to understand the nature of KR violence and post-violence justice realisation in many local communities. In this process, community members had adopted dissimilar philosophical and cultural sources to justify their versions of narratives. For instance, community leaders who had aimed to discourage violence and facilitate peaceful coexistence with former KR leaders frequently utilised Buddhist precepts and concepts as well as local folk beliefs. In particular, the Buddhist sila (precepts) that prevent killings and concepts of karma formed an important foundation that discouraged many people from committing physical violence. Importantly, the narrative set by the political authority largely determined the boundary of local communities’ narrative generation. The key points in the master narrative such as the brutal nature of KR, the responsibilities of the top leaders, and the exemption of local KR leaders from punitive responsibilities had been considered by community members as the clear boundary by which they should abide. Hence, the local narratives were addressing the areas to which such master narratives do not pay attention or towards which they are somewhat ambivalent or vague. Moreover, the detailed narrative lines developed in such processes

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were presented in more subtle and indirect ways to acknowledge the complexity of the reality and variations of the KR cadres in terms of their motivations and level of commitment, rather than overtly challenging the dominant narratives.

Narratives Discouraging the Usage of Violence In the 1980s, the security conditions in the country were still unstable and the Cambodian government had attempted to sustain people’s anger against KR. The political campaigns to condemn KR had continued and, in this process, social stigmatisation against KR leaders was often adopted in an overt manner. A large number of uncontrolled killings and other forms of violence had occurred across the country especially during the early 1980s. In this context, the conversations between community leaders who discouraged violence and the people who advocated revenge often formed over two competing narratives of justice and nonviolence. Among the people who had been victimised by the KR’s revolutionary campaigns, on the one hand, there was a strong demand for former harm-doers to take responsibility for their actions. The collapse of the KR regime offered a rare opportunity to realise justice, which should have happened before former KR leaders ran away for their safety. Due to the absence of the central authority, there were few methods to achieve this objective alternative to self-mobilised ‘punishment’ on these harm-doers. In fact, collective violence had occasionally been adopted in the Cambodian cultural communities as punishment for people who were committed to unacceptable misbehaviour. People were considered to be morally obliged to repay both the good deeds and bad deeds from other people. Especially related to the harm they experienced, people kept a grudge (kum, kumkuon) to be paid back either through “a single happening or a series of smaller events that gradually add up” (Hinton, 1998, p. 356). It was not uncommon that the pay back was disproportionate, even destroying the lives of the harm-doer and their families. On the other hand, the local narratives for everyday peace primarily aimed to deter revenge violence against KR leaders in the local areas. These narratives focus on the significance of committing violence on these community members. In fact, many community leaders acknowledged victims’ anger against some former KR leaders. Having gone through the same suffering, community leaders empathised and embraced the anger

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and sense of despair that victims harboured. The shared mourning was an important part of the conversations. Then, however, local leaders emphasised that violence should not be adopted to express their anger. These narratives were popularly adopted in that they clearly reflect people’s prevalent desire for safety, fear of making ‘bad karma,’ and the desire to manage their daily lives without strong interruptions. To be specific, three types of narratives were widely adopted. Enough Is Enough Many people highlighted that there had been too much violence from which everybody had suffered. According to the research participants, this narrative was a good reflection of the strong desire that the majority of the population had experienced in their own communities. Most seniors in local communities had gone through decades-long intra-state conflicts, the side effects of the Vietnamese war, and the mass violence imposed by KR. With the establishment of the new PRK regime, the country now moved into another civil war with KR and other resistance groups. People were tired of violence and insecurity. Hence, ‘enough is enough’ was accepted as a powerful message by many people. For instance, two participants to the author’s field research mentioned: Our anger was calmed because the government often told us not to kill, not to revenge. It goes that “Khmers have killed Khmers all the time. Khmer killing Khmer and hating one another brings no benefit. Khmer killed one another. We destroy Khmers. If we keep killing Khmers, Khmer will become extinct.” (Interview XXIII) In my case, I frequently started a conversation by saying “We had a very difficult time during the Khmer Rouge and now we are in a lot better situation. Why don’t we sort out the issue in a peaceful way? Let’s try the Khmer people love the Khmer people and not to make any breakup or conflict.” To remind that the Khmer Rouge was a hard time was a very common expression that many village chiefs start their mediation with. (Interview IX)

Let Bygones Be Bygones Another narrative people frequently utilised was ‘let bygones be bygones’ (Bomplech roeung chas chol tov or Choup romleuk roeung chas tov). If

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‘enough is enough’ reflected people’s desire for having a safe space from violence, ‘let bygones be bygones’ emphasised the need for moving on. Without having good institutional mechanisms for dealing with the atrocity, to move on was one of few options that people could choose. Recalling the past would fill us with remorse again. What we suffered had happened in the past. We are decent persons, so we do not take revenge. Our Khmer ancestors said “When bitten by the bloodsucker, never bite it out of revenge. Just take it away. That’s it.” At the time, law enforcement was very poor, but now it is different. The government teaches us to care about one another. Never hate or revenge one another. All human beings want to live happy lives. All of us want happiness and to get happiness we must have deep mutual understandings. This is how to live in happiness. If we don’t have mutual understandings and always think about the past, we cannot have happiness. Revenge would happen. At the time, thing happened the way it was, but now we can’t do illegal acts. We have laws in force. Committing illegal acts would face punishment in consequence. Former Khmer Rouge were granted with pardon. They are human beings like us. They have rights and freedom. If we punch them, we are wrong. (Unpublished interview data, recorded by Bunly Soeung, 2019)

In this context, the expression of ‘to forget’ requires a careful examination as it may not literally mean to forget. While during interviews people mentioned that they forgot the past, many of them in the same interviews made the statements like: No, people didn’t want to forget. Many people who experienced the Khmer Rouge died. Now even though the government wants to invite them to the Khmer Rouge-related ceremony, they are not interested. People under 45 do not know what happened during the Khmer Rouge period. But it does not mean that wanted to forget it. (Interview IV)

‘To forget’ more often represents these community members’ attitudes to put the KR-related issues at the lower end of their daily agenda. The people who encourage ‘let bygones, be bygones’ emphasise that they have more important and urgent things to consider, and should not let the past issues disturb their life at present. Related to this, a frequently utilised phrase is ‘When bitten by the bloodsucker, never bite it out of revenge.’ It was used to undervalue the significance of their pain. For instance, a large number of research participants shared the statements like:

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I was really angry with them. (…) However, my mother-in-law told me that “Son, if the bloodsucker bites you, never bite it back in revenge.” I followed what she said. (Unpublished interview data, collected by Bunly Soeung, 2019) I don’t take him human and don’t care whether he is there. When a bloodsucker bites you, do you spend so much time to bite back?” (Interview XIX)

Hatred Cannot Cease by Hatred Thirdly, people usually referred to Buddhist concepts to explain the uselessness or counterproductivity of violence. One popular phrase adopted to explain that violence has no utility was “Hatred (or violence) cannot cease by hatred (or violence),” which people believed to be grounded on a Buddhist teaching. If we keep hatred and revenge, the killings one another repeatedly occurs endlessly. When we can stop from ourselves, the killings would end. According to Buddhist teaching, it teaches us about “hatred cannot cease by hatred.” Q: A:

So you think this teaching “hatred could not be ceased by hatred” is critically important? Yes, it is important in building inner peace, no more revenge and no more killings. (Unpublished interview data, recorded by Bunly Soeung, 2019)

Previously I got angry with them but later on my anger disappeared. Buddha teaches that hatred cannot be ceased by hatred. If I kept hatred in my mind, it continues endlessly. (Unpublished interview data, recorded by Bunly Soeung, 2019)

Be Mindful of the Karma That You Create The Buddhist concepts of karma and precepts that prevent killing were also frequently utilised. By combining these two concepts, people often delivered the message: (1) former KR leaders will eventually receive the punishment even though you do not take revenge actions against them;

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(2) you will get the consequence of your own violence regardless of your legitimate motivation as violence cannot be the solution to violence. I never thought him [a former KR cadre] as a human being again. Actually, I had wanted to see him thinking of doing revenge because he killed my father. But my mother said “Don’t do that. It will create a bad karma again. In the previous life, your father must have done something bad to him.” (Interview V) Actually, only religion was used to calm the villagers down since we had no law to punish them. When taking revenge, you will get bad karma. Those former Khmer Rouge officials committed bad deed and their receiving karma was just enough. Let them get their bad karma. It was not necessary to kill them at all, said the village or commune representatives. Religious explanation was very effective and the tension between the villagers and the former Khmer Rouge officials was better. (Interview VIII)

Narratives on Former KR Leaders Another major issue that local narratives tried to deal with was local people’s anger that indiscriminately targeted all KR associates. To stop uncontrolled violence and later develop better relationships with them, such a simplistic identification of them as KR associates needed to be deconstructed. Related to this point, the master narrative set by the political authority had confirmed that the responsibility of KR’s violence was ultimately on the (narrowly defined) top leaders. Nevertheless, the political regime had not maintained a clear and coherent position on how to perceive the other leaders and associates of KR. Many questions related to their identities in the contexts of KR violence have been left unanswered by the government’s messages, which include: If mid-/low-ranking KR officials were not responsible perpetrators, how should they be identified? Are they still perpetrators whose legal responsibilities are waived? Are they bystanders who simply could not oppose the wrong and violent policies? Are they also victims of the KR violence? Utilising the vagueness in the master narrative, Cambodians in many local communities had developed different narratives related to these questions. In the author’s field research, the types of narratives below have been shared within the participants’ own communities.

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Not All Leaders Were Cruel One form of narrative attempted to distinguish and acknowledge individual leaders’ roles and attitudes during the KR period and their individual backgrounds. Through this, people highlighted a message that ‘not all leaders were cruel and bad’ that could provide the reasons not to kill particular KR associates. In terms of individual leaders’ attitudes, community members have lived with them and worked together for a substantial amount of time. Most community members clearly acknowledged the KR leaders who were sympathetic to them and those who were particularly brutal and harsh. A large number of research participants, for instance, made statements like: There were two types of Khmer Rouge officials in my village. For the first type, they just followed the instructions or commandments from the higher-level officials. They just carried out their job, following the orders in order to survive. For the second type, they were very cruel and aggressive. They did a lot of bad things to the people. They were very strict and they did not tolerate the people at all. Most of them already passed away. When we were sick, we asked them for the medical check-up or for taking a break, but they did not allow us. They were very strict with the food distribution. Therefore, we had to work hard even though we got sick. If we did not work hard, we would have problems. (Interview XIX) The villagers knew that those former Khmer Rouge officials were kind under the Khmer Rouge regime. They never did violence or torture against us despite the Khmer Rouge’s very strict and tough policy. They even helped us sometimes. Therefore, after the collapse of Khmer Rouge regime, the villagers felt pity on them and just liked them. Now, they are still kind. They are much kinder if compared to the past under Khmer Rouge. This brought them love and affection rather than revenge. (Interview VII)

Related to the above point, community members’ relationship building with former KR leaders was partly influenced by their connections in the pre-KR periods. In many cases, low/middle ranked leaders of KR were selected from the local areas. These local leaders were family members, relatives, and friends of other community members. Such pre-KR relationships usually played an important role in pacifying community members’ actions towards these leaders. This factor was particularly important when the victims had family connections with harm-doers. Many research

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participants mentioned that they decided not to take revenge against the leaders who had killed their families, mainly because the harm-doers were also their family members. Moreover, when the victims and perpetrators had maintained a close friendship before the KR period, they had better opportunities to build mutual understanding about the challenges that both sides had faced by engaging in dialogues. In some cases, community members suggested applying more consistent criteria: the roles they played and the power that they held. The judgement about responsibility was particularly important when community members approached the mid-ranked leaders who were in the position to order killing of people. There were variations in the levels of accountability for actions to which mid-ranked leaders were held, which reflected the dissimilar governance systems area by area. In some communities, most residents agreed that mid-ranked leaders should be responsible since they had the authority to order and approve killing. In other areas, however, people more often mentioned that mid-ranked leaders did not really know what was going on at the community levels. It was more up to local leaders to decide what to do with people. Sometimes, the roles that former KR leaders had assumed were an important criterion in differentiating people’s attitudes. A couple of relevant examples are given below. Yes, there were few cases of revenge killings. Those who were killed held higher position. They were associated with reporting the names of victims to be killed. Most of them were cooperative heads and village chiefs who knew the villagers and what they were doing well, and those who directly committed the killings. (Interview I) They [those who were killed] were security officials. There were some deputy commune chiefs but mostly they were security [officials]. (…) The security officials were the main target to be attacked by the villagers who tried to search for those security officials. (Interview X)

The narratives on individual KR leaders’ attitudes and roles were shared and considered in the conversations between local actors over whether an act of revenge violence was necessary. When a group of local members considered a revenge action targeting former KR leaders who had been sympathetic and nice to them, many community members would approach this group to explain the good deeds that the KR leaders

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had done. At the end of the conversations, people usually concluded that “So, he is OK. Please don’t kill him” (Interview XVI). Such actions were frequently backed by other community members as the majority of the local population had clearly recognised the actions and attitudes of the local KR leaders during the revolutionary campaigns, as the quotes below clarify. However, even after the vengeance killing was abandoned, people’s anger and anxiety persisted for a long time, as a research participant mentioned below: The family of the victims felt the deep pain and agony over the death of the victims. The anger and anxiety were extreme. However, they did not commit any violence at all. They just expressed their anger, hatred and anxiety through tear drops and descriptions of their suffering life. They did not want the genocide to reoccur in the future for the next generations. It [such a conversation] was deeply painful. (Interview VII)

They Are also Victims The space for social reconciliation gradually expanded over the time. Particularly, the UN-led post-conflict peacebuilding process brought a major shift. The government openly declared to dig a hole and bury the past in order to prevent the resumption of military violence. Under such a circumstance, ‘to forget the past and work together for communities’ was accepted in many local communities as a form of social reconciliation and peace maintenance. However, this main shift was not backed up by a systematically and substantially developed narrative to redefine the significance of KR associates’ previous deeds. The master narrative on KR still remained as the prevalent notion during this period. It was reinforced in most public statements and the information available at various commemoration sites. However, the KR-related issues were treated as low on the agenda or taboo in most public debates or events, unless the events were specially planned to commemorate the KR victims (Pham et al., 2019, pp. 127–128). Under the circumstances, more conciliatory narratives began to be shared within some local communities. One such narrative was to acknowledge former KR leaders as the victims of the KR regime. While it is undeniable that these former associates served the regime, their victimisation as well as their coerced oppression of others should be carefully put into context. Firstly, people insisted on recognising the KR’s process of

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recruiting local actors and forcing them to serve as local leaders or security forces. In all three locations of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Svay Rieng, respondents confirmed that the local-level leaders of the basic units were picked up by senior leaders without pre-consultation, and forced to assume their roles. In this process, questioning the order from Angkar (the KR party) meant putting their own lives at risk. Secondly, these low-ranking leaders had gone through the same levels of victimisation that other community members experienced. They lost their close family members, suffered from hunger, and were under constant threat of being killed. Each narrative is backed up by detailed stories based on individual experiences. Some local leaders were subject to mass violence caused by KR’s internal power struggle. For instance, in Svay Rieng province, interview participants confirmed that there was a major shift in the KR leadership style between 1977 and 1978. It was partly due to the power struggle among different commanderships. According to the interviews, local leaders were allowed a significantly bigger space to apply their own ideas and judgements. Interview participants recalled ‘good leaders’ who had done some sensible and sympathetic things for them. However, in most cases, these local leaders were accused of having ‘betrayed’ the Angkar (the party or the KR regime) and were taken away to be killed. The new leaders who replaced them were aliens to the areas, and were a lot stricter in applying the rules. The sense of terror among people also intensified then. In this regard, one interview participant mentioned: Yeah, from my point of view, actually I did not know which factor is more powerful that contributed to the mass killing in the country but I knew that at the time the Khmer Rouge always changed leaders from time to time. Once they changed the leaders in the village, the past leaders were arrested and taken away. Sometimes, they were put in the rice sack and taken away. This is what I knew. The leaders in the community worked for 3 or 6 months or up to a year and later on they were changed to another different place or were taken away for being killed. (Interview XIX)

However, the narrative that acknowledged the victimhood of KR leaders was often challenged in cases where individual KR leaders had engaged in particularly brutal and malicious behaviour. For instance, in a conversation in Phnom Penh, one research participant mentioned: “No, we didn’t feel pity of him [a former KR leader]. We didn’t know where

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he came from. He was very harsh from the first day that he came [to our village]. He ordered us to work unnecessarily harshly” (Interview V). In this regard, people’s response to the narrative was largely influenced by individual local leaders’ manners and behaviour during the KR regime. We Don’t Take Him as KR Anymore An aspect of local narrative development is ‘the absence of narrative’ on former KR leaders’ group identity as KR. Silence and absence of narrative require a careful examination in that the significance of silence can be interpreted in substantially different ways. For instance, ‘avoidance of talking about KR leaders’ was utilised in many local communities as a tactic for social shunning (see Chapter 3 for more details). In this case, silence represented people’s collective anxiety vis-à-vis former KR leaders. However, the absence of narrative in this section denotes the situation where people maintain quite close interaction with former KR leaders and community members do not consider the former leaders’ previous affiliation to KR in their everyday communication. In this context, ‘the absence of narrative on their group identity’ represents community members’ acceptance of former KR leaders more as parts of their communities rather than the affiliates of KR. For instance, a number of research participants share the perspectives like these ones: The majority of the people do not have any distinction towards the Khmer Rouge officials when we meet them even though they committed the genocide. We just identify them individually. For instance, Mr. A, Mr. B, or Mr. C, like this. We usually don’t identify them as former Khmer Rouge official. (Interview III) In our community, we did not discriminate against any family members or relatives of the former Khmer Rouge officials at all. They live their lives in the community happily. The wife of the deceased former Khmer Rouge official remarried to a new husband. Their children can get education. They can join with the community. They even become teachers. The villagers just focused on the perpetrators who served the Khmer Rouge regime. They did not take revenge against their family members or the relatives at all. (Interview X)

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In some interviews, people oppose the usage of the term KR as it unnecessarily divides Cambodians into different groups, as can be seen in the below quote: What we really need is to try to eliminate the divisive term of the Khmer Rouge but use the term of just Khmer. There isn’t such a thing as blue Khmer, yellow Khmer. We only need a united Khmer. Moreover, top leaders need to work hard to unite us rather than divide us. (Interview XXVI)

Marginalisation of KR Leaders’ Narratives The aforementioned narratives were mostly generated and developed by victims and community residents in local areas of Cambodia. To summarise, community members who wanted to expand the opportunities for nonviolent coexistence with former KR leaders had adopted their own narratives on the usage of violence and the identities of former KR leaders. Although none of them overtly challenged the master narrative, they identified and utilised the ‘vagueness’ in the narrative in order to facilitate the social environment that they hoped to have. How then did former KR leaders, the counterpart of this dynamics, respond to these local dynamics? What happened to these KR leaders’ own narratives on the KR campaigns and their involvement in the campaigns? In general, most KR leaders chose to keep a low profile either avoiding making comments on the KR issues or largely accepting the narratives set by the government or local communities. Hence, the narratives of KR leaders and soldiers have largely been suppressed over the past decades. There were limited opportunities during the author’s field research to identify former KR leaders’ thoughts on KR, the KR rule, or their commitment. In most cases, the KR leaders who joined the author’s interviews avoided answering questions on these topics. Nevertheless, there are a few published studies that have examined the narratives of former KR soldiers and leaders, based on the data collected in the previous strongholds of KR. As former KR associates comprised a substantial portion of the total population in these areas, these studies report more detailed and explicit statements of KR leaders’ narratives. Although these narratives do not necessarily represent the views of former KR leaders in other areas, the analysis of these data sheds light on how the KR leaders’

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own narratives might have developed if they were given non-restrictive environments. The former KR leaders’ understanding of the past identified in these studies was two-fold. Firstly, they share a sense of guilt about the destruction and violence that the KR movement had committed (Manning, 2015). They were clearly aware of the negative impact of the KR regime. In these cases, former KR leaders usually adopt the narrative of victimhood. Regarding the motivation to join KR, for instance, they stuck to the point that ‘we were involuntarily recruited.’ Moreover, they highlighted their own suffering under the KR rule and during the civil war. Many had lost their direct families, suffered from hunger and malnutrition, and had been under a constant threat of being killed. The same narrative was repeated in various types of dialogues with KR leaders, ranging from the official statements at the tribunal to informal conversations with other community members. A former KR leader whom the author interviewed described the situation in the last year of the KR regime: All of us were innocent. You know, at the time all lower ranking former Khmer Rouge officials just worked hard to survive. They knew nothing. While working hard for the regime, the village chief and commune chief were killed by their fellow Khmer Rouge. Then, a new village chief or commune chief was appointed. I knew a case that district chief was forcefully taken away by a van by Khmer Rouge and later on it was known that he was killed. Any time we saw that van coming to our village we felt very fearful. This is because the van was to take people away for being killed. The new district chief said that “The previous district chief had not performed his work well. That was why he was killed.” However, this new district chief was then killed alike. His name was Mr. M . He was a fat man. The commune chief worked very hard for the regime, but he was killed by the Khmer Rouge regime. A new commune chief took over the work. He worked very hard and effectively, encouraging the villagers to work hard. He was very loyal to Angkar. Nevertheless, he then was killed. I don’t think that the leaders in the village or in the commune must be responsible for the killings of millions of victims. As for me, I just worked to survive. I did not know when my turn is. (Interview I, the name of the KR leader was anonymised)

Some KR leaders challenge the identification of the KR as an inhumane and uniform entity that had carefully planned all strategies for their ‘revolution.’ In contrast, they argue that the organisation was comprised of

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various people, and many policies were spontaneously determined based on many situational factors. For instance, massive executions of civilians were, they believe, more often caused by the decisions of low-ranked cadres who were uneducated and keen to prove their loyalty to the party. In many interviews, people emphasise that there were good leaders (usually including themselves) who wanted to be nice to other people. Incoherent and contradictory communication channels are blamed as important reasons behind the violent policies. Secondly, some narratives acknowledge the legitimacy of the KR campaigns. Although the regime had made many mistakes and presented important limitations, according to them, KR’s vision for developing a better society was genuine and valuable. KR’s propaganda was successful in addressing some people’s concerns on the recent history of Cambodia. An important issue was with the political leadership in the early 1970s. The then head of the state Lon Nol had expelled Prince Sihanouk from political power via a military coup, which had encouraged many people to question the regime’s legitimacy. The suspected involvement of the US in this coup heightened the nationalistic zeal against foreign powers. The corrupt governance of the regime also galvanised people’s anxiety. Utilising these issues, KR identified its campaign as a revolutionary movement to protect the monarch from foreign invasion and to reform the governance system for the poor. According to this narrative, while the movements had presented many limitations and pitfalls, the objectives of the KR campaign were legitimate and patriotic. Some people also believed that Prince Sihanouk would not have been able to return to his kingship unless the KR revolution had succeeded (YfP, 2011, 2012). Some participants mentioned with a sense of nostalgia, that the ‘spiritual’ nurturing of youths worked well in the country. The sense many former KR leaders feel will be similar to the following quote from Chon and Thet (2010, p. 1)’s study: I don’t know why it happened like that (…) When we were students, we thought in a good way and did everything step by step. I joined the movement because I thought something good would come out of it. But finally, it turned bad and now my name is connected to a bad thing.

In other cases, some former KR leaders emphasised the positive contributions and actions that their senior leaders had developed. One striking example is the way that local community members in Anlong

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Veng, Oddar Meanchey province, remember and commemorate Ta Mok, a former chief commander of the KR military groups. According to Manning (2015), people in Anlong Veng believe that To Mok had promoted the development of local areas, building new infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and dams. There were people who remember Pol Pot as a ‘strong man’ and felt disappointed that most people only see his faults (Manning, 2015). To reiterate, it requires a further study to confirm how far the aforementioned narratives that were collected mainly in KR strongholds resonate with the views of former KR leaders living in other areas. Nevertheless, it is obvious that major narratives introduced in this section are substantially different from the prevalent narratives within local communities including both the political master narrative and different versions generated by community members. The marginalisation of these distinct narratives in the post-KR Cambodia simultaneously reflects the power disparity between former KR leaders and other community members as well as the influence of the master narrative. The relationship reconstruction in local communities was promoted largely by some community members (who are on the majority side) through the processes of ‘allowing’ the re-integration of former KR leaders (who are on the minority side). Hence, the local narratives generated in this process largely aimed to convince ‘hawkish’ people who are more reluctant about reconciliation, and did not seriously take on board the opinions of former KR leaders. At the same time, moreover, this marginalisation partly explains how community members approach the master narrative. Many community members feared being recognised for opposing the government’s direction. Although it is rare that the government agents explicitly prohibit certain types of discourse from emerging in local communities, people are worried about the negative consequence of their actions against it. Such a fear was also identified in the areas that used to be KR’s strongholds. For instance, an interview cited in Manning (2015) acknowledged that people in Anlong Veng could not publicly commemorate Ta Mok due to their fear of attracting the government’s attention. Hence, many community members adopted more ‘private’ ways to remember him.

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Discussion: Bottom-Up Narratives for Conflict Disruption From a theoretical perspective, the above findings are particularly relevant to the academic debates on destabilising conflict narratives that intensify social tensions and violence. Narrative is an account of the objects, which selects and synthesises detailed stories through a frame. It represents the teller’s cognition of scheming (Polkinghorne, 1988). It is constructed through the tellers’ purposeful process to make sense of their experience. Considering the narrative issues in the peacebuilding contexts, although detailed discussions vary, the studies on this topic, by and large, acknowledge that narratives in conflict-affected societies are frequently dominated by political elites to delegitimise outgroups in the same society and encourage the continuation of violence. Moreover, these conflict narratives are frequently backed up by institutional pressure on people to publicly uphold the narratives (Edkins, 2003; Evans & Kaynak, 2015; Lessa, 2013; Schuck et al., 2016). Hence, it is important for people in these societies to destabilise the conflict narratives. These narratives may cover not only the historical background of the violence (the past) but also their visions for the society that they want to further develop (the future) (Maynes et al., 2008). Mac Ginty (2022, pp. 202–203) argues that such narrative disruption can be done through people’s everyday practices and suggests three ways that it might happen: to offer counter-narratives that disrupt the dominant narratives, to take actions against the prevalent norms, and to address the conflict mentality. Related to the above discussions, the findings in this study provide rarely available empirical evidence that demonstrates how such a narrative disruption can be adopted by community actors in the particular context of Cambodia. In short, the everyday narratives identified in Cambodia did not focus on ‘the nature of KR or its revolutionary campaign’ with which the master narrative was mainly concerned. Instead, especially when attempting to address ongoing violence, the bottom-up narratives attempted to address people’s desires to realise justice but to stop violence and prevent any negative consequences of their actions. Moreover, when they navigated ways to create and expand the space for peaceful coexistence with former KR leaders, some parts of the local narratives concerned the identity of KR associations. However, these

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narratives were usually presented in ways that filled the “gaps unexplained in terms of the role, responsibility and experiences of lower-level Khmer Rouge” (Manning et al., 2018, n.p.). In other words, while still being within the broad boundaries of the mainstream narrative, the local narratives attempted to minimise violence against former KR leaders by acknowledging the complexity of the KR governance and distinguishing low-ranked associates in their local areas. In terms of the sources of narrative generation, community members’ narratives were developed primarily utilising their religious philosophy and precepts, local cosmological beliefs, and maxims and old sayings. They had practically mixed and integrated a few different narrative sources to make sense of their current situations and justify their suggestions. Not all narratives used in this process were ‘reconciliatory’ in nature, as understood in the academic discussions (e.g., “Let it go this time. You can kill him if he does the violence again”). In other cases, narratives reflect people’s sense of helplessness about the chances for making changes to the ongoing situation (e.g., “Just let bygones, be bygones”). However, these narratives were the ones to which people could relate, thus could be more effective in creating social changes in their own contexts. Due to such features, people in local communities could come up with the narratives that looked politically ‘safe’ and culturally appealing to most community members, in order to disrupt the prevalent violence and create the space for peaceful coexistence with former harm-doers. They offered reasonings for ways to effectively influence community members and convinced people to adopt “the mentality of disrupting” (Mac Ginty, 2022, p. 204) the violence and suppression of many KR leaders who they felt acceptable. Nevertheless, its roles and contributions in conflict disruption are difficult to articulate clearly since such everyday narratives are adopted in conjunction with other actions. The roles of everyday narratives may often look less obvious in comparison to other factors unless particular attention is given to them. For instance, while community members adopted narratives for preventing revenge killing, the government’s ban of unauthorised violence was an institutional arrangement that played an important role. Hence, some people may attribute the reduction of vengeance killing to such government actions only. While the important contributions of government policies are undeniable, however, such externally imposed regulations would not have worked for long unless the policy had not been normatively and logically justified through such local narratives.

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As a caveat, moreover, it should not be assumed that the Cambodian model can be necessarily effective in other societies. In fact, post-KR Cambodia presented a unique social context in that victims of violence comprised of absolute majority of the population, the representative body of the harm-doer group lost its status as a legitimate actor in the society, and the dominant narratives did not galvanise direct violence towards the harm-doer group. Accordingly, there was not strong competition between contradictory narratives among major social groups. Moreover, the promotion of conflict prevention and social reconciliation did not require an overt challenge to the dominant narratives. Cambodians’ everyday narratives were generated to pursue their specific desires reflecting on such particular contexts. In this regard, the process of community actors’ everyday narratives stated above demonstrates the importance of examining “the ‘realities’ of conflict in terms of hurt, pain, displacement and destruction” (Mac Ginty & Firchow, 2016, p. 309).

Conclusion This chapter has examined the everyday narratives that community members have adopted in the process of promoting nonviolent coexistence and further enhancing their relationship with former KR leaders. It explained that these everyday narratives did not overtly challenge any of the master narrative lines. Instead, they gradually expanded the opportunities for peaceful coexistence with the former harm-doers by acknowledging the complexity of the reality and variations of the KR cadres in terms of their motivations and level of commitment. Specifically, in the first section, it introduced the narratives that aimed to support the lack of utility or counterproductivity of vengeance violence as a method for realising justice. Community members emphasised that they had experienced more than enough violence in the previous period and that the painful past should be let go. These two narratives appealed to people’s desire to move on from the past violence and atrocity and have space for a peaceful life. Moreover, utilising Buddhist philosophy, they explained that hatred cannot be addressed by hatred and the people who kill others will reap the consequence according to the Buddhist law of ‘cause and effect.’ These narratives focus on offering more logical explanations about the low utility of violence. Secondly, another set of everyday narratives focused on dismantling the indiscriminate judgement of all

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KR cadres’ responsibility, by acknowledging the complexity of KR leaders’ roles. A large number of local communities have acknowledged and emphasised the good deeds of some local KR cadres in order to prevent violence against these individuals. Then, when the mutual recognition between community members and former KR leaders was enhanced, people occasionally recognised former KR leaders’ victimhood and even declined to identify them through their association with KR. While these narratives offered politically safe and culturally acceptable reasons to improve their relationship with former KR leaders, this chapter also introduced the idea that the narratives from former KR leaders’ perspectives were largely suppressed in this process. With the strong power disparity against them, most KR cadres had to hide their thoughts on the nature of the KR rule and their roles under the regime, in order to maintain their positive relationship with other community members and not to attract attention from the authorities. In this regard, the everyday narratives in local communities in Cambodia represent the perspectives of victims that are an absolute majority in number and whose views are backed up by the current political authority. Interview List Interview I, A former KR leader in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview III, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview IV, A community leader in Svay Rieng (January 2019) Interview V, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview VII, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview VIII, A local leader living in Svay Rieng (November 2020) Interview IX, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview X, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (December 2020) Interview XIV, A local NGO practitioner working on social reconciliation, living in Phnom Penh (September 2021) Interview XIX, A survivor who once served as a local KR leader near Phnom Penh (October 2020) Interview XXII, A survivor of the KR violence in Svay Rieng (January 2019)

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Interview XXIII, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (December 2020) Interview XXIV, A survivor of the KR violence in Battambang (January 2019) Interview XXVI, A former soldier of the PRK who fought against KR during the civil war (December 2018)

References Bennett, C. (2015). Living with the dead in the killing fields of Cambodia (Doctoral thesis). University of Kent. Chandler, D. (2008). Cambodia deals with its past: Collective memory, demonisation and induced amnesia. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9(2–3), 355–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/14690760802094933 Chon, G., & Thet, S. (2010). Behind the killing fields: A Khmer Rouge leader and one of his victims. University of Pennsylvania Press. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge University Press. Evans, M., & Kaynak, S. M. (2015). Media framing in religious and secular conflict in Turkey and Israel. International Political Science Review, 36(2), 139–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512113512147 Gidley, R. (2019). Illiberal transitional justice and the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia. Palgrave Macmillan. Hinton, A. (1998). A head for an eye: Revenge in the Cambodian Genocide. American Ethnologist, 25(3), 352–377. http://www.jstor.org/stable/645789 Kolind, T. (2008). Post-war identification: Everyday Muslim counterdiscourse in Bosnia Herzegovina. Aarhus University Press. Lessa, F. (2013). Memory and transitional justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against impunity. Palgrave. Long, C., & Reeves, K. (2008). Dig a hole and bury the past in it. In W. Logan & K. Reeves (Eds.), Places of pain and shame: Dealing with ‘difficult heritage’ (pp. 68–81). Routledge. Mac Ginty, R. (2022). Everyday peace. Oxford University Press. Mac Ginty, R., & Firchow, P. (2016). Top-down and bottom-up narratives of peace and conflict. Politics, 36(3), 308–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/026 3395715622967 Manning, P. (2015). Reconciliation and perpetrator memories in Cambodia. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(3), 386–406. https://doi. org/10.1093/ijtj/ijv015

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Manning, P. (2017). Transitional justice and memory in Cambodia: Beyond the extraordinary chambers. Routledge. Manning, P., Ly, S.-K., & Ser, S. (2018, May 16). Changing the story: Whose stories and why? University of Leeds. https://changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk/ 2018/05/16/changing-the-story-whose-stories-and-why/ Maynes, M. J., Pierce, J. L., & Laslett, B. (2008). Telling stories: The use of personal narratives in the social sciences and history. Cornell University Press. Pham, P. N., Balthazard, M., Gibbons, N., & Vinck, P. (2019). Perspectives on memory, forgiveness and reconciliation in Cambodia’s post-Khmer Rouge society. International Review of the Red Cross, 101(910), 125–149. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1816383119000213 Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human science. State University of New York Press. Schuck, A., et al. (2016). Who’s afraid of conflict? The mobilising effect of conflict framing in campaigns news. British Journal of Political Science, 46(1), 177–194. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123413000525 Sirik, S. (2020). Memory construction of former Khmer Rouge cadres: Resistance to dominant discourses of genocide in Cambodia. Journal of Political Power, 13(2), 233–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2020.1764805 Youth for Peace (YfP). (2011). Behind the darkness: Taking responsibility or acting under orders? Youth for Peace. Youth for Peace (YfP). (2012). Neary Padevat: Female revolutionaries. Youth for Peace.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Unpacking the Nature of Everyday Peace

This study set two primary objectives. Firstly, it aimed to delve into the practices for promoting peace and reconciliation that are mobilised by community actors in their everyday life in different locations in Cambodia. The post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding in Cambodia is an important case. 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of the collapse of the KR regime in Cambodia. During this period, the country has gone through a decade-long civil war, an internationally driven postwar peace process, and rapid economic growth under an authoritarian regime. Hence, this case study offers an opportunity to study how peace is made, enacted, embodied, and lived over a long period. Against this backdrop, particular attention was given in this analysis to the questions of ‘What does everyday peace look like?,’ ‘What forms of everyday practice have community members developed and utilised?,’ ‘How is the local process for relationship building related to the wider peacebuilding and governance contexts in the country?,’ and ‘How have community members in Cambodia handled and destabilised the mainstream narratives related to KR in the process?’ Secondly, based on the empirical analysis, this publication intended to engage in and further advance the conceptual and theoretical debates in Peace and Conflict Studies on the nature of everyday peace. This volume pays primary attention to four areas of theoretical discourse: plurality, mundaneness, connectivity, and narrative generation. These © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1_8

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thematic areas have been extensively examined, from the early conceptual studies to the most recent empirical studies. The in-depth case study of Cambodia will be useful in further advancing these debates as it will offer a non-western perspective on everyday peacemaking and peacebuilding that understands the everyday in the context of cultural and social relationships. By presenting how reconciliation is embedded in notions and practices of social relations in Cambodia, in this regard, the volume will contribute to de-centring the Euro-centric nature of the current academic discourse. As a conclusion, this chapter recaps the main findings and related discussions that appear in the previous chapters. The first section will weave the features of everyday practices introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 focusing on the types of actions. The second section will revisit the conceptual and theoretical discussions that appeared throughout the previous chapters, and revisit their practical and theoretical implications.

Everyday Practices Mobilised in Local Communities in Cambodia This project aimed to present an in-depth case study of the promotion and maintenance of social reconciliation in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, with particular focus on the restoration of social interaction between former KR leaders and other community members. First, facing the emergence of uncontrolled revenge killing against former KR associates after the collapse of the KR regime, many community leaders undertook various actions to deter violence and maintain a basic level of security. They engaged in multiple rounds of dialogue with the community members who were organising the aggressions against former KR cadres to discourage these actions. Often such dialogues carried on within households, between children who participated in the ‘punishment of KR leaders’ and their parents or other seniors in the families. In such dialogues, people often referred to the government’s policies banning unauthorised violence, narratives like ‘enough is enough’ and ‘the KR leaders will see the consequence of their bad deeds in the Buddhist law.’ In other cases, local communities endeavoured to commemorate the victims who were killed during the KR’s rule. Projects like bone collections, mock funerals, and reconstruction of local monasteries were widely undertaken under the auspices of the government.

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Through these efforts, many community members accepted or acquiesced to their physical coexistence with the KR leaders who had been involved in many cruel activities, despite feeling strong anxiety and antagonism towards them. People’s primary objective for these practices was to reduce violence in their local areas and to achieve emotional healing for the survivors. This motivation is, in a sense, more relevant to crisis management or prevention of violence than to social reconciliation. However, the protection of former KR leaders from violence and the maintenance of nonviolent coexistence between them and other community members laid a critically important foundation for the next phase of social reconciliation. In some local areas, community leaders attempted to initiate direct engagement with former KR leaders. The selection of timing and venues for facilitating such engagement was carefully chosen according to the community populations’ attitudes. Frequently utilised venues were the local development projects led by the government, which aimed to repair or reconstruct local infrastructure. As they were public projects requiring much human labour, community leaders convinced other community members to incorporate some former KR leaders in order to utilise their labour and skills. Some community leaders invited the KR leaders in their local areas to Buddhist commemorations that they implemented. Although community members and KR leaders might not directly communicate with each other, the continued participation of KR leaders (and their families) in community activities created a platform for building relationships. Second, this volume examined the everyday practices which were gradually established and embedded in the later phases of the post-KR period. To illustrate different dimensions of everyday practices, Chapter 4 set different analytical foci in explaining the activities relevant to different levels of social reconciliation. In examining the everyday practices for passivity, it was demonstrated that local actors had stopped practicing project-type activities that had been initiated in the early stages of the post-KR period. Instead, they adopted a more subtle form of practice like silent actions, for example social shunning, that was applied in their everyday life. While the form of such actions may be inactive or invisible, their impact on former KR leaders was substantial and both KR leaders and other community members were well aware of the implications of such subtle actions. As another type of everyday practice, the chapter highlighted situations where community members attempted to

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avoid thinking of the KR issues in order to focus on managing their daily livelihoods. Although dealing with the painful memory of the KR experience was an important and challenging issue, people had other priorities which effectively discouraged them from paying attention to dealing with the past atrocity. Moreover, in discussing everyday practices for sociality and reciprocity, this chapter paid attention to the procedural aspects, examining the symbolic and indirect actions exchanged between former KR leaders and other community members to express their goodwill towards each other. Specifically, it was clarified that both former KR leaders and the survivors of the KR violence did not explicitly raise the KR issues in the process. Instead, they continued to exchange more indirect and symbolic actions to demonstrate goodwill towards their counterparts. Finally, it explained that the transition from reciprocity to solidarity involved the continuation of the same type of interactions. Through the repetition of such reciprocal actions, the trust between them has strengthened overtime. To confirm if a community demonstrates solidarity with former KR leaders in the local area, this chapter presented three types of indicators: not to identify former KR leaders with their affiliation with KR, to elect them as community leaders, and to engage in family relations with them.

Features of Everyday Peace Practices Through empirical examination, this volume proposed and examined the following concepts that identify key features of everyday peace and the dynamics of everyday peacebuilding: plurality, connectivity, subtlety, and obscurity. Plurality This study demonstrated that local communities in Cambodia demonstrated varied states of social reconciliation in relation to the KR history. For doing this, Chapter 5 adopted a conceptual framework that categorises the types of local actors’ engagement with former KR leaders into six categories: (1) agonistic nonviolence, (2) avoidance of the past, (3) healing and commemoration, (4) tolerance of coexistence, (5) acknowledgement of counterparts’ goodwill and value, and (6) rehumanised relationship. The cases relevant to healing and commemoration, tolerance of coexistence and acknowledgement are more frequently identified than

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others; hence, it can be argued that the mid-level reconciliation is more prevalent in Cambodia although it should be further verified through a more systematic study. Nevertheless, there were a substantial number of examples that are relevant to all other categories, ranging from the minimum level of reconciliation to a high level of solidarity. This finding implies that the types of social reconciliation (or the relationship with former KR leaders) that survivors of the KR violence experience in their everyday lives are substantially different depending on the locations and local contexts in which they live. After roughly four decades of the KR regime, there are people who maintain cautious and suspicious attitudes towards former KR cadres and cannot forgive them. In contrary, there are survivors of the KR violence who have developed a high level of mutual trust with former KR leaders in their local areas and have even decided to engage in family relationship with them. Hence, when focusing on the reconciliation and peace that each individual experiences in their everyday life, the contour of peace and reconciliation in Cambodia should look substantially dissimilar. In this regard, when we examine peace through the everyday framework, it enables people to understand the multiplicity and complexity of peace that a society presents, and come up with more realistic and tailor-made approaches to address the needs of different local communities. Connectivity Using the concept of connectivity, this study examined how the features of everyday practices for reconciliation are determined in the interaction between community members and external factors. Firstly, in the background chapter, this study introduced a few contextual factors that many research participants highlighted as important, which include the policies set by the political authority, security conditions, economic conditions, and cultural and religious principles and beliefs. Based on this introduction, Chapter 5 illustrated how community members respond to such external factors while pursuing their desire for a more conciliatory relationship with former KR leaders, with a particular focus on the influence of the political authority. Firstly, they accepted the policies with appreciation. Having experienced the upheavals and chaos in the absence of the central authority, the government’s initiatives to deal with the KR history had offered local communities important resources for promoting a more conciliatory

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relationship with former KR members. Many community members were appreciative of the institutional platforms that help them maintain basic security, and express their anxiety and pain. Then, while implementing these initiatives, community members developed and adapted the forms of the initiatives to bring them more in line with their cultural beliefs. Hence, despite many challenges in the aftermath of KR’s mass violence, many community members attempted to conduct mock funerals and commemorative rituals in conjunction with the bone collection instructed by the government. As community members gained more inner resources, moreover, they gradually replaced the previous programmes set by the government with the local practices that they feel are more natural and easier to implement in a sustainable way. Particularly widely accepted were annual Buddhist festivals that people have carried on as important parts of their cultural and religious practices. Although these processes do not overtly challenge the politically promoted initiatives or restrictions, community members promoted and expanded the methods to pursue their desire in the given conditions. Moreover, it examined the factors that differentiate the ability of local communities to respond to contextual factors. In terms of inner resources, it introduced the importance of the availability of active local seniors (as a non-material resource) and funding for event mobilisation (as a material resource). In communities where many seniors survived the KR period, people could mobilise a wider range of actions and resources to prevent rampant violence and facilitate the space for sociality and reciprocity. Moreover, when the initiatives for local development were promoted by the political authorities, the communities could positively and actively respond to them and utilise these initiatives for further promoting social reconciliation. Nevertheless, the radical rule of KR had caused a massive death toll and a large number of seniors who were physically weaker died of hunger, malnutrition, and hard work. In Phnom Penh, many community leaders who were forced to move to rural areas never returned. Hence, many local communities had to manage the turbulent time without having good leadership. This factor often generated substantially different dynamics of relationship building, even between neighbouring communities. In addition, the amount of material resources that community members could mobilise was an important factor that determined the range of everyday practices for relationship building. Hence, when the

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funding depends heavily on the donation of a small number of households, the meanings and forms of the events were often influenced by the preference or thoughts of the donors. Subtlety and Obscurity Due to their banality, everyday practices are often invisible to external actors and their significance as peacebuilding may not be fairly appreciated. This study unpacked what banality means in this regard, paying attention to four features of everyday peace. Firstly, Cambodians frequently adopt indirect and symbolic communications to deliver their messages to their counterparts. Hence, when mutual engagement between former KR leaders and other community members was initiated and further developed, it was rare for them to explicitly talk over the KR-related issues. Clear apologies from KR leaders were also rarely made. Instead, the two sides chose to exchange more symbolic actions to express their willingness to accept each other. Secondly, everyday practices can occur in a private setting or in inactive forms. In such cases external actors who can access only the public space in local communities are not able to observe and examine everyday practices (Carrer, 2022). In Chapter 6, examples like the dialogue occurring in households and the inactive forms of social shunning were introduced as representative examples. Subtlety may arise because everyday practices for a particular purpose are implemented as parts of other events or practices. For instance, while local development projects and Buddhist rituals were utilised as important venues for making direct interactions between former KR leaders and the survivors of the KR violence, these events have never been primarily pursued for the purpose of social reconciliation. Hence, it is not easy to tease out the roles of such local practices in facilitating social reconciliation, which are imbedded in events or programmes that set different or wider objectives. Finally, obscurity is caused by the dissimilar approaches or perception of community members and external actors (researchers or peacebuilding practitioners) on the main issues like peace, reconciliation, or development. Community members’ understanding of these concepts and relevant practices forms largely on the basis of particular cultural, social, and religious contexts. Hence, the practices for building social reconciliation which are undertaken based on such unique understandings may be misinterpreted by externals who see these actions through their own cultural lens.

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These features of subtlety and obscurity largely represent the cultural and social practices that many community members prefer to adopt. In this regard, although their forms may apparently look invisible or mundane, they have strengths as peacebuilding practices. For instance, such mundane practices make it easier to avoid unnecessary political or social tensions in comparison to more organised and overt social campaigns. Moreover, as these practices are more in line with community members’ cultural understandings and require less resources to continue, everyday practices can be more sustainable in offering opportunities for enhancing social relations. On the flip side, however, community members’ everyday practices are less likely to promote radical and fundamental social transformation within a short period of time. Moreover, everyday practices that reflect notions and norms prevalent in a local area may unintentionally support the structure or practices that are counterproductive for peacebuilding. As a caveat, everyday reconciliation in Cambodia emerged mostly in communities where residents have lived and will go on living for a long time. Hence, most actions and events were mobilised based on people’s consideration of their long-term relationship with other community members. Therefore, the empirical findings in this study cover only parts of everyday practice, and in particular exclude the lessons related to more episodic types of everyday peace such as one-off events, accidental actions of certain individuals, and unexpected encounters between divided groups. In terms of temporality, the data and examples capture a snapshot of social conditions in Cambodia in the early 2020s, and should not be interpreted as permanent features.

Development of Everyday Narratives Chapter 7 of this volume turned attention to which narratives community members have adopted and utilised. In short, everyday narratives were created in ways that most community members felt comfortable to use; hence, they were widely accepted and sustained for a long period. For instance, everyday narratives identified in this chapter largely rely on the religious philosophy and precepts, local cosmological beliefs, and maxims and old sayings that are widely accepted in local communities. Due to such underlying ideas, other community residents felt such everyday narratives to be familiar and easy to accept. In addition, the direction

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and scope of these narratives were navigated to avoid any political sensitivity or other types of controversy between community members. This feature enabled people to be more active in utilising these narratives without worrying about the potential risk that they might face by using them. Moreover, the narrative of ‘acceptance’ is not presented in a proactive manner. In other words, community members who uphold such a narrative do not argue for the inclusion of former KR leaders in the communities. Instead, the notion to take for granted having former KR leaders included in all activities, gradually pervades between the members of the communities. Although people do not necessarily make explicit statements to confirm the narratives, an increasing number of people adopt such a notion. More specifically, the types of narratives examined in Chapter 7 present two distinct foci. Firstly, a number of narratives adopted in the early phase of the post-KR period aimed to discourage vengeance killing, by condemning the usage of violence itself. These narratives simply appealed to people’s reluctance to see any more violence (e.g., ‘enough is enough’) and desire to have a more secure space (e.g., ‘let bygones be bygones’). Other narratives offered more logical explanations of the low utility and counterproductivity of using violence, relying on Buddhist precepts and philosophy (e.g., ‘hatred cannot cease by hatred’ and ‘you will create a bad karma by committing violence’). Secondly, some narratives aimed to dismantle the indiscriminate stigmatisation of all KR leaders. In some cases, community members attempted to distinguish good leaders from cruel ones and attempted to protect the former. In other cases, people generated the narrative to distinguish the majority of KR associates from the top leaders who ordered all war crimes. In this narrative, it was emphasised that an absolute majority of them were forced by the regime to assume their roles without being given a choice. There were occasions where people acknowledged the victimisation that former KR leaders had gone through. They acknowledged that many local leaders of KR had suffered the same levels of victimisation that other community members experienced. When the mutual trust between community members and former KR leaders was solidly established, people tended not to identify former KR leaders through their association with KR.

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Everyday Peace as an Analytical Framework Based on the aforementioned empirical findings, this volume has conceptualised the nature of everyday peace from a theoretical perspective, which includes plurality, connectivity, subtlety of everyday peace, and passivity as a state of social reconciliation. Moreover, it has introduced a few aspects of the dynamics for promoting social reconciliation in local communities of Cambodia that are relevant to the ongoing academic debates on reconciliation such as the emotional need for social reconciliation, power disparity between former KR leaders, and the destabilisation of conflict narratives. As the final discussion, this concluding chapter will weave these conceptual and theoretical pieces to address three broad questions that are widely considered in contemporary discussions on everyday peace. The first question it considers is “in what sense does everyday peace offer a new framework for examining peace?” The contribution of the everyday framework to the analysis of peace and conflict has been explained from different perspectives. To name just a few, it was discussed that the concept of everyday peace incorporates many types of activities to promote peace and indicators to examine the states of peace that had previously been marginalised in the academic debates on peace. Moreover, the introduction of everyday peace helped researchers pay attention to the hidden agency of community actors. It also expanded to scope of mixed methods to examine local dynamics of peace and conflict (Firchow, 2018; Firchow & Gellman, 2021; Mac Ginty, 2013). Adding to these ongoing debates, the key findings in this volume demonstrate the utility of the everyday framework in presenting the pluralistic nature of peace(s) in a society. As examined in Chapter 5, local communities in Cambodia present substantially different states of social reconciliation ranging from passivity to solidarity. The discrepancy in the state of reconciliation between different locations was largely influenced by dissimilar security and economic conditions whereas the diversity within the similar geographical locations was influenced by the availability of local resources (especially, local leadership and financial resources). Accordingly, the types of social reconciliation that individuals experience in their everyday lives are significantly different from others, depending on the contexts that they are in. In other words, the condition of peace in a region or society identified at the macro level may not be relevant to many individuals and communities living in the region/society. Moreover,

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the plurality of everyday peace demonstrates the importance of distinguishing the practices and mechanisms that are seen at public levels and the peace(s) that people experience in their daily life. The recognition of different peace states is important when a plan for enhancing social reconciliation is designed. The primary needs of local communities can be substantially different depending on the states and conditions of social relations that the communities develop. For instance, as explained in the case of Krang Thom village (alias) in Chapter 5, there are communities where people still maintain fear and mistrust of former KR associates in their area. Many community residents in the village believe that truth-finding should carry on and the people who are responsible for violence should be exposed. However, in the communities where community members recovered reciprocity/solidarity with former KR leaders, many people want more indirect approaches for reconciliation so that the process does not generate unnecessary noise that may put former KR leaders in an awkward situation. In some areas where a large number of former KR associates live together, there may be an urgent need to acknowledge their narratives and to make a more inclusive process for reconciliation. It is risky to ignore such diverse (often contradictory) needs of local communities unless particular attention is given to such a multiplicity of peace(s). The emphasis on plurality should not be interpreted to deny the value of a macro-level examination of peace that offers a generalised assessment based on the aggregation of details. Despite the plurality, there are the types/levels of reconciliation and peace that a majority of the population maintains and experiences. For instance, the author’s field research identified that the cases relevant to sociality and reciprocity (mid-level reconciliation) were more prevalent in comparison to others like passivity and solidarity. Moreover, as Chapter 5 acknowledges, the forms and dynamics of everyday practices for reconciliation in most locations present similar features in that they were largely influenced by the state-level policies and cultural backgrounds that are applied and imbedded across the country. Hence, there are features of everyday peace that better represent the overall situation in a society, and it is important for many studies to make such a generalised assessment of these features. Nevertheless, when relying solely on the aggregated examination of the overall situation, academic studies often neglect the dissimilar needs of people that should be addressed when promoting and consolidating

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peace. Indeed, a large number of studies examined the social and institutional conditions in order to identify the reconciliation in Cambodia, and accordingly drew similar conclusions. For instance, Ngarm (2017, p. 24) mentions that while “Cambodia has seen to some extent reconciliation at the political level (…) the social emotional reconciliation dimensions still remained untouched.” From a similar perspective, Robertson (2019, n.p.) confirmed “reconciliation remains elusive” while Bockers et al. (2011) said that many factors including mental health issues “still impede social coexistence and the peace-building process.” These reports and studies often assume that such institutional conditions directly determine the nature of peace within the society (Millar, 2014). Although these reports made a fair evaluation of the overall situation in the country as a whole, in this regard, they risk over-generalisation of the complex levels and types of reconciliation that local people experience. In short, to come up with effective approaches and methods for supporting peacebuilding in a society, a macro-level analysis that is more prevalent in the conventional academic studies needs to be supplemented by a more micro-level analysis. At the end of the day, peace is what people experience. In this regard, the adoption of the everyday peace framework enables researchers to supplement conventional approaches to the analysis of peace, by offering a platform to have a nuanced examination of such complexity and its evident/potential impact on the wider peacebuilding process.

Significance of Everyday Peace as Peacebuilding From a more practical perspective, the questions that many people have raised in many seminars and panels on everyday peace are related to the significance and utility of everyday peace practices as a form of peacebuilding. Some relevant questions are: “Can everyday peace practice offer a new opportunity for building peace?,” “Can everyday peace bring about a fundamental social transformation?,” “Can we consider everyday peace when people engaging in the practice don’t even have the vision for peace?” A significant number of critiques argue that everyday peace is insufficient to bring about an emancipatory and transformative peace. Instead, the purpose of everyday peacebuilding in practice is usually to maintain a decent level of safety and livelihood, often contributes to the

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sustenance of the power status quota, and may not necessarily represent people’s vision for peace (Millar, 2020). Apparently, the findings in Cambodia confirm that everyday peacebuilding rarely plays the role of a gamechanger to transform the structural and systematic aspects of the society. Community practices more often seek the best possible options to promote peace within the contextual environment. Related to these questions, the findings in this volume present three points. Significance of Micro-Level Conflict Management From a short-term perspective, it emphasises the importance of ‘microlevel conflict management’ as a core element of peacebuilding in that it enhances the level of peace that people experience in their daily life. When focusing on the actions themselves, many everyday practices are comprised of a series of actions (or non-actions) organically taken by people. These actions frequently have short-term goals like avoidance of violence or inclusion of people in a particular event. Hence, from a long-term perspective, such actions may not be considered significant in promoting and consolidating peace in a society. In this volume, the minimum level of conflict management was relevant to the state of passivity. In passivity, people still harbour anxiety (or even abhorrence) against the outgroup but accept coexistence with them in order to avoid further violence and maintain basic security. While different groups live alongside each other, they avoid or minimise their interaction without mutual recognition. From a conceptual perspective, it is questionable whether we can identify such a situation as a state of social reconciliation or peace. Rather than peacebuilding, this type of practice looks more like a temporary and micro-level conflict management or interruption to or pause of violence. Nevertheless, in many post-conflict societies, a short-term goal such as preventing further violence and managing security is one of the most urgent needs and important foundations for further peacebuilding. From a security perspective, for instance, to maintain social stability is a fundamental foundation for social peacebuilding. Moreover, by preventing the violence from victims, this type of action facilitates the physical coexistence and lays important groundwork for future social acceptance. When the KR regime disappeared, many communities were left with a power vacuum for a period ranging between a few weeks and a few months, according to location. A large number of revenge killings occurred during

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this period. Under such circumstances, prevention of mass violence in most post-violence contexts is an urgent and important requirement for social reconciliation. Such a temporary pause of violence may be as crucial to enable a fundamental change that will follow when the stabilisation of conflict is made. In Chapter 3, this point was further discussed referring to Arai (2022)’s concept of functional coexistence. To recap, the minimum level of nonviolence and security in many contexts is a crucial step that needs to be properly laid and maintained, in order for the society to move on to a higher level of conflict resolution or social reconciliation. If a more ambitious process is attempted while the inter-group relationship is premature, these processes are likely to collapse, regardless of the good intentions underlying them. In this regard, although the actions for short-term conflict management at the micro-level may look less significant, they may address the most needed actions for peacebuilding. Utilities for Conflict Disruption From a long-term perspective, when such everyday practices continue, it often triggers an important shift in the local dynamics of peacebuilding. The concept of conflict disruption is a good description of what happened in many local communities in Cambodia and the significance of such processes. In Mac Ginty (2022, pp. 205–206), conflict disruption denotes “a disturbance of the equilibrium or trajectory that normalises conflict.” It may not bring about systematic mechanisms for transforming the conflicts, but at least it can puncture the normalisation of violence and encourage people to reconsider the pathways of their interaction. The early stages of everyday practices by no means eliminated the anger and painful memory of the victims and other community members. Seeing little chance for overtly expressing their anger, community residents instead began to adopt a more subtle form of punishment: social shunning. They disconnected these former harm-doers from most social networks in the communities. The former KR leaders and their families were not invited to important social events, included in the collective labour projects, or consulted when making decisions on community development, and were not supported if they opened shops. As time went by, however, the objectives and forms of everyday peace transform over time reflecting the changes in people’s perspectives and

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social contexts. Accordingly, the form of relationship building (or relationship cutting) with former KR leaders settles in as a new ‘norm’ in local communities. While few explicitly condemned or did harm to these former perpetrators, most people were aware of the tacit rule of ignoring their presence in their villages. This adherence to prevalent local practice sometimes created a virtual cycle of causing mutually positive responses between former KR leaders and other community members. A significant number of community members have gradually transformed their goals from violence reduction to mutual recognition as members of the same communities for over 30 years (see Chapter 4 for more details). Such transformation may look too slow, gradual and often less organised in comparison to more coordinated forms of peacebuilding. Nevertheless, many empirical studies confirm that many institutional mechanisms that aim to generate more radical and systematic social reconciliation have ended up with marginal successes (Özerdem & Lee, 2016). Conflict transformation ultimately requires changes in social cultures and structures, and it is questionable whether everyday peace contributes less to this objective compared to the conventional social reconciliation models. Everyday Peace as the Only Resort Finally, it should be noted that, in many cases, everyday peace practices are often the only strategies that community members can adopt. In fact, many conflict-driven societies experience a lack of functioning state institutions, as some provinces of Cambodia experienced in the power vacuum between the collapse of the KR regime and the establishment of the new PRK structure. In the midst of the security instability without a controlling authority, everyday peace is almost the only mechanism upon which people can rely. Even when the state institutions are established, people’s daily life can be more directly influenced by the practice of everyday peace rather than such institutional arrangements. As discussed in Chapter 3, the judicial process for the KR leaders had little relevance to local community members’ reconciliation over the KR atrocity. In other words, everyday peace in many contexts is what people can choose to promote even if little external support is available. As a side note, there are perspectives that interpret these features as a reflection of people’s lack of willingness to pursue peace. Nevertheless,

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the author’s interviews present that they represent more than lack of willingness. First, some interview participants mentioned that the concept of reconciliation and justice do not naturally fit people’s understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Second, in some interviews, people stated that the promotion of high reconciliation sounds too artificial and is rarely pursued in their normal social relationship building. They question why such a high level of reconciliation should be pursued when it is not their normal practice to engage in such relations with other social groups. These responses imply that the standards of peace/reconciliation that critics understand as emancipatory can be very alien to the local communities. In this regard, the value and significance of everyday peace should not be understood by considering solely how effective it is for the type of peacebuilding that researchers consider important or desirable. In other words, everyday practices may not be the ‘best’ forms for conflict management and peacebuilding from the external’s perspectives but they are frequently the ‘good enough and realistic’ forms of peacebuilding from community members’ perspectives. In this regard, moreover, they may not demonstrate a clear vision for a future direction of peacebuilding but they are more likely to sustain the level of peace that they can promote within their capacity and the finite resources available to them. To be clear, the acknowledgement of the value of everyday peace(building) does not argue or advocate for replacing other peacebuilding initiatives or larger projects for development with everyday peace (Martin, 2011). Nevertheless, individual and household endeavours “to enhance their survival prospects and overall levels of resilience and the adaptation” (Nel et al., 2017, p. 201) to the given social conditions need to be recognised as an equally important aspect of peacebuilding.

References Arai, T. (2022). Functional coexistence in intractable conflict: A decades-long view of conflict intervention. Peace and Change, 47 (2), 118–151. https:// doi.org/10.1111/pech.12523 Bockers, E., Nadine, S., & Christine, K. (2011). Reconciliation in Cambodia: Thirty years after the terror of the Khmer Rouge regime. Torture, 21(2), 71–83. https://europepmc.org/article/MED/21715956 Carrer, M. (2022). How people respond to violence: Everyday peace and the maoist conflict in India. Palgrave Macmillan. Firchow, P. (2018). Reclaiming everyday peace. Cambridge University Press.

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Firchow, P., & Gellman, M. (2021). Collaborative methodologies: Why, how, and for whom? PS: Political Science & Politics, 54(3), 525–529. https://doi. org/10.1017/S1049096521000330 Mac Ginty, R. (2013). Indicators+: A proposal for everyday peace indicators. Evaluation and Program Planning, 36(1), 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.evalprogplan.2012.07.001 Mac Ginty, R. (2022). Everyday peace. Oxford University Press. Martin, R. (2011). Regional economic resilience, hysteresis and recessionary shocks. Journal of Economic Geography, 12, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/ jeg/lbr019 Millar, G. (2014). An ethnographic approach to peacebuilding: Understanding local experiences in transitional states. Routledge. Millar, G. (2020). Preserving the everyday: Pre-political agency in peacebuilding theory. Cooperation and Conflict, 55(3), 310–325. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0010836720904390 Nel, E., Smart, J., & Binns, T. (2017). Resilience to economic shocks: Reflections from Zambia’s Copperbelt. Growth and Change, 48(2), 201–213. https:// doi.org/10.1111/grow.12181 Ngarm, S. (2017). Cambodia reconciliation. Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. Özerdem, A., & Lee, S. (2016) International peacebuilding: An introduction. Routledge. Robertson, H. (2019, January 7). Reconciliation remains elusive as Cambodia marks 40 years since fall of the Khmer Rouge. ABC News. https://www.abc. net.au/news/2019-01-07/40-years-since-the-fall-of-the-khmer-rouge-in-cam bodia/10684748

Index

A Agonistic nonviolence, 14, 91, 92, 95, 164 Anlong Veng Peace Center, the, 30 Avoidance of the past, 14, 66, 68, 69, 81, 91, 92, 164 B Bone collection projects, the, 27, 49, 97, 99 Bophana Audio-Visual Resources Center, 30 Bottom-up narratives, 154 C Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the, 27, 28, 138 Center for Victims of Torture, the, 30 China, 22, 136 Conflict disruption, 155, 174 D Democratic Kampuchea, the, 22

Dismantling conflict narratives, 156 Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM), 30, 31

E Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), 1, 13, 22, 28–30, 80

G Genocide Research Committee, the, 26

H Hun Sen, 27, 28, 31, 69, 138

I Ieng Sary, 26

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Lee, Everyday Reconciliation in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rethinking Political Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13987-1

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180

INDEX

K Kampuchea United Front for the National Salvation (KUFNS), the, 25, 26 Kang Kek Iew, 29 Kdei Karuna Organization, the, 30 Killing Fields, the, 27

R Reciprocity, 5–7, 42, 64, 65, 70, 71, 74, 75, 80, 89, 90, 95, 101, 108, 164, 166, 171 Rehumanised relationship, 14, 91, 164 Rithy Pan, 30

L Laos, 22 Lon Nol, 22, 152

S Samphan, Khieu, 27 Sociality, 5–7, 42, 64, 70, 71, 74, 75, 89–92, 108, 129, 166, 171 Solidarity, 5–7, 14, 24, 64, 71, 75–78, 80, 89, 90, 95, 100, 104, 124, 164, 165, 171 Solidarity Village Commemoration, 52 Subtlety, 15, 85, 113, 114, 127–130, 164, 167, 168, 170

N Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 22, 80, 81 Nuon Chea, 29

P Paris Peace Agreements, the, 27 Passivity, 5, 7, 13, 14, 32, 33, 42, 48, 57–59, 64, 68, 71, 80, 89–91, 95, 108, 170, 171, 173 Pchum Ben, 25, 52, 53, 72, 73, 104, 105 People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the, 11, 26, 27, 32, 33, 45, 49, 54, 58, 64, 78, 83, 97, 98, 102, 136–138, 141, 175 People’s Revolutionary Tribunal, the, 26 Pol Pot, 22, 26, 91, 153

T Tolerance of coexistence, 14, 91, 93 Toul Sleng, 27 Trans-cultural Psychological Organization (TPO), 30 V Vietnam, 11, 22, 26, 32, 33, 64, 129, 136 Y Youth for Peace (YfP), 30, 80, 152