Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia

Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers

Peter Manning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367085483
• eBook ISBN: 9781317007234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Memories of violence, suffering and atrocities in Cambodia are today being pulled in different directions. A range of transitional justice practices have been put to work in the name of redressing, restoring and renewing memory. At the centre of this stage is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid tribunal established to prosecute the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, under which 1.6 million Cambodians died of hunger or disease or were executed.

This book unpicks the way memory is reconstructed through appeals to a national memory, the legal reframing and coding of memories as crimes, and bids to locate personal memories within collective biographies. Analysing the techniques and interventions of the ECCC, as well as exploring the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the book explores the relationships in which Cambodian communities navigate memories of political violence. This book is essential for understanding transitional justice in Cambodia in, and beyond, the courtroom. Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia shows that the governing logic of transitional justice interventions – that societies are unable to 'deal with' memories of atrocity and violence without some form of transitional justice mechanism – neglects the complexity of memory and remembering in post-atrocity contexts and the agency of the subjects to which such mechanisms are addressed.

Drawing on documentary sources, legal transcripts, interviews and participant observation data, the book situates transitional justice processes in Cambodia within a wider context of social and cultural memory politics, examining (old and new) conflicts of memory that have emerged between the varied accounts and uses of the past that exist in Cambodia now. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars in sociology, human rights, law and criminology.

2Transitional justice and memory

In this chapter, we step back from the Cambodian context to examine key currents and developments in memory studies and transitional justice. My aim here is to track patterns and assumptions in thinking within the two fields that have gone on to coalesce powerfully in the case at hand, mapping frameworks for how memories of violence can and should be known and acted upon. Social scientific research on memory has been principally preoccupied with two questions (Brown 2008): Firstly, how does memory work (a social ‘mechanics’ of memory)? Secondly, why has memory emerged as such an important issue for and within contemporary societies? These two questions are important because they speak directly to the issues of how the past shapes who we are and the moral burdens that are invoked on the past in the name of renewing the present. Core concepts and scaffolds within the field – such as ‘collective’ memory – have been scrutinised, applied, discarded and reconsidered in the proliferation of scholarship that has marked the emergence of memory studies as a sub-disciplinary field over the past 20 years (Kansteiner 2010), reflecting a quickly changing landscape. My intention here, firstly, is to follow Jeffery Olick’s invitation to problematise key areas that have hampered the study of collective or social memory: its unity or singularity, its authenticity, its tangibility and its conceptual autonomy and divisibility relative to other categories of analysis (2007: 89). In doing so, I thumbnail the roles of performance, place, history and discourse within explanations of how social memory is formed and reproduced. Within this account, I offer a brief reading of strands of the work of Michel Foucault, staking out an approach to memory that sees memory as a discourse that produces subjects – who we are – as well as promising itself as an object of expertise and transformation in its own right. I then return to reconsider the nascent urgency surrounding discourses of memory and the ethical imperative to remember.

The second half of this chapter thumbnails key debates within transitional justice, a field of scholarship and practice that is predicated on an interwoven set of normative, technical and ideological claims over what memory is and what must be done with it in the wake of atrocities and suffering. Transitional justice has grown rapidly over recent decades and it now represents a powerful field of advocacy, scholarship and practice that seeks to correct, redress and remedy social order in post-conflict settings. But transitional justice itself is also a contingent feature of international political order. Its central aims and techniques – which are not self-evidently coherent – reflect specific sets of assumptions and hopes for the forms of society that they seek to inaugurate, which are themselves politically freighted. Moreover, any case or ‘episode’ of transitional justice emerges and is framed subject to forces that shape and condition what redress, justice or restoration can look like in any given context.

A social mechanics of memory

A review of work on a social ‘mechanics’ of memory is obliged to start with Maurice Halbwachs’ seminal work on the ‘collective memory’ (1992). Halbwachs’ formative years were spent in France in the early decades of the twentieth century, and currents within French sociology and philosophy strongly shaped his writing. Halbwachs’ central argument was that, while memory might appear to be the property of the individual psyche, it is our membership within social groups that arranges and orders the images of the past that are remembered and maintained, therefore contextualising and accomplishing individual memories as meaningful. Halbwachs suggests that memories are constitutive of group identities, furnishing the stories and narratives through which a sense of self and belonging are possible. Halbwachs was specifically writing against prevailing currents in psychology at the time that posited memory as a purely individual phenomenon. In this sense, the birth of the ‘collective memory’ as a social phenomenon emerged in relief of accounts that privileged the individual as the repository of memory, although one unifying convergence here was the premise that what we remember and forget constitutes who we are. While we should be wary of the tendency to canonise Halbwachs’ work as the antecedent to memory studies – an arts of memory was longstanding prior to Halbwachs’ writing, and his work emerged in relief of developments in the natural sciences, psychology and philosophy that took memory as their principal object of study (Olick et al. 2011: 5–9) – Halbwachs’ thinking cues important and productive questions for our purposes here.

In several respects, Halbwachs’ work mirrors wider currents that were emerging in social theory and thinking at that time. Halbwachs drew from the work of Durkheim, for example, in theorising the way the ritual affirmation of the past could constitute the social bonds of the present (2001). Indeed, Halbwachs has been subjected to many parallel critiques in this regard. Like Durkheim, Halbwachs’ approach has been criticised for reifying a totalised understanding of the ‘social’ – that is, ‘collective’ – memory as an entity that exists in and of itself and in accordance to its own logic and that therefore risks an overdetermination of the individual and individual memory. Moreover, whilst Halbwachs suggested that there were as many collective memories as there were social groups, like Durkheim, he appears to present an account of the social world that quickly becomes coterminous with national collectivities or methodological nationalism (see Beck 2007 for a closer discussion of methodological nationalism). Despite these cautionary reflections, Halbwachs remains an important embarkation point because his work sensitises us to the way social groups can be constituted in the present through the maintenance of the past.

The relationship between memory and identity has been central to debates on social and collective memory. These debates have been characterised by a series of thorny oppositions concerning the way memories are constituted and how they are reproduced. Halbwachs’ work can be read to assume the existence of a collective memory that might exist coercively beyond the individual, along the lines of Durkheim’s famous conscience collective (1984). Against this, Olick has contrasted the development of ‘collected’ memory approaches, accounts of shared memories that might exist as the aggregated accretions of individual memory (2007: 23–27). In this tradition, for example, Schuman and Scott locate collected memories in the shared, aggregated experiences of generations (1989). The opposition between collective and collected memory invites us to choose between a framework that risks a cumbersome and totalising concept of collective memory, one that is implied to have an existence beyond individual psyches, and approaches to shared collected memories that might neglect the contingent and socially embedded forces at work in the maintenance of memories and therefore risk ‘depoliticising’ the past.

A second opposition prefigured within Halbwachs’ writing is present here. Key approaches to social and collective memory have been keen to accommodate the role of memory in the realisation of cultural identity and the interface of ‘vernacular’, ‘official’ and ‘public memory’ (Bodnar 1993), situating the ‘vernacular’ as rooted within more authentic reflections of identity and experience. Theorists of nationalism might here point out that arguments that the past residually and authentically persists as ‘traces’ that constitute group identities are central to ethno-symbolist accounts of nations (see, e.g. Smith 1998). Against these are more critical accounts of memory that emphasise the constructed production and manipulation of social memory and history. Perhaps foremost in this line of thinking is Hobsbawm and Ranger’s collection The Invention of Tradition (1983). For Hobsbawm and Ranger, the past can be a vehicle for the legitimation of elite and state power, particularly in the service of nationalistic beliefs, through commemorative activity. The opposition presented here is between, on the one hand, approaches that lean towards understanding collective memory as an authentic reflection of the past, versus, on the other, memory as synthetic, ‘top-down’ forms of mystification that conceal the ‘real’ past.

More recent scholarship in memory studies has sought to navigate these oppositions with further nuance. Wertsch (2002) and Olick (2007) have rejected the dichotomy between ‘fictional’ and ‘authentic’ and ‘collective’ versus ‘collected’ memories, instead emphasising that all acts of memory are active, practical, unfinished and socially mediated. Such arguments are indicative of a widespread reappraisal of the previous frameworks discussed. Olick points out, pragmatically, that approaches to memory from disciplines that are traditionally ‘individualist’ and ‘physiologically’ focused, such as neurobiology or psychology, are now keen to press that memory is cue dependent and networked and will often foreground social contexts rather than individual experience when individuals remember (2007: 26–27). Singer and Conway have argued, further, that even highly personalised traumatic memories are socially negotiated and contested, which enables and conditions processes of erasure and remembering (2014). Indeed, experimental and discursive strands of psychology increasingly foreground the role of interaction, culture and context in enabling memory (Brown and Reavey 2015). Conversely, from a sociological perspective, greater caution might be needed in locating exactly where the social conditioning of memory occurs. For example, as Gavriely-Nuri suggests (2014), we might reread Halbwachs’ conception of collective memory as metaphorical rather than substantive category, pointing to the way that collective memory frameworks are invoked for and therefore constituted within political enunciations. In other words, as unsatisfactory a concept as a ‘collective’ memory might be as a substantive analytic category in its own right, collective memories – principally national ones – are frequently invoked as objects of intervention, transformation and discipline, affecting both what and how people remember.

Memories exist and are reproduced, then, neither as ‘collective’ nor ‘collected’ but as socially accomplished (Olick 2007: 26). On this basis, memory is seen as ongoing process of realisation between individuals, groups and social texts, representations and spaces (and accounts of memory here permit its realisation through relationships to material artefacts, places and technologies). These approaches to memory that seek to accommodate a ‘dynamics’ of remembering between agents, memory ‘tools’ and social contexts are fruitful because they do not recapitulate to naturalised conceptions of memory as purely archival, objectively locatable from a repository extraction, or prematurely dismiss the formative role that experience and agency may play in making memories persistent.

Crucibles and sites of memory

The reproduction of memory, according to ‘dynamic’ accounts, is therefore a practical process. On this basis, the active, ‘performative’ and spatial dimensions of memory are critical. Memory is topographically reproduced in its artefacts, institutions, agents and representations. It is maintained within ‘everyday’ landscapes (Tolia-Kelly 2004), as well as appearing rooted and embodied at sites implicated in specific histories including markers of memory, such as sites of atrocity (Koonz 1994). Memory is further invoked and affirmed at ‘spectacular’ forums, perhaps most visible in the seemingly unending proliferation of commemorative and memorial practices we see today (Frost and Laing 2013), especially in the service of the histories of nation states. Connerton suggests – drawing a connection between the body, bodily habits and performativity – that commemorations are pivotal in delineating pasts from presents, sedimenting ‘bodily’ memory and laying the contours within which social memory is possible (1989). The juncture of collective or shared social memories and individual minds therefore requires a bridging entity, which implies the constitutive role of embodiment, the body and performance (Narvaez 2006). As Winter notes, all acts of memory are more than just recollections, because in each performative, embodied iteration, memories are affected and affirmed rather than simply restated or ‘verified’ (2010: 11–12).

Memory performances, then, occur within specific social contexts and locations. The role of memorials and museums as markers of memory, in this regard, is rarely innocent because they always imply particular interests, preferred histories and wider patterns of inequality. In the minutiae, visual representations and displays at work in memorials and museums are thought to offer ‘clusters’ of meanings that communicate narratives about the past (Williams 2007), whereby memorials can act as ‘texts’ that can be read to condition and cue memory for visitors (Young 1993). The ‘birth’ of the museum as a nineteenth-century inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1Introduction
• 2Transitional justice and memory
• 3Political violence in Cambodia
• 4Moving forward through justice
• 5Memory on trial
• 6Complementary knowledge
• 7Victims and perpetrators
• 8Beyond the tribunal
• 9Remembering the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
• Index