Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia

Realms of Memory

Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era. How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)? In what ways were the therapeutic claims of the ECCC overblown and destined to disappoint? How did the Cambodian government use the ECCC to support its own self-serving reading of the past? What important memory work did NGOs take on that is often forgotten because of the tendency to focus exclusively on prominent institutions such as the ECCC? To answer these questions and more listen to University of Bath sociologist Pete Manning, author of Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia: Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers.