The “Perfect Failure” of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia

A five-year ethnographic study in Cambodia reveals the 'perfect failure' of hybrid Khmer-Western genocide memorials, which, despite appearing successful due to elite capitulation to Western cosmopolitan memory and the lure of atrocity tourism, fail culturally. The research demonstrates that these memorials, while promoting genocide pedagogy, are resisted by both elites and non-elites as they clash with Cambodian Buddhist conceptualizations of memory and commemoration. This challenges the globalization of a Holocaust model of commemoration and questions the universal human right to remember in postconflict memoryscapes.

Kidron, C. A. (2020). The “Perfect Failure” of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia. Current Anthropology, 61(3), 304–334. https://doi.org/10.1086/708843