This paper focuses on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), established to prosecute those most responsible and the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime. As an “archetypical totalitarian regime” (Bruneteau 2009), this regime relied upon the fluidity between identities of victims and perpetrators. However, trials are often based upon monodimensional legal categories (victims, witnesses, perpetrators).
This paper asks whether the ECCC are able to construct a nuanced understanding of complex political victims (Bouris 2007). In particular, it analyses the participation of former Khmer Rouge in the legal proceedings as civil parties. It raises the question of how to address the need for differentiating experiences of victimization without introducing a problematic hierarchy of victims.
This paper is based upon extensive fieldwork in Cambodia and speaks to transitional justice scholarship critical of the use of a simplistic binary of “victims” vs. “perpetrators”.
