Visiting the Tiger Zone – Methodological, Conceptual and Ethical Challenges of Ethnographic Research on Perpetrators

ABSTRACT

This article is a methodological, conceptual and ethical reflection on challenges and opportunities afforded to ethnographic researchers in the field when working with perpetrators of mass violence and their motivations. Departing from a research project on the motivations of former cadres of the Khmer Rouge and fieldwork conducted on this topic in Cambodia, various possible approaches to conducting such ethnographic research are discussed, focusing on long-term stays in the community, frequent visits and building networks in the community, and repeat individual visits to select people without embedding oneself as a researcher in the community. For each of these approaches their distinct strengths and limitations are considered in light of various methodological, conceptual and ethical challenges encountered by the author in the field. As such, this article does not suggest specific methodological developments but offers a critical reflection of how various approaches to an ethnography of perpetrators can variously deal with these challenges.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments of the two anonymous reviewers, as well as the editor Gearoid Millar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Timothy Williams is a research fellow at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University, Germany. His research deals with genocide and mass violence and motivations for participating in it, and he has conducted extensive field research in Cambodia. In 2017 he was awarded the International Association of Genocide Scholars' Emerging Scholar Award, and in 2015 he was awarded the Raphael Lemkin Fellowship of the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Institute. He is completing his PhD at Marburg University and studied at Mannheim University (BA Political Science) and at the London School of Economics (MSc Comparative Politics).

Notes

1 Interview with a former militiaman [chhlop], later also militia group leader in August 2014 in Battambang province, Cambodia.

2 See Chandler, Brother Number One; Short, Pol Pot.

3 The notable exception is Hinton, “Why Did You Kill?”; Hinton, Why Did They Kill?.

4 Hoefinger, “Professional Girlfriends.”

5 Springer, Violent Neoliberalization.

6 Brickell, “Intimate Geopolitics.”

7 Sokphea, “Practices and Challenges Towards Sustainability.”

8 For a full version of the model see Williams, The Complexity of Evil; for an earlier version of the model see Williams, “The Complexity of Evil.”

9 An INUS condition is an insufficient, but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition. For the full causal implications of the concept, see Mackie, “Systematic and Nonsystematic Processing.”

10 Millar, Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding, 6.

11 Baumeister, “The Holocaust and the Four Roots of Evil,” 243.

12 Among many others, see Halilovich, Places of Pain; Menzel, Was vom Krieg Übrig Bleibt; Millar, Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding.

13 Hinton, “Why Did You Kill?”; Hinton, Why Did They Kill?.

14 Zucker, “Matters of Morality”; Zucker, “Trauma and Its Aftermath.”

15 Guillou, “An Alternative Memory”; Guillou, “Khmer Potent Places.”

16 Ledgerwood, “Buddhist Ritual.”

17 Fujii, Killing Neighbours.

18 Jessee, Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda; Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More.”

19 E.g. Sereny, Into that Darkness.

20 Manning, “Reconciliation and Perpetrator Memories.”

21 For a good overview of the advantages of this type of approach, see Fujii, Killing Neighbours, chapter 1.

22 Straus, The Order of Genocide.

23 McDoom, “The Psychology of Threat;” McDoom, “Who Killed in Rwanda's Genocide?”; McDoom, “Antisocial Capital.”

24 Smeulers, “Female Perpetrators.”

25 Anderson, The Criminology of Genocide.

26 Ea and Sim, Victims and Perpetrators?

27 McGrew, “Pathways to Reconciliation.”

28 Gray, Justice and Transition.

29 Browning, Ordinary Men; Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners.

30 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten; Welzer, Täter; Welzer, Neitzel and Gudehus, “Der Führer war wieder viel zu human.”

31 Williams, “I am Not, What I am”; see also Gudehus, “On the Significance of the Past.”

32 For an historical overview of the genocidal process in Cambodia see Chandler, A History of Cambodia; Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power; Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime.

33 Chandler, Voices from S-21, 45–76.

34 On detailed tabulations of victims see Tabeau and Kheam, Demographic Expert Report.

35 Given that I received some of my contacts from DC-Cam, it would have been interesting to compare the responses given to me in my interviews with those in the previous interviews. However, DC-Cam's interviews focus much more on the facts of when individuals were where and in which position than on the meanings these individuals assign to their actions and their understandings of the situations they were in, which was central to my project, rendering a comparison not very constructive.

36 Also, when I asked interviewees about their previous interview situations, the interviews often appear to be strongly biographical in nature, focussing much more on the geographical locations and structural positions the individuals were in, than their perspectives on their participation and the context they were in. This is also the case for any publicly available interviews I could find of people with whom I spoke, meaning that I cannot systematically compare there previous narratives with what they told me, as the questions posed in the interviews differ.

37 Interview conducted by the author with a former militiaman, later also group leader, in August 2014 in Battambang province.

38 Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, 132.

39 For more details on self-study and criticism sessions see Path and Kanavou, “Converts, Not Ideologues?” 306; Thion, “Cambodian Idea of Revolution,” 29.

40 Interview conducted by the author with a former military messenger and secretary in November 2014 in Prey Veng province.

41 Due to a lack of statistics on this topic, it is unclear how many former Khmer Rouge there are in Cambodia in total, and furthermore how many live in the former strongholds. My tentative assessment would be that those living outside the strongholds are considerably more numerous, thus resulting in most former Khmer Rouge not being embedded in such social networks.

42 Hinton, Why Did They Kill?; Zucker, “Matters of Morality”; Zucker, “Trauma and Its Aftermath.”

43 Williams, “Perpetrator-Victims.”

44 Jessee and Williams, “Perpetrators as Victims?”

45 Jessee and Williams, “Perpetrators as Victims?”

46 See, for example, Zucker, “Trauma and Its Aftermath.”

47 While there were some revenge killings directly after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, hostilities towards former Khmer Rouge in communities since have normally only targeted individuals who were responsible for the mistreatment of people in that specific community.

48 Fluehr-Lobban, “Ethics”; Höglund and Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation”; Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research.”

49 Bernath, “Complex Political Victims.”