The Politics of Lists: Bureaucracy and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge

“You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.”

So wrote Kafka in his ([1925] 2009) nightmarish parable of bureaucratic supremacy, The Trial. Yet as James A. Tyner’s book The Politics of Lists makes clear, the same words might have been lifted from a context far more unsettling than fiction: the hellish agrarian experiment of Democratic Kampuchea, which in the four years between 1975 and 1979 turned Cambodian society almost literally upside down. Where Kafka’s Josef K found himself entombed in labyrinthine corridors, the black-shirted victims of the Khmer Rouge toiled, starving, in sweltering rice fields. Yet the underlying horror is familiar. As written by leading Khmer Rouge cadre Comrade Duch, “the right to arrest is vested in the people who have the right to smash” (p. 127). Appeal in both cases is futile; the authority of the edict unquestionable.

Despite the appeal of such parallels, to view the Khmer Rouge as a bureaucratic entity is, outside of Tyner’s extensive oeuvre, unusual. This is, after all, a regime more associated with erasure than composition; one in which “year zero” meant the evisceration of prerevolutionary systems and those who populated them. Yet as Tyner argues, nuance is required. Formal education, certainly, was viciously opposed. The Khmer Rouge destroyed some 90 percent of school buildings and the same proportion of teachers lost their lives, yet their aim was not to create a vacuum. Rather, it was to increase the value of the knowledge that filled it: to reify, even deify, the authority of the all-seeing organization, Angka, that sought control over every fiber of the nation.

Across five chapters, The Politics of Lists trains a forensic lens on Angka’s bureaucratic power, each part examining a distinct dimension of organizational infrastructure in Democratic Kampuchea. The first of these sets out the central thesis of the book: The horrors of the Khmer Rouge were not the product of disorganization or mass violence, but a far more instrumental form of bureaucratic necropolitics. Far from an opportunistic power grab, this was revolution through initiation. Sets, zones, and structures were central to the revolutionary cadres’ objectives. Yet it was the list, that biopolitical technology of risk that manifests “paranoia as a form of power” (p. 18), that lay at the center of Democratic Kampuchea’s all-pervasive discourse of security.

Building on this thesis, Chapter 2 sets out to interrogate the reasoning that drove a small circle of educated men—all received higher education, mostly in Paris, one to the doctoral level—to promulgate the destruction of knowledge on such a grand scale. As well as the destroyed schools, temples were turned into granaries and medical centers were restaffed with untrained and often illiterate party loyalists. Yet as Tyner lays out, this was no indiscriminate spree, but a purposive strategy intended to seize full control of information. Because most medical staff could not read, “they were instructed how to recognize the words on the bottle” (p. 63), an act of faith in the hierarchy that superseded the authority of scientific knowledge. In public communications similarly, although “it was important that ‘content’ be broadcast … it must not be too strong on explanation” (p. 68).

Far from denigrating the written word, therefore, what Tyner reveals is the Khmer Rouge leadership’s ghoulish veneration of its power. As he explains, following Foucault, “power circulates, but it does so through the inscription and transmission of knowledge in the form of bureaucratic writing” (p. 69). With total control of writing comes total power. The Standing Committee’s goal was to remove all challenges and obstacles to this authority, anointing bureaucratic prescriptions with the unanswerable symbolism of a papal bull. Thus, as Tyner explains, “If Democratic Kampuchea was a terror society it is not simply because of the spectre of physical violence, of random killings, rape and torture. It was also because Democratic Kampuchea was a bureaucratic society” (p. 93). Yet as Chapter 3 aims to evidence, although bureaucratic power might be conveyed through the word, it is never contained by it. Homing in on the book’s eponymous theme, Tyner here presents the case for the list as a biopolitical agent. Drawing on a range of historical documentation, Tyner shows the reader how the exposure of enemy networks was a key concern of the leadership. Cadres were instructed to “firmly grasp biographies and ideologies” (p. 88), placing the views and actions of each individual within an explicit chain of associates, including friends, relatives, and neighbors. Details of such associations were often recorded preemptively: Many transfers between posts would be annotated with the details of previous associations. Yet its full power was only brought to bear upon the decision to “smash” (p. 85) a human link within this chain. The smashing of one meant the smashing of all, but the inevitable confessions of each link spawned still more lists, whose deadly power would be enacted in short order.

Lists like these are the central concern of the book not only because of their role in orchestrating death on an incredible scale, but because the intensity of their use in Democratic Kampuchea reveals much of the biopolitical power of bureaucracy more broadly. Records of association obtained under interrogation are shocking in their minimalism, recording simply the biopolitical “fact” of guilt, erasing the unwanted “detail” of torture, desperate fabrication and death. In these apparently innocuous artifacts, the full violent power of the word is laid bare, not only to relate the desired truth of the list maker, but to annihilate that of its subject.

With the authority of bureaucracy over life established, Chapter 4 explores its authority to end it. Set in the interrogation and torture center of S-21, the aim here is to explore not conditions and operations in the chilling former school building—although these are laid out in often meticulous detail—but the meaning and implications of the necropolitical purgatory between the “establishment” of guilt and death itself. Opening with the fleshy humanity of photographs and life stories, the chapter progressively strips life from its account, desiccating its narration of the center’s four years of operation with statistics built from the deadly lists that drove it. By the chapter’s close, the human’s-eye view has disappeared entirely, replaced by the chilling numerical logic of bureaucracy. Purges of the center’s inmates—hundreds at a time—appear merely as incidental, compellingly necessary pulses on a graph.

Tyner’s triumph here is therefore not only to remind the reader of Stalin’s famous quote, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” but to lay bare precisely the pathway that might lead them to utter it. An existential deep dive into the corrupting biopolitical power of bureaucracy unfettered, The Politics of Lists reads with the intensity of gothic horror. Yet even amidst the nightmarish descent into the dehumanized rationality of mass murder, it is the details that stand out. Rooted in Tyner’s long study of Khmer Rouge documentation, the book benefits from old and new research conducted over many years and many contexts. Photographs, documents, interviews, and data are densely curated throughout, with a coherence that places each piece of evidence in the service of the whole.

Nevertheless, as outlined in the concluding Chapter 5, this is far more than a book for historians, or those interested in this bloody period of Cambodia’s recent history. Having versed the reader fully in the necropolitical power of bureaucracy under the Khmer Rouge, the final act here is to demonstrate its ongoing relevance to a far wider readership. Ranging from drone strike kill lists to biometric ID, The Politics of Lists concludes with the message that this was no mere moment in history, but a mere flex of the muscles of a bureaucratic authority that never stopped growing. The transition to digital data has not defeated the written word, argues Tyner, but strengthened it through disembodiment. As current events from the deportation of noncitizens to the blacklisting of protest groups and foreign companies demonstrate, the word, the list, and the bureaucracy continue to reign supreme.

A book Kafkaesque in both subject and intensity, but utterly twenty-first century in its implications, The Politics of Lists is therefore of relevance to a wide range of audiences. The general public will appreciate its accessible pace, concision, and flow, and scholars of Cambodia will applaud the range and detail of the evidence presented here. Yet in its presentation of “the inherent danger of security practices founded on biopolitical governance” (p. 174), it holds a broader academic relevance to the geographic discipline and beyond. Political geographers, geographers of security, carceral geographers, and those interested more specifically in biopower and necropolitics, all stand to gain from this accomplished exposition of bureaucratic power inscribed on paper, body, and mind.