Alexander Laban Hinton
Biographic Data
| ID | 3617331 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Laban Hinton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander Laban |
| FAMILY NAME | Hinton |
| SIGNATURE | HINTON A L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 392 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice
Anthropological Witness
This book tells the story of the author's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, his attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, the author served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a…
Anthropological Witness
Anthropological Witness tells the story of Alex Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony…
The Snake
From start to finish, Donald Trump’s campaign speeches featured a xenophobic parable, "The Snake." The message of "The Snake" is clear: it is a story warning of the dangers of immigration, the threat of white genocide, and the need for a hypermasculine response. Trump use of such language also demonstrated how readily a wide range of such groups could be mobilized around a white nationalist message that emphasized such white genocide fears and de…
It Can Happen Here
A renowned expert on genocide argues that there is a real risk of violent atrocities happening in the United States If many people were shocked by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations—crazed extremists who did not re…
Why Did They Kill
Of all the horrors human beings perpetrate, genocide stands near the top of the list. Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million dead worldwide. Why Did They Kill? is one of the first anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it, Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge in order to explore why mass murder happens and what motivates perpet…
Transitional Justice
How do societies come to terms with the aftermath of genocide and mass violence, and how might the international community contribute to this process? Recently, transitional justice mechanisms such as tribunals and truth commissions have emerged as a favored means of redress.Transitional Justice, the first edited collection in anthropology focused directly on this issue, argues that, however well-intentioned, transitional justice needs to more de…
Critical Genocide and Atrocity Prevention Studies
The frustrations of a genocide scholar are many. Chief among them is what Keith Tester refers to as the "rage" of the "incapacitated" 1 -the paradox of having too much knowledge of human suffering but finding our selves unable to do little more than shout, "something must be done!" Institutions have become the primary moral agents for responding to terrible events like genocide, Tester notes, adding "It is not just the world which has been wholly…
The First Lesson in Prevention
Despite its rapid proliferation over the past fifteen years, genocide and atrocity crimes prevention studies are often blinded by normative assumptions and conceptual blinder. This essay argues that any effort at prevention must begin with a first critical lesson, one revealed in the essay’s opening line and writing style. This first lesson suggests a path toward a more critical prevention studies, one involving critique, archeology, and pharmako…
Subjectivity (DC-Cam and the ECCC Outreach Tour)
The chapters in Part III, “Eddies,” seek to step behind this justice facade and explore the lived experience of victim participation as well as the ways in which this experience was mediated by another Cambodian intermediary organization, Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam). Chapter 7 builds upon the previous chapters by unpacking how the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) sought to produce a certain liberal democratic,…
Performance (Reach Sambath, Public Affairs, and “Justice Trouble”)
Chapter 5 shifts from aesthetics to performativity, even as the two are intertwined. Just as the parties came together at Tuol Sleng in a performance of transitional justice and law, one that seemed to realize the transitional justice imaginary’s aspiration for transformation, so too did the civil parties enter into legal proceedings that had clear performative dimensions, including an ethnodramatic structure that led some to refer to it as “the …
Aesthetics (Theary Seng, Vann Nath, and Victim Participation)
The second part of the book, “Turbulence,” centers on the transitional justice encounter of three survivors (Theary Seng, Vann Nath, and Bou Meng) involved in victim participation at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Chapter 4, for example, is loosely structured around the idea of aesthetics and the experience of two victims who participated in the proceedings, Theary Seng and former S-21 prisoner Vann Nath. If the 2008…
Disposition (Youk Chhang, Documenter and Survivor)
Beginning with an interview with Youk Chhang, the head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the chapter explores his path to the non-governmental organization and the projects it undertook, including Khmer Rouge Tribunal outreach. The second half of the chapter looks at how the play “Breaking the Silence” emerged from these efforts. A collaboration from the start, the play on the surface reflects the aspirations of the transitional justice im…
Re/enactment
This Preamble to Part II describes the reenactment at Tuol Sleng prison by Duch and participants as a part of the ECCC’s evidence gathering, and peace and reconciliation process. It introduces chapters on the lived experience of Cambodians who participated in ECCC.
Space (Center for Social Development and the Public Sphere)
Chapter 3 “Space,” continues to focus on interstitiality, lived experience, and the combustive acts of creativity and imagination that take place behind the justice face. It examines another NGO “vortex,” the Center for Social Development,” which was led by two Cambodian-Americans, Chea Vannath and Theary Seng and known for high-profile Khmer Rouge Tribunal outreach “Public Forums.” The chapter traces the origins of the non-governmental organizat…
Time (The Khmer Institute of Democracy)
Overview : Focusing on two in-depth case studies (Khmer Institute of Democracy (KID) and the Center for Social Development), the next two chapters unpack the genealogies of these intermediary outreach non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the institutional practices that laid a basis for their specific Khmer Rouge Tribunal outreach activities. This history, as well as the background and vision of the NGO leaders, is critical to understanding …
Discourse, Time, and Space
This Preamble to Part I describes the work of the International Center for Transitional Justice in their ‘Making an Impact: Guidelines on Designing and Implementing Outreach Programs for Transitional Justice’ and how this relates to Cambodia, the ECCC, and the work of the Khmer Institution of Democracy.
Breaking the Silence
This Preamble to Part III begins with a description of a play performed in collaboration with the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the Cambodian Branch of AMRITA Performing Arts. This part focusses on the lived experience of victim participation and how the transitional justice imaginary ideas of reconciliation and healing did not necessarily accord with the understandings of Cambodians.
Normativity (Civil Party Testimony)
In Chapter 8, “Normativity,” I follow this line of discussion but focus on the understandings of less educated Cambodian civil parties, including rural villagers. The chapter focuses, in particular, on everyday understandings of “return,” which inform transactions with beings ranging from patrons to family members and the spirits of the dead. For many Cambodians, the court provided an opportunity to fulfill their obligations to significant others…
Conclusion
Beginning with a discussion of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia civil party Neth Phally, the book’s conclusion, “Justice in Translation,” argues for a dynamic, discursively-informed phenomenological justice approach to transitional justice, one in keeping with the spirit of critical transitional justice studies and that foregrounds ethnographic attunement to lived experience, discourses, interstices, and the combustive encounters …
Progression (Cambodia’s Three Transitions)
Overview After a Preamble that discusses a transitional justice outreach guide and discourses related to time and space, Chapter 1, “Progression,” considers two earlier transitions obscured by the discourses of the transitional justice imaginary. The first comprised a series of initiatives, including a tribunal, undertaken by the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) immediately after Democratic Kampuchea (DK) (1979 to late 1980s). Cambodia’s seco…
The Justice Facade
Is there a point to international justice? This book explores this question in Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge revolutionaries committed genocide and crimes against humanity in an attempt to create a pure socialist regime (1975–1979). Due to geopolitics, it was only in 2006 that a UN-backed hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“Khmer Rouge Tribunal”), commenced operation, one of a growing number of post-Col…
Postscript—Man or Monster
evil. Black ink staining white cloth. Th e word is written across the neckline of the man's polo shirt in a photo graph at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A caption names him: "duch (original name Kaing Guek Eav aka Kiev). " Duch's head rises from the shirt collar, too large for his slight build. Pressed into a line, his lips conceal bad teeth. In the background, a man in a dark suit is a shadow behind Duch. Someone has sc…
From the clenched fist to the open hand
Anthropologists like symbols, and sometimes approach things in unusual ways. "Analysis" is a word suggesting "detailed examination" to bring something out of darkness and into the light. It is also an act of separation, the parsing of constituent elements apart. For unpacking is a critical endeavor. Not the criticism of negative evaluation, but a judgment, which, somewhat like analysis, means to "separate" and "divide". The hand of unpacking symb…
Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In 'Man or Monster?' Alexander Hinton uses creati…
Violence in War and Peace
An alternative anthropology: exercising the preferential option of the poor / Leigh Binford
Why Did They Kill?
A Head for an Eye
More than one and one half million Cambodians died from disease, starvation, overwork, and execution under Khmer Rouge rule (1975-79). To help redress the lack of anthropological research on the origins of such large-scale genocides, in this article I explore how the Cambodian cultural model of disproportionate revenge, in combination with Communist Party ideology, provided a cultural template for the extreme violence that took place during this …
PTSD and Key Somatic Complaints and Cultural Syndromes among Rural Cambodians
This article describes a culturally sensitive assessment tool for traumatized Cambodians, the Cambodian "Somatic Symptom and Syndrome Inventory" (SSI), and reports the outcome of a needs assessment conducted in rural Cambodia using the instrument. Villagers locally identified (N = 139) as still suffering the effects of the Pol Pot genocide were evaluated. All 139 had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as assessed by the PTSD Checklist (PCL), a…
Critical Genocide Studies
Over the last two decades, the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies has dramatically expanded and matured. No longer in the shadow of Holocaust studies, it is now the primary subject of journals, textbooks, encyclopedias, readers, handbooks, special journal issues, bibliographies, workshops, seminars, conference, Web sites, research centers, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and a unit at the…
Agents of Death
Why Did You Kill
Why did you kill?From the first day I arrived in Cambodia to conduct ethnographic research, I had wanted to pose this question to a Khmer Rouge who had executed people during the genocidal Democratic Kampuchea regime (April 1975 to January 1979)- When the Khmer Rouge-a radical group of Maoist-inspired Communist rebels-came to power after a bloody civil war in which 600,000 people died, they transformed Cambodian society into what some survivors n…
Hidden Genocides
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the viol…
Justice and Time at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
This essay explores the interrelationship of justice and time at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia [ECCC hyperlink: http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en] (ECCC, or “Khmer Rouge Tribunal”). In doing so, it follows the trial participation of the late Vann Nath, a survivor of S-21, a torture and detention center operated by the Khmer Rouge. From April 15, 1975 to January 6, 1979, this Maoist-inspired group of revolutionary implemented polici…
Prolegomenon to a Processual Approach to the Emotions
Khmerness and the Thai ‘Other’
On 29 January 2003, a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. This article explores the roots of this violence, arguing that the anti-Thai riots were linked in part to a set of discourses and imagery that have long been central to assertions of ‘Khmerness’ and constructions of the ‘Other’
Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory
Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. David E. Lorey. and William H. Beezley, eds. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Books, 2002. 258 pp
Prolegomenon to a Processual Approach to the Emotions
Cultural Models And The Study of Aggression
Agents of Death
Why Did You Kill
Why did you kill?From the first day I arrived in Cambodia to conduct ethnographic research, I had wanted to pose this question to a Khmer Rouge who had executed people during the genocidal Democratic Kampuchea regime (April 1975 to January 1979)- When the Khmer Rouge-a radical group of Maoist-inspired Communist rebels-came to power after a bloody civil war in which 600,000 people died, they transformed Cambodian society into what some survivors n…
A Head for an Eye
More than one and one half million Cambodians died from disease, starvation, overwork, and execution under Khmer Rouge rule (1975-79). To help redress the lack of anthropological research on the origins of such large-scale genocides, in this article I explore how the Cambodian cultural model of disproportionate revenge, in combination with Communist Party ideology, provided a cultural template for the extreme violence that took place during this …
Annihilating difference
Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambod…
Violence in War and Peace
An alternative anthropology: exercising the preferential option of the poor / Leigh Binford
Why Did They Kill?
Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory
Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. David E. Lorey. and William H. Beezley, eds. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Books, 2002. 258 pp
Khmerness and the Thai ‘Other’
On 29 January 2003, a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. This article explores the roots of this violence, arguing that the anti-Thai riots were linked in part to a set of discourses and imagery that have long been central to assertions of ‘Khmerness’ and constructions of the ‘Other’
Genocide
Nightmares Among Cambodian Refugees
Critical Genocide Studies
Over the last two decades, the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies has dramatically expanded and matured. No longer in the shadow of Holocaust studies, it is now the primary subject of journals, textbooks, encyclopedias, readers, handbooks, special journal issues, bibliographies, workshops, seminars, conference, Web sites, research centers, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and a unit at the…
PTSD and Key Somatic Complaints and Cultural Syndromes among Rural Cambodians
This article describes a culturally sensitive assessment tool for traumatized Cambodians, the Cambodian "Somatic Symptom and Syndrome Inventory" (SSI), and reports the outcome of a needs assessment conducted in rural Cambodia using the instrument. Villagers locally identified (N = 139) as still suffering the effects of the Pol Pot genocide were evaluated. All 139 had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as assessed by the PTSD Checklist (PCL), a…
Genocide and Mass Violence
Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America
Foreword / Theodore Fontaine vii Introduction. Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America / Jeff Benvenuto, Andrew Woolford, and Alexander Laban Hinton 1 Part I. Intersections and Trajectories 1. Discipline, Territory, and the Colonial Mesh: Indigenous Boarding Schools in the United States and Canada / Andrew Woolford 29 2. Global Capital, Violence, and the Making of a Colonial Shatter Zone / Robbie Ethridge 49 3. Genocide in Canada: A Relatio…
Justice and Time at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
This essay explores the interrelationship of justice and time at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia [ECCC hyperlink: http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en] (ECCC, or “Khmer Rouge Tribunal”). In doing so, it follows the trial participation of the late Vann Nath, a survivor of S-21, a torture and detention center operated by the Khmer Rouge. From April 15, 1975 to January 6, 1979, this Maoist-inspired group of revolutionary implemented polici…
Hidden Genocides
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the viol…
Man or Monster?
Alexander Laban Hinton offers a detailed analysis of a former Khmer Rouge security center commandant who was convicted for overseeing the interrogation, torture, and execution of nearly 20,000 Cambodians. Interested in how someone becomes an executioner, Hinton provides numerous ways to consider justice, genocide, memory, truth, and humanity.
Man or Monster
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In Man or Monster? Alexander Hinton uses creative…
From the clenched fist to the open hand
Anthropologists like symbols, and sometimes approach things in unusual ways. "Analysis" is a word suggesting "detailed examination" to bring something out of darkness and into the light. It is also an act of separation, the parsing of constituent elements apart. For unpacking is a critical endeavor. Not the criticism of negative evaluation, but a judgment, which, somewhat like analysis, means to "separate" and "divide". The hand of unpacking symb…
Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In 'Man or Monster?' Alexander Hinton uses creati…
Subjectivity (DC-Cam and the ECCC Outreach Tour)
The chapters in Part III, “Eddies,” seek to step behind this justice facade and explore the lived experience of victim participation as well as the ways in which this experience was mediated by another Cambodian intermediary organization, Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam). Chapter 7 builds upon the previous chapters by unpacking how the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) sought to produce a certain liberal democratic,…
Performance (Reach Sambath, Public Affairs, and “Justice Trouble”)
Chapter 5 shifts from aesthetics to performativity, even as the two are intertwined. Just as the parties came together at Tuol Sleng in a performance of transitional justice and law, one that seemed to realize the transitional justice imaginary’s aspiration for transformation, so too did the civil parties enter into legal proceedings that had clear performative dimensions, including an ethnodramatic structure that led some to refer to it as “the …
Aesthetics (Theary Seng, Vann Nath, and Victim Participation)
The second part of the book, “Turbulence,” centers on the transitional justice encounter of three survivors (Theary Seng, Vann Nath, and Bou Meng) involved in victim participation at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Chapter 4, for example, is loosely structured around the idea of aesthetics and the experience of two victims who participated in the proceedings, Theary Seng and former S-21 prisoner Vann Nath. If the 2008…
Political science (34 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Cambodian History and Society (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Criminology (22 works) · Genocide (20 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Economic Justice (16 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (13 works) · History (13 works)