Ken Maclean
Biographic Data
| ID | 3650993 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ken Maclean |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ken |
| FAMILY NAME | Maclean |
| SIGNATURE | MACLEAN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Clark University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
War ecologies and their seductions
How can we engage ethnographically with the often overlooked toxic and explosive effects of war and their harmful, frequently multi-generational, legacies? The oversight is notable because war waste insidiously contaminates and transforms entire environments, making them lethal for humans and non-humans alike at different scales and over different time frames. While anthropologists have critically examined the social, political, material, and emo…
Failure (re-)framed
The Vietnamese Communist Party adopted a rigid Maoist-model to foment class struggle to eradicate all traces of ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ across the northern countryside during the 1950s. The mass campaign began in late 1952 then ended abruptly in late 1956 due to the violent chaos it unleashed. A growing body of critical scholarship exists on this campaign; however, the importance of the final step in the campaign's model remains largely over…
Interactive Digital Platforms, Human Rights Fact Production, and the International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court (ICC) initiated criminal proceedings against Ahmad Al Faqi Mahdi in 2016 for the war crime of directing the destruction of religious monuments in Timbuktu, Mali, in the context of a non-international conflict. The monuments included nine mausoleums of Sufi saints that Islamist groups regarded as idolatrous, one mosque, and approximately four thousand ancient manuscripts. The case, which successfully ended in a gui…
Human Rights 'Fact' Production and Why It Matters
Ken MacLean's Crimes in Archival Form (University of California Press, 2022) explores the many ways in which human rights 'facts' are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as a case study, the book examines the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global campaign led by a nongovernmental organization. Foregrounding fact-finding in critical yet constructive w…
Debate on The army and the Indonesian genocide
A review of Border Capitalism, Disrupted
"A review of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone. By Stephen Campbell." Economic Geography, 95(2), pp. 206–207
The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure
The essay utilized two concepts, lawfare and spacio-cide, to place different facets of “belonging” into conversation with one another. The concepts highlight how the progressive erasure of citizenship shapes the progressive erasure of home and vice-versa, with the result being the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia today. The first section of the essay situates the Rohingya crisis within the broader politico-military context. It ill…
History Reformatted
We primarily see the archive as storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is . . . a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. (Murphy 2011, 481)Many Vietnamese present ritual offer…
Humanitarian mine action in Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk
This article examines current debates for and against Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA) in Myanmar. The analysis, based on interviews with key local, national, and international actors involved in HMA, reveals why so many of them regard the mapping and removal of "nuisance" landmines as posing a security threat to the peace process. (Landmines deny people access to territory; when conflict ends, these landmines no longer serve a strategic purpose an…
Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data
This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financ…
State, Society and the Market in Contemporary Vietnam
Pham Thi Vach, who later became a Communist Party member and secretary for the People’s Committee in Kim Ty District (Hung Yen Province), first demonstrated her leadership potential in the late 1950s, while still a teenager. Concerned by heavy rains, she mobilized her peers to save the fall harvest one year by carrying out urgently needed repairs to dikes that protect Hung Cuong Commune from catastrophic flood. Leading by example, Vach personally…
Enacting Anticorruption
This essay examines the ongoing “fight against corruption” in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The PMU-18 scandal (ca. 2005–2007), the country's largest to date, is featured as a way to explore how different initiatives to audit the financial-moral practices of officials at all levels of government shape one another in contemporary Vietnam. This focus, which considers the material consequences of different discursive positions, reveals a curiou…
Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labour
The article examines the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the past decade to convince government officials to take meaningful steps towards the eradication of forced labour in Burma. Despite the government's intransigence on this issue, ILO-led interventions have produced some tangible results: a ban on the practice in 2000 and the creation of a complaint mechanism in 2007 that enables its Liaison Officer to determine w…
The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past
In 2006, the Museum of Ethnology organized a special exhibit on everyday life in Hanoi during the "subsidy period", the term increasingly used to describe the decade of high socialism that began in 1975 with the reunification of a divided Vietnam and ended in 1986 with the official introduction of market reforms known as crossed D signôcombining comma abovei mói (Renovation). The representational strategies, which linked the collectivism of the p…
In Search of Kilometer Zero
Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region's rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the a…
The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure
The essay utilized two concepts, lawfare and spacio-cide, to place different facets of “belonging” into conversation with one another. The concepts highlight how the progressive erasure of citizenship shapes the progressive erasure of home and vice-versa, with the result being the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia today. The first section of the essay situates the Rohingya crisis within the broader politico-military context. It ill…
The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past
In 2006, the Museum of Ethnology organized a special exhibit on everyday life in Hanoi during the "subsidy period", the term increasingly used to describe the decade of high socialism that began in 1975 with the reunification of a divided Vietnam and ended in 1986 with the official introduction of market reforms known as crossed D signôcombining comma abovei mói (Renovation). The representational strategies, which linked the collectivism of the p…
Enacting Anticorruption
This essay examines the ongoing “fight against corruption” in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The PMU-18 scandal (ca. 2005–2007), the country's largest to date, is featured as a way to explore how different initiatives to audit the financial-moral practices of officials at all levels of government shape one another in contemporary Vietnam. This focus, which considers the material consequences of different discursive positions, reveals a curiou…
In Search of Kilometer Zero
Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region's rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the a…
Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data
This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financ…
Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labour
The article examines the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the past decade to convince government officials to take meaningful steps towards the eradication of forced labour in Burma. Despite the government's intransigence on this issue, ILO-led interventions have produced some tangible results: a ban on the practice in 2000 and the creation of a complaint mechanism in 2007 that enables its Liaison Officer to determine w…
The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past
In 2006, the Museum of Ethnology organized a special exhibit on everyday life in Hanoi during the "subsidy period", the term increasingly used to describe the decade of high socialism that began in 1975 with the reunification of a divided Vietnam and ended in 1986 with the official introduction of market reforms known as crossed D signôcombining comma abovei mói (Renovation). The representational strategies, which linked the collectivism of the p…
In Search of Kilometer Zero
Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region's rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the a…
State, Society and the Market in Contemporary Vietnam
Pham Thi Vach, who later became a Communist Party member and secretary for the People’s Committee in Kim Ty District (Hung Yen Province), first demonstrated her leadership potential in the late 1950s, while still a teenager. Concerned by heavy rains, she mobilized her peers to save the fall harvest one year by carrying out urgently needed repairs to dikes that protect Hung Cuong Commune from catastrophic flood. Leading by example, Vach personally…
Enacting Anticorruption
This essay examines the ongoing “fight against corruption” in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The PMU-18 scandal (ca. 2005–2007), the country's largest to date, is featured as a way to explore how different initiatives to audit the financial-moral practices of officials at all levels of government shape one another in contemporary Vietnam. This focus, which considers the material consequences of different discursive positions, reveals a curiou…
Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labour
The article examines the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the past decade to convince government officials to take meaningful steps towards the eradication of forced labour in Burma. Despite the government's intransigence on this issue, ILO-led interventions have produced some tangible results: a ban on the practice in 2000 and the creation of a complaint mechanism in 2007 that enables its Liaison Officer to determine w…
Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data
This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financ…
History Reformatted
We primarily see the archive as storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is . . . a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. (Murphy 2011, 481)Many Vietnamese present ritual offer…
Humanitarian mine action in Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk
This article examines current debates for and against Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA) in Myanmar. The analysis, based on interviews with key local, national, and international actors involved in HMA, reveals why so many of them regard the mapping and removal of "nuisance" landmines as posing a security threat to the peace process. (Landmines deny people access to territory; when conflict ends, these landmines no longer serve a strategic purpose an…
A review of Border Capitalism, Disrupted
"A review of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone. By Stephen Campbell." Economic Geography, 95(2), pp. 206–207
The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure
The essay utilized two concepts, lawfare and spacio-cide, to place different facets of “belonging” into conversation with one another. The concepts highlight how the progressive erasure of citizenship shapes the progressive erasure of home and vice-versa, with the result being the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia today. The first section of the essay situates the Rohingya crisis within the broader politico-military context. It ill…
Debate on The army and the Indonesian genocide
Human Rights 'Fact' Production and Why It Matters
Ken MacLean's Crimes in Archival Form (University of California Press, 2022) explores the many ways in which human rights 'facts' are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as a case study, the book examines the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global campaign led by a nongovernmental organization. Foregrounding fact-finding in critical yet constructive w…
Interactive Digital Platforms, Human Rights Fact Production, and the International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court (ICC) initiated criminal proceedings against Ahmad Al Faqi Mahdi in 2016 for the war crime of directing the destruction of religious monuments in Timbuktu, Mali, in the context of a non-international conflict. The monuments included nine mausoleums of Sufi saints that Islamist groups regarded as idolatrous, one mosque, and approximately four thousand ancient manuscripts. The case, which successfully ended in a gui…
Failure (re-)framed
The Vietnamese Communist Party adopted a rigid Maoist-model to foment class struggle to eradicate all traces of ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ across the northern countryside during the 1950s. The mass campaign began in late 1952 then ended abruptly in late 1956 due to the violent chaos it unleashed. A growing body of critical scholarship exists on this campaign; however, the importance of the final step in the campaign's model remains largely over…
War ecologies and their seductions
How can we engage ethnographically with the often overlooked toxic and explosive effects of war and their harmful, frequently multi-generational, legacies? The oversight is notable because war waste insidiously contaminates and transforms entire environments, making them lethal for humans and non-humans alike at different scales and over different time frames. While anthropologists have critically examined the social, political, material, and emo…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (7 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · History (4 works)