Why Did They Kill? by Alexander Laban Hinton

Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide

A tightly argued anthropological account that investigates why mass killing occurred in Cambodia by combining interviews, archival evidence, and on-the-ground observation to trace how revolutionary ideology, social dislocation, local power dynamics, administrative routinization, and cultural categories of purity and threat came together to enable ordinary people to participate in extraordinary violence; the book centers perpetrators’ and survivors’ voices to show how fear, coercion, moral reordering, and bureaucratic imperatives produced systematic targeting and murder, and it reflects on memory, responsibility, and what the Cambodian case teaches about the social processes that make genocide possible.

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