Anyone who researches genocide and its perpetrators, has, at some point, tried to understand ‘[h]ow a person — [a] basically ordinary person — can be at the same time respectable and terrifying’ (p. 195). Through his examination of the trial of Duch (former Khmer Rouge cadre, Kaing Guek Eav), Alexander Laban Hinton's book, Man or monster, addresses this paradox. However, in asking this question the book goes much further, to asking wider questions of how we come to understand others (and ourselves) at all, particularly within the frame of international justice and genocide.
Duch's trial — Case 001 — was the test case for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the ECCC, or Khmer Rouge Tribunal), the hybrid court established in 2006 to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime. In Man or monster, Hinton draws on court transcripts, participant-observation, extensive interviews, poetry and creative writing, and his own reflexive analysis, to construct a detailed ethnography of a court case, a person, and a historical moment. By depicting the trial in meticulous, but readable, detail, Hinton explores how we construct ideas of humanity/humanness, good and evil, perpetrator/victim, justice and reconciliation in the post-conflict context of Cambodia. Combining experimental writing techniques with the work of theorists such as Arendt, Lacan, Derrida, and Freud, we, as readers, are drawn not only into a discussion of how a person commits atrocities, but also how we, as writers and readers, are complicit in constructions of blame and responsibility that erase or obscure the complexities of life.
Hinton positions his work as an ethnodrama — an approach aimed at raising the ambiguities of scholarship disguised by most academic writing (p. 35). As an ethnodrama, the book could be read as acts in a play. Because indeed, the story is dramatic. Between 1975 and 1979, Duch, a former schoolteacher, ran the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison, Tuol Sleng, at which over 12,000 men, women, and children were tortured and forced to confess their crimes against the regime; admissions that led to their brutal execution. When the regime fell in 1979, Duch escaped and lived undisturbed for over twenty years, before being tracked down by photojournalist Nic Dunlop in 1999. This in itself is dramatic, but the twists and turns of his trial, and the wider politics of memory within which it sits, provide a compelling story warranting dramatic and philosophical consideration.
The book starts in Tuol Sleng (now a museum) where Hinton merges with tourists to explore the site as a dissonant space of historical knowledge (and, disjarringly, world heritage; p. 244). We end back at the site with Chum Mey and Bou Meng, survivors of Tuol Sleng who sit at the site every day, selling their story, and posing for photographs with tourists. By bounding the case as such Hinton draws us into a consideration of the many aspects of justice and reconciliation that exist outside and beyond the court, as well as the politics of memory within which the ECCC sits.
The main contents of the book cover the court case in meticulous, chronological order. ‘Part I: Confession’, considers Duch, the Khmer Rouge regime, and Tuol Sleng as aspects of historical violence for which the present needs redress through the court. ‘Part II: Reconstruction’, considers the legacy of Tuol Sleng beyond its function as a processing facility for prisoners’ confessions prior to execution and provides voice to affect beyond the juridical framework of a court. The chapters (and their titles) outline the categories through which the prosecution and defence position their cases: man; revolutionary; subordinate; cog; commandant; master; villain; zealot; scapegoat; accused. By doing so they draw attention to the limited fields within which blame and responsibility, or innocence and victimhood, are framed within the court system. These frames dismiss the reality of humanness, which is messy, complicated, and cannot be reduced to one category or another. The final chapters, ‘Background’ and ‘Epilogue’, outline Hinton's methodological approach to the research and writing, and the theoretical propositions of the book as a whole.
Through his attention to the uncanny and the redactic, Hinton shows that life, history, pain, and violence, cannot be contained by a court. History will always overflow its bounds — this comes to the fore when civil parties asked for vengeance rather than justice (p. 193), when Duch repeatedly changes his plea (from admitting legal and moral responsibility [p. 57], to positioning himself as a cog in the wheel [p. 106], to finally, and dramatically, asking for acquittal [p. 228]), and when Hinton recognises his own place in the political construction of historical narrative that now influences national and international understandings of who and what the Khmer Rouge were (p. 32).
There are hints of Hinton's previous work in the consideration of justice in a Buddhist framework (which parallels the court's attempts at hybridisation) that is refreshing in a book about an international court. But Hinton's most provocative theoretical proposition is his re-direction of Arendt's ‘banality of evil’, to the ‘banality of everyday thought’ (pp. 31–5; 296). The banality here is not of violent acts, but the way that we, as humans, create specific frames (articulations or convictions) of understanding to navigate our social worlds and create understanding, frames that exist to the exclusion of other frames, as well as aspects of life that exist outside those frames. In this proposition, Hinton goes further than Arendt in her recognition of the ordinariness of those who commit acts of cruelty and terror. The banality of everyday thought highlights that when we decide someone is either a man or a monster, we are engaging in the same redactive framing of humanness that allowed the Khmer Rouge to commit genocide. Hinton himself grapples with this tension when he considers whether he has been able to step away from the overwhelming urge to present Duch and his story as one of monstrous inhumanity (p. 270). Duch is not just a mirror (for a mirror reflects a distorted version of ourselves); Duch is a lens to make visible the mechanisms that made torture and mass murder possible.
Man or monster will be useful to those studying anthropology, geography, international relations, transitional justice and law, genocide, violence, and post-conflict politics. It will also be of use to those considering the very work we do as social scientists; how what we do is intimately involved in the frames of how others come to understand particular places, people, and events. Monsters do not exist by themselves: they are made by us — an imagined terror that creates the very thing it seeks to describe. By that means monsters do not exist outside the realm of humanity; they are created within it. There is no such thing as a man or a monster: there can only be both.
