Political Genocides in Postcolonial Asia

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    Abstract

    This article discusses political genocide in postcolonial Asia, looking at Indonesia, Cambodia, and China. Mass political killing presents a special problem in genocide studies. The slaughter of human beings because of the political beliefs and attitudes they held, or were presumed to have held, cost millions of lives during the twentieth century. The Indonesian killings of 1965–6 cost half a million lives and the killings during the Cultural Revolution in China claimed a million lives. Although these are massive death tolls, both episodes involved only a relatively small proportion of the total population of those two countries. The Cambodian killings, by contrast, claimed twenty-five per cent of a population of eight million in little more than three years. These three political genocides took place within little more than a decade. They occurred in the context of the Cold War, a time of acute polarization between secular ideologies that is unprecedented in world history.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies
    Editors Donald Bloxham & A. Dirk Moses
    Place of PublicationOxford, UK
    PublisherOxford University Press
    Pages445-65
    Edition1st
    ISBN (Print)9780199232116
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2010

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