Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the place of time, capitalism, and corruption in transforming space after the Cambodian genocide from prei kmoac – the forest of the dead – to desirable land fit for development by the elite.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013 when I first interviewed people living on Koh Sap, a small Cambodian island in the Bassac river, people told me that the rich would never live where they did – in the prei kmoac - forest of the dead – a former prison and killing site which had seen the death of several thousand people. It was one of hundreds of such sites, resulting from the Khmer Rouge regime, who, in the late 1970s, enacted a genocide that killed over 1.7 million people. Following the genocide, prei kmoac such as the land on Koh Sap were common. Dead bodies and restless spirits – lost, lonely, and improperly buried – converged in these areas, making them unsafe and undesirable: land only for the poor and those with nowhere else to live.

Now, however, development is rampant and some prei kmoac have become desirable real estate for the elite. Over time and through various factors, the dead have lost their power to disturb, and the land has become open territory for acquisition, often forcibly. With entrenched corruption, the patronage-based system, and a recently established dynastic dictatorship, the elite in Cambodia are getting richer and more powerful, and land grabs and coerced sales are prevalent. The dead sometimes play a part in this – they can be central to development projects at the expense of the land and the poor. Meanwhile, as the population has grown, other areas have been transformed from the forest to homelands, and as this has happened the land has become safe: free from the dead and the haunting. As these transformations happen, what happened in these places becomes forgotten or rendered invisible. Through the case study of Koh Sap, I will look at such changes, and the role of time, memory, and global development in such processes.