Ben Kiernan

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Benedict Francis "Ben" Kiernan (born January 29, 1953 in Melbourne ) is an Australian historian who deals with the history of Southeast Asia in the 20th century and especially the Pol Pot regime and the history of genocides such as that in Cambodia . He is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University .

Kiernan studied at Monash University , where he received his PhD in 1983 with David P. Chandler . From 1990 he was at Yale University, where he founded the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in 1994 and a program for comparative genocide studies in 1998, which he headed until 2015. As part of the CGP, he received substantial funding to set up a documentation center in Cambodia. In 2000 he also launched an East Timor project in Yale (in East Timor there was also a genocide by the Indonesian government at about the same time as that in Cambodia).

Kiernan was in Cambodia in the early 1970s and, like other foreigners, was expelled from the Khmer Rouge in 1975 . At first, like many left-wing intellectuals, he was positive about the communist regime in Cambodia (and corresponding publications by him from the 1970s were later used to question his qualification as a historian of the Cambodian genocide), but this changed from 1978 after numerous interviews Refugees from the country changed (he learned the Khmer language ). He began to publish about the crimes of the regime in the 1980s and make them known to wide circles. In 1995 he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Khmer Rouge. His book on the Pol Pot regime is considered a standard work. Not only did he tap into new sources, but he also cleared up misunderstandings about the regime, highlighted the extent of ethnic cleansing associated with the terror, and pointed to internal resistance within the regime that ultimately contributed to the overthrow after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 . His reputation as a genocide researcher was cemented by his 2007 book Blood and Soil , which provides an overview of the history of genocide. He identifies four basic themes (racism, expansion, a return to agricultural origins and an idealized past).

In 2006 he was a five-year Federation Fellowship from the Australian National Research Council at the University of Sydney , and he is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne .

Fonts

  • with Serge Thion : Khmer Rouges! Material for the history of the community in Cambodia. J.-E. Hallier / A. Michel, Paris 1981.
  • with Chanthou Boua: Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942–1981. Zed Books, London 1982.
  • How Pol Pot Came to Power. Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 1985, 2004.
  • Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacre. Columbia Center for the Study of Human Rights, New York 1986.
  • The Pol Pot Regime. Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 1996, 2002, 3rd edition 2008.
    • French edition: Le génocide au Cambodge, 1975–1979. Race, idéologie et pouvoir. Gallimard, Paris 1998.
  • Blood and Soil. A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 2007.
    • German edition: Earth and Blood. Genocide and Annihilation from Antiquity to the Present. DVA, Munich 2009.
  • Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia. Documentation, Denial, and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick 2007.
  • Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017.

As editor:

  • with David P. Chandler : Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea. Eight essays. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 1983.
  • with Camille Scalabrino, Steve Heder u. a .: Cambodge. Histoire et enjeux. L'Harmattan, Paris 1986.
  • Burchett. Reporting the other side of the world 1939–1983. Quartet Books, New York 1986.
  • with David P. Chandler, Chanthou Boua: Pol Pot Plans the Future. Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea 1976–1977. Yale Center for International and Area Studies, New Haven (CT) 1988.
  • Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community. Yale University, South East Asia Studies, New Haven (CT) 1993.
  • with Robert Gellately : The Specter of Genocide. Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003.
  • Conflict and Change in Cambodia. Routledge, New York 2007.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul R. Bartrop , Steven L. Jacobs: Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide. Routledge, New York 2013, Kiernan chapter , 159-164.
  2. ↑ Stephen Morris: The Wrong Man to Investigate Cambodia. In: Wall Street Journal . April 17, 1995. For example, Kiernan is quoted in an article in the Melbourne Journal of Politics from 1976 in which he states that there is sufficient evidence that the Khmer Rouge are not the monsters that the press recently portrayed them as ( there is ample evidence in Cambodia and other sources that the Khmer Rouge movement is not the monster that the press have recently made it out to be) and traces the massacres that have become known to misdirected troops that acted against orders from above.
  3. ^ Bartrop, Jacobs: Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide. 2013, p. 159.
  4. ^ Bartrop, Jacobs: Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide. 2013, p. 161.
  5. ↑ Racism, expansionism, Agrarism, Antiquity. In: Kiernan: Blood and Soil. 2007, p. 38.
personal data
SURNAME Kiernan, Ben
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kiernan, Benedict F.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne