The Peace Review is pleased to announce a call for essays on "Genocide, Healing, Justice, and Peace: The Cambodian Experience." The Peace Review is an international journal distributed in more than 50 nations. Essays are welcome on any aspect of this issue's theme, broadly conceived. Submissions that address global/diasporic issues and perspectives are especially encouraged. Submission deadline: July 15, 2011.
Call for Essays: Genocide, Healing, Justice, and Peace: The Cambodian Experience
For three years, eight months, and twenty days, between 1975 and 1979,
the Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia. It has been described as one
of the most radical and brutal periods in world history. It was a time
of mass starvation, torture, slavery, and killing. The number of
Cambodians who died under the Khmer Rouge remains a topic of debate:
Vietnamese sources say three million, while others estimate 1-2
million deaths. Historians have called it the Cambodian Holocaust, a
pogrom of ethnic cleansing and societal reform that still haunts many
survivors and their descendants.
Among Cambodians, those living in Cambodia, and the Diaspora (i.e. the
United States), peace is elusive, since justice may never be achieved.
"How is justice possible if Pol Pot is already dead?" many survivors
asked after 1998. In 2003, The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia was established through an agreement between the government
of Cambodia and the United Nations, with a mandate to prosecute senior
members of the Khmer Rouge for war crimes and crimes against humanity,
during the time the Khmer Rouge held power. Today, many of the
surviving victims and their descendants fear that the majority of the
Khmer Rouge leaders will go unpunished because the judicial process is
being manipulated by the current Prime Minister, Hun Sen, himself a
known former Khmer Rouge leader. The legacies of this period and the
taste of injustice are powerful and affect the lives of Cambodians at
home and in diasporic communities abroad.
Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice is dedicating issue 23.4 to
examining the interplay among Genocide, Healing, Justice, and Peace:
The Cambodian Experience. What are peace-makers pursuing on the
ground, in Cambodia and in diasporic Cambodian communities? What will
it take to bring about peace: physical peace, geographic peace,
imagined peace, emotional peace, spiritual peace, social peace,
familial peace, individual peace, and so on? Are Cambodians as
journalist Joel Brinkley declares "cursed" by history to live under
abusive tyrants? What will it take to bring about justice? What is the
interplay between justice and peace for Cambodian survivors who
continue to live and struggle with the phantom of the genocide? How is
genocide and injustice transmitted, culturally, temporally, and
generationally? Where can Cambodians find hope, or rather, expressions
of hope, and by extension, healing? How are Cambodian youths
negotiating history, identity and community? How have the genocide
and the experience of surviving post-genocide been reflected in the
arts of Cambodia? How are the arts used for peacemaking? What are
leaders, activists, and everyday Cambodian subjects doing to pave a
path for peace and justice? How are peace and justice somatically
experienced and expressed? Is the Tribunal a move towards justice, and
by extension peace, or does it deepen old wounds and open up painful
scars? What can we learn about justice, peace, and healing? Can there
be peace without justice, or justice without peace? We seek essays
written by scholars, activists, refugee workers, religious leaders,
artists (e.g. musicians, poets), community members, social workers,
journalists, and survivors that relate to the Cambodian genocide,
justice, and peacemaking within and among Cambodian communities
worldwide.
Essays are welcome on any aspect of this issue's theme, broadly
conceived. Submissions that address global/diasporic issues and
perspectives are especially encouraged.
Interested writers should submit essays (2,500-3,500 words) and 2-3 line
bios to Peace Review no later than July 15, 2011. Essays should be
jargon- and footnote-free.
See Submission Guidelines at:
http://usf.usfca.edu/peacereview/guidelines.htm
Peace Review is a quarterly, multidisciplinary transnational journal of
research and analysis focusing on the current issues and controversies that
underlie the promotion of a more peaceful world. We publish essays on
ideas and research in peace studies, broadly defined. Essays are
relatively short (2,500-3,500 words), contain no footnotes or
exhaustive bibliography, and are intended for a wide readership. The
journal is most interested in the cultural and political issues
surrounding conflicts occurring between nations and peoples.
