When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia

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Erin Lin, Associate Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University

Wednesday, November 20, 2024
12:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Webinar

ABOUT THE BOOK

In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia, the lasting presence of undetonated bombs from the Vietnam War and their ongoing impact on Cambodian farmers and their land is meticulously documented. However, Lin's recent work takes this issue beyond historical recounting.

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs. Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped, Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.

Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land. Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past. As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erin Lin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University who uses a multidisciplinary approach to explore critical issues in comparative politics and international security. Her research focuses on topics such as the legacies of war, economic development, agriculture, and genocide. A key area of her work examines the relationship between soil conditions and unexploded ordnance, specifically in Cambodia, where undetonated bombs from the Vietnam War still affect rural communities. Lin integrates ethnographic and econometric methods, combining immersive fieldwork with large-N archival datasets to provide comprehensive insights. Her research has been published in top political science journals and she received her PhD from Princeton University.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Margaret Peters is Associate Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Chair of the Global Studies major at UCLA. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research on the political economy of migration. She is currently working on a book project on how the process of forced displacement affects migrants’ sense of dignity and how these dignity concerns affect decisions of whether to move from the crisis zone, where to move, and when to return. She is additionally writing a book on how dictators use migration, including forced migration, to remain in power. Her award-winning book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, argues that the increased ability of firms to produce anywhere in the world combined with growing international competition due to lowered trade barriers has led to greater limits on immigration, as businesses no longer see a need to support open immigration at home.