Created by Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier, IIAS/Leiden and CKS/Phnom Penh

Entangled Refugee Mobilities retraces the trajectories of various refugee groups in Cambodia during the 1970-1975 civil war between the Khmer Republic and the communist insurgency (‘Khmer Rouge’). The causes, routes, and logistics associated with these movements often overlapped with the displacements and military operations of the Cambodian republican army, South Vietnamese and American soldiers, and communist guerrillas (North Vietnamese, ‘Vietcong’, and Khmer Rouge). These dynamics illustrate what Asian American Studies scholar Yen Le Espiritu has described as ‘militarized refuge(e)’ in her book Body Counts (University of California Press, 2014).

The large-scale population movements between 1970 and 1975 marked the beginning of 25 years of forced migration for Cambodians within and beyond national borders, ending only with the United Nations-supervised repatriation efforts in the early 1990s. Yet, despite their significance, they have received limited scholarly attention. Throughout the conflict, journalists, humanitarian agencies, governmental officials, and military units documented the situation of the refugees. However, the picture (numbers, locations, actors, processes, timelines, and conditions) remains impressionistic, and there has yet to be a critical discussion of these sources or their portrayal of refugees, government actions, and civil society responses.

ERM tries to take a step in this direction by tracing these intertwined trajectories with detailed historical data; locating the points of departure, transit, and arrival; and ‘re-materializing’ these movements through images, testimonies, press articles, and reports. As a work-in-progress, it aims to serve as a collaborative tool for reconstructing this overlooked history from multiple perspectives. In the absence of oral history projects, it seeks to recover voices that were hardly recorded and not often heard (at least not without an institutional or journalistic mediation). It also aims to highlight the material and affective dimensions of refugeehood, including the way environment, landscapes, infrastructures, and ‘things’ shaped these mobilities.