Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea fundamentally transformed the social, economic, political, and natural landscape of Cambodia. During this time, as many as two million Cambodians died from exposure, disease, and starvation, or were executed at the hands of the Party. The dominant interpretation of Cambodian history during this period presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian...

This book examines the essential role of women in cartography during WWII. Starting by highlighting the process of mapping during World War II and major employers of women cartographers, Tyner and Tyner illuminate how the discipline of cartography emerged and highlight the contributions of women involved in this process. The book uncovers the impact of WWII on mapmaking.Before the war, cartography was seen as a tool rather than a discipline in its own right. The advent of war drama...

In both literature and film, mutants, androids, and aliens have long functioned as humanity’s Other—nonhuman bodies serving as surrogates to explore humanity’s prejudice, bigotry, and hatred. Scholars working in fields of feminism, ethnic studies, queer studies, and disability studies, among others, have deconstructed representations of the Othered body and the ways these fictional depictions provide insight into the contested terrains of identity, subjectivity, and personhood. In science ...

Reassessing the Cambodian genocide through the lens of global capitalist development.James Tyner reinterprets the place of agriculture under the Khmer Rouge, positioning it in new ways relative to Marxism, capitalism, and genocide. The Cambodian revolutionaries’ agricultural management is widely viewed by critics as irrational and dangerous, and it is invoked as part of wider efforts to discredit leftist movements. Researching the specific functioning of C...

What America’s intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold War–era U.S. national security strategyThe Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. milit...

A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacyFrom the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic tre...

Geography encompasses everything from the local—where human beings live, work, and travel—to metageographies like nations and regions. James A. Tyner's inventive and multidisciplinary ideas on geography similarly range from the personal—his father's experience in the military during the Vietnam War—to a broad discussion of how the United States has come to exercise power through the production of geographic knowledge, in this case in Southeast Asia. Since the end of the Second World War, S...

The Philippines is the world's largest exporter of temporary contract labor with a huge 800,000 workers a year being deployed on either six month or two year contracts. This labor migration is highly regulated by the government, private, and non-governmental/non-private organizations. Tyner argues that migrants are socially constructed, or 'made' by these parties and that migrants in turn become political resources. Employing a post-structural feminist perspective Tyner questions the very ...

Grounded in theory and research, this book offers a spatial perspective on how and why populations are regulated and disciplined by mass violence—and why these questions matter for scholars concerned about social justice. James Tyner focuses on how states and other actors use acts of brutality to manage, administer, and control space for political and economic purposes. He shows how demographic analyses of fertility, mortality, and migration cannot be complete without taking war and genoci...

Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge carried out genocide in Cambodia unparalleled in modern history. Approximately 2 million died - almost one quarter of the population. Taking an explicitly geographical approach, this book argues whether the Khmer Rouge's activities not only led to genocide, but also terracide - the erasure of space. In the Cambodia of 1975, the landscape would reveal vestiges of an indigenous pre-colonial Khmer society, a French colonialism and American intervention. ...

Since the cessation of major combat operations in Iraq, approximately 120 people - either contract workers or private soldiers - have been abducted, with one-third being executed. The largest contingent of these workers has been provided by the Philippines. Through a specific, though not exclusive, focus on the Philippines connection, this book considers the myriad ways in which transnational labour migration intersects with the occupation of Iraq. Also examining the role of the USA in the...

The Nature of Revolution provides the first account of art and politics under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. James A. Tyner repositions Khmer Rouge artworks within their proper political and economic context: the materialization of a political organization in an era of anticolonial and decolonization movements. Consequently, both the organization’s policies and practices—including the production of poetry, music, and photography—were incontrovertibly shaped by and crea...