Reflections on Administrative Evil, Belief, and Justification in Khmer Rouge Cambodia

• Main Author: Christopher L. Atkinson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2013-06-01
• Series: SAGE Open
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013491951

Administrative evil is sinister—It lurks in the shadows and under the surface of organizational action. The Khmer Rouge genocide stands as one of the most terrible instances of human injustice in modern memory. The methods of Pol Pot and his contemporaries, and the outcomes of their approaches to make their control of the population absolute, are examined as a study in systematic imposition of evil on a society. The article is an assessment of the Khmer Rouge regime through the lens of administrative evil, drawing from literature on hatred, paranoia, and belief as organizing and motivating forces, the legitimation of bureaucratic malevolence, and the teleology of historical agency. The article proposes that bureaucracy, by virtue of its lack of discretion against political forces, is not merely a potential tool of good or evil, but a force of administrative evil in and of itself that we may be unable to control.