Torque: Searching for Localization at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Abstract In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in “localization” in fields such as transitional justice, human rights, peacebuilding, and development. This essay considers this “local turn,” as some call it, from the vantage point of anthropology and in relationship to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or Khmer Rouge Tribunal. We argue that “localization,” which suggests a condition or state of being, is better viewed through the metaphor of torque, or a locus of movement created (like the pushing of pedals to move a bike) by those who aspire to localize. Doing so enables us to take a phenomenological perspective that is attuned to lived experience and thereby avoids the pitfalls of approaches that can be reductionist, thinly attuned to on-the-ground meaning-making, and mask power relations. Drawing on their years of ethnographic research in Cambodia and on the ECCC, the authors make this argument through a close examination of the courtroom testimony of an ECCC civil party and a “testimonial therapy” program developed by a local Cambodian NGO, the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization. If the notion of “localization” points to the need to engage with contextual variation and on-the-ground understandings, we contend, it can also distract from the dynamic lived experience that emerges in such interstices between the local and the global. Justice, in other words, resides in the circuits, social ecologies, networks, and assemblages that give rise to everyday life and practices.