Mr Andrew Richard Johnston
BA Japanese and Economics (SOAS), MA Pacific Asian studies (SOAS) (majoring in 'Economic dynamics of Southeast Asia').
Overview
- Name:
- Mr Andrew Richard Johnston
- Email address:
- 204908@soas.ac.uk, kangrandy@hotmail.com
- Thesis title:
- The Political Genocide of Cambodia, a comparative study.
- Year of Study:
- 1
Internal Supervisors
Biography
Until undertaking my PhD, my main academic focus has been that of Economics, specifically focussing on the regions of South and Southeast Asian as my primary discipline. Having become increasingly interested in the political economy of these regions, my field of interest shifted firmly into the field of politics, and having always been fascinated by socialist regimes and mass murder associated with Communist states, my research, perhaps unsurprisingly, has found itself in the domain of political genocide.
PhD Research
The focus of my PhD is to ascertain the degree to which individual actors exacted violence in a central and peripheral detention centre during the Khmer Rouge regime. In comparing the two centres I wish to analyse the extent to which, within the same cognitive framework, the proximity to the central state was a factor of paramount importance in regards to the behaviour of the tools of violence, i.e. the perpetrators of mass murder. My thesis naturally places the Cambodian experience in a worldwide context with great emphasis placed on comparisons drawn with the Nazi concentration camp system, Soviet Gulags and Maoist labour camps.
