Ken MacLean
Professor, Sustainability and Social Justice
Professor, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
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My research is interdisciplinary in nature reflecting my continued interest in the politics of knowledge production. With a geographic focus mainland Southeast Asia, I concentrate on a number of inter-related topics—from state-sponsored violence and forced migration to the politics of humanitarianism and international criminal law. I have published widely on these issues with the goal of reaching diverse audiences, including non-academic ones.
My research agenda has three tracks.
First, I am working on a new book project tentatively titled, Tortured Histories: Conspiratorial Fantasies and the Khmer Rouge Genocide. The archival project will assess the historical value of confessions that are, to a significant degree, false in terms of factual referentiality as they were obtained with torture. The findings will shed light on the preoccupations of the Khmer Rouge leadership, the cultural scripts shaping the form and content of the prisoners’ confessions during different political purges, and the possibilities and limits of governing via paranoia.
Second, I am also examining the uses and abuses of “open-source intelligence” in the field of human rights documentation and advocacy, with special attention to the possibilities and challenges AI poses both in the public sphere and the evidentiary context of international criminal proceedings.
Third, I am exploring how scholars, activists, and security officials model the future with regard to the ways accelerating climate change will spark large-scale violent conflicts and significant forced displacement over essential resources. How such futures, including its ecocides, are modeled will play a decisive role in what places and populations are protected and which ones are sacrificed.
These projects, which reflect my continued interest in the soclal lives of documents (be their marterial or digital) and their material effects, have their roots in prior book projects. For example, my most recent book, Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production, and Myanmar (University of California Press, 2022), explores the many ways in which human rights “facts” are produced rather than found. With Myanmar as my case study, I examine the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global NGO-led campaign. By foregrounding fact-finding, in critical yet constructive ways, I aim to prompt long overdue conversations about the possibilities and limits of human rights documentation as a mode of truth-seeking. Such conversations are particularly urgent in an era when the perpetrators of large-scale human rights violations exploit misinformation, weaponize disinformation, and employ outright falsehoods, including deep fakes, to undermine the credibility of those who document abuses and demand that they be held accountable for them in the court of public opinion and in courts of law. To respond to such attacks, I argue, practitioners and scholars alike should be more transparent about how human rights “fact” production works, why it is important, and when its use should prompt concern.
The book was short-listed by ICAS (International Convention of Asian Scholars) for its 2023 Best Book Prize in the Social Sciences.
In my first book, The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), I detailed how bureaucratic documents can play a major history-shaping force. By focusing on the creation and misuse of government documents in Vietnam since the 1920s, the book reveals how profoundly the dynamics of bureaucracy have affected Vietnamese efforts to build a socialist society since then. Flurries of paperwork and directives that moved back and forth between high- and low-level officials, revealed a surprising paradox: in trying to gather accurate information about the realities of life in rural areas, and thus better govern from Hanoi, the Vietnamese central government employed strategies that actually made the state increasingly illegible to itself. The result was a falsified world existing largely on paper. As high-level officials attempted to execute centralized planning via decrees, procedures, questionnaires, and audits, low-level officials and peasants used their own strategies to solve local problems, though not always in concert with one another. Amidst the proliferating webs of mistrust and ambiguity, many low-level officials were able to engage in strategic action and tactical maneuvering shaped socialism in Vietnam in surprising ways.
I have also had the pleasure of holding short-term positions as a visiting research fellow at several institutions, including: The Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in the Netherlands (S2023); The Mahidol University Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies in Thailand (F2021); and the University of Kyoto’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Japan (F2016).
Funding for my research projects has come from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Fulbright IIE Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, among other sources.
Degrees
- Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005
- M.S. in Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2004
- M.A. in Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998
- B.A. in Anthropology, Princeton University, 1990
Affiliated Department(s)
- Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
- Sustainability and Social Justice
- Holocaust and Genocide Studies, International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE), Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies (CGRAS)
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Scholarly and Creative Works
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"Digital human rights storytelling and its palimpsests: (De)-constructed Images of Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar" [In press 2024]
Published in Journal of Human Rights
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2024
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The G-Word: A Podcast on Genocide
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2023
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Interactive Digital Platforms, Human Rights Fact Production, and the International Criminal Court
Published in Journal of Human Rights Practice
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2023
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Vol. 15
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Issue #1
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Published by University of Toronto Press
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2023
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Human Rights ‘Fact’ Production and Why It Matters: Myanmar as a Case in Point
November
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2022
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Genocide by Attrition: The Role of Identity Documents in the Holocaust and the Genocides of Rwanda and Myanmar
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2022
Fortify Rights
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“Nowhere is Safe”: The Myanmar Military’s Crimes Against Humanity in the Wake of the Coup d’état
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2022
Fortify Rights
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Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights Production and Myanmar
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2022
University of California Press
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Published by Routledge
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2021
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Historicizing the Archive: Revisiting the Mechanics of Mass Murder in Indonesia (1965-1966)
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2020
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Vol. 176
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Commentary: International Humanitarian Law and Corporate Accountability in a Conflict Zone
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2018
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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
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2018
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Famine Crimes: Military Operations, Forced Migration, and Chronic Hunger in Eastern Burma/Myanmar (2006-2008)
IDCE Occasional Paper Series
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2018
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The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure
Published in Journal of Genocide Research
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2018
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Vol. 21
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Issue #3
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Humanitarian Mine Action in Myanmar and the Mismanagement of Risk
Published in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology
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2017
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Vol. 74
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Danger Underfoot: Humanitarian Mine Action in Myanmar
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2017
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Vol. 7
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Published in TRaNS: Trans-Regional and-National Studies of Southeast Asia
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2016
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Vol. 1
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Issue #2
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History Reformatted: Vietnam's Great Famine (1944-1945) in Archival Form
Published in Southeast Asian Studies
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2016
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Vol. 5
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Issue #2
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Counter-Accounting with Invisible Data: The Struggle for Transparency in Myanmar's Energy Sector
Published in Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR)
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2014
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Vol. 37
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Issue #1
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Risk Management and the Business of Financial (Non-)Disclosure in Myanmar
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2014
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Published by Brill
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2014
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Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity: Vietnam
Chapter: The Enterprising CadrePublished by University of Hawai'i Press
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2013
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'A Biography Not' General Tran Do: His Dissident Writings, Elite Politics, and Death in Retrospect
Published in The Journal of Vietnamese Studes
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2013
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Vol. 8
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Issue #1
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The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam
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2013
University of Wisconsin Press
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Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labor
Published in Asian Studies Review
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2012
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Vol. 36
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Issue #June
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Enacting Anti-Corruption: The Reconfiguration of Audit Regimes in Contemporary Vietnam
Published in Positions: Asia critique
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2012
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Vol. 36
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Issue #June
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Published by Routledge
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2012
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Published by Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
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2010
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Published in The Journal of Vietnamese Studies
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2010
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Vol. 5
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Issue #2
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Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in a Neoliberal Age
Chapter: Sovereignty after the Entrepreneurial Turn: Mosaics of Control, Commodified Spaces, and Regulated Violence in Contemporary BurmaPublished by Cornell University Press
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2008
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Published in History and Anthropology
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2008
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Vol. 19
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Issue #3
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Published in Comparative Studies in Society and History
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2008
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Vol. 50
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Issue #4
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Published by Australia National University
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2007
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Manifes Socialism: The Labor of Representation in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1956-1959)
Published in The Journal of Vietnamese Studies
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2007
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Vol. 2
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Issue #1
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Reconfiguring the Debte on Engagement: Burma and the Changing Politics of Aid
Published in Critical Asian Studies
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2004
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Vol. 36
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Issue #3
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Capitalizing on Conflict: Logging and Mining in Burma's Ceasefire Zones
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2003
EarthRights International and Karen Environmental and Social Action Network
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More of the Same: Forced Labor Continues in Burma (October 2000-September 2001)
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2001
EarthRights International
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Awards & Grants
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Best Book in the Social Sciences - Short List
International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS)
2023
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