Announcing our upcoming 7th lecture in the Political Science Speaker Series: Dr. Erin Lin:
[Erin Lin]
Dr. Lin will be lecturing on Scarred Land: Cambodian Life After American Bombing, see poster attached.
May 18th 12-1:30pm
EMU Crater Lake South (Rm. 145)
Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs over Cambodia, the equivalent of one planeload of bombs falling every 45 minutes around the clock for nearly a decade. What started as a secret infiltration of Laos, in which a few CIA officers would train and arm local Hmong villagers to fight the Communist forces, eventually enveloped Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, fought primarily with bombs. Fifty years after the last sortie went out, I show how, through the legacy of unexploded ordnance, the war can sediment itself into layers of contemporary society.
As a consequence, many forward-looking policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, from economic liberalization to authoritarian consolidation, are taking place in parallel to an environment still haunted by its violent past. Drawing on original interviews, a wealth of new historical data, and extensive fieldwork at the Cambodia-Vietnam border, Scarred Land reveals how the unintended failure of military technology creates a dark halo around post-conflict land: the very bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities can help deter predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land.
Erin Lin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Food Politics at the Ohio State University. Her research interests lie in the areas of post-conflict reconstruction, political geography, food security, and legacies of war, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. In particular, she specializes in the political, economic, environmental, and agricultural repercussions of unexploded ordnance leftover from war. She is a team member of the Initiative for Food and Agricultural Transformation (INFACT), a university-wide effort to encourage cross-disciplinary research. Her collaborative research projects include: the use of machine-learning models to identify bomb craters and the location of unexploded ordnance (with Rongjun Qin) and the study of soil contaminants in Hawaii, due to chemical leakage from unexploded ordnance (with Leah Bevis and Nick Basta). She received her BA in Environmental Studies from Yale University and PhD in Politics from Princeton University.