Power in numbers: mob killing in Cambodia
A year ago, a mentally ill man was beaten to death by villagers who had mistaken him for a thief. Despite only four of those involved being sentenced, it was a harsher punishment than expected – in almost all instances of mob killings, no questions are even asked.
There is nothing uniquely Cambodian about mob violence. While there is a temptation to draw links between its local prevalence and psychological trauma inflicted by the brutality of the Khmer Rouge, social theorists view the phenomenon almost solely in relation to the state – it exists in countries where people don’t trust the authorities to mete out fair punishment, and where the authorities in turn do not enforce the state’s legitimate monopoly on violence.
