Photo by CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS Kent State geography professors James Tyner and Mandy Munro-Stasiuk
Kent State University has received a $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to delve deeply into one of the worst massacres of modern times.
The university said in a news release that the project will use historical satellite imagery and archival research to study landscapes of mass violence in Cambodia during and after the regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. More than 2 million people were killed during that time.
The project is led by Kent State geography professors James Tyner and Mandy Munro-Stasiuk. Their work will focus on “the interconnections of environmental degradation, deforestation and mass violence during and after armed conflict,” according to the release.
“This research has important implications for all post-conflict societies in that resource scarcities, including that of water, are assumed to lead to more conflict in the future,” Tyner said in a statement. “We need to understand how and why violence sometimes comes about through peace building.”
Tyner and Munro-Stasiuk this summer will conduct field research in Cambodia with two Kent State geography graduate students. They want to better understand “how and why programs and policies designed to augment both water and food security in the aftermath of civil war may actually facilitate further conflict and violence,” according to the release.
Munro-Stasiuk is using Landsat and KH-9 spy satellite imagery dating back to 1972, as well as more recent geospatial technologies, to identify the locations of Khmer Rouge construction projects and determine “how they were built, why they were built and what happened there,” the university said.
The researchers also hope to gain insight on the locations of mass graves.
“Through the satellite imagery, we are seeing the genocide and famine in progress,” Munro-Stasiuk said in a statement.
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