The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) can influence how historical narratives are disseminated and perceived. This study explores the implications of LLMs’ responses on the representation of mass atrocity memory, examining whether generative AI systems contribute to prosthetic memory, i.e., mediated experiences of historical events, or to what we term “prosthetic denial,” the AI-mediated erasure or distortion of atrocity memories. We argue that LLMs function as interfaces that can elicit prosthetic memories and, therefore, act as experiential sites for memory transmission, but also introduce risks of denialism, particularly when their outputs align with contested or revisionist narratives. To empirically assess these risks, we conducted a comparative audit of five LLMs—Claude, GPT, Llama, Mixtral, and Gemini—across four historical case studies: the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, and the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Each model was prompted with questions addressing common denialist claims in English and an alternative language relevant to each case (Ukrainian, German, Khmer, and French). Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally produce accurate responses for widely documented events like the Holocaust, significant inconsistencies and susceptibility to denialist framings are observed for more underrepresented cases like the Cambodian Genocide. The disparities highlight the influence of training data availability and the probabilistic nature of LLM responses on memory integrity. We conclude that while LLMs extend the concept of prosthetic memory, their unmoderated use risks reinforcing historical denialism, raising ethical concerns for (digital) memory preservation, and potentially challenging the advantageous role of technology associated with the original values of prosthetic memory.

This chapter deals with the theory of torture outlined in the notebooks and confessions of Khmer Rouge interrogators who worked at the central prison and execution center S-21 from 1975 until 1979. While the notebooks from study sessions for interrogators present the party leadership's views on how to "properly" conduct torture, as well as the aims and techniques of torture, confessions add to this knowledge by showing what the leadership imagined as behavior that violated their theory of good and "revolutionary" conduct by interrogators. Good torture, according to the teachings noted by the cadres, resulted not from the application of certain "techniques" to change the consciousness of the interrogated, but instead, from the proper revolutionary spirit of the interrogator. As long as cadres were pure in revolutionary spirit, they would torture well—and use proper techniques. Doing torture, first and foremost, meant "doing politics". Those unable to deliver good results, therefore, also necessarily had a bad revolutionary spirit, which could indicate that they needed further revolutionary "refashioning" or, even worse, that they were hidden enemies trying to destroy the revolution. The Khmer Rouge's theory of torture created a gray area that forced cadres into constantly enforced conformity, ultimately turning dozens of interrogators into victims themselves.

The memorialization of mass atrocities such as war crimes and genocides facilitates the remembrance of past suffering, honors those who resisted the perpetrators, and helps prevent the distortion of historical facts. Digital technologies have transformed memorialization practices by enabling less top-down and more creative approaches to remember mass atrocities. At the same time, they may also facilitate the spread of denialism and distortion, attempt to justify past crimes and attack the dignity of victims. The emergence of generative forms of artificial intelligence (AI), which produce textual and visual content, has the potential to revolutionize the field of memorialization even further. AI can identify patterns in training data to create new narratives for representing and interpreting mass atrocities—and do so in a fraction of the time it takes for humans. The use of generative AI in this context raises numerous questions: For example, can the paucity of training data on mass atrocities distort how AI interprets some atrocity-related inquiries? How important is the ability to differentiate between human- and AI-made content concerning mass atrocities? Can AI-made content be used to promote false information concerning atrocities? This article addresses these and other questions by examining the opportunities and risks associated with using generative AIs for memorializing mass atrocities. It also discusses recommendations for AIs integration in memorialization practices to steer the use of these technologies toward a more ethical and sustainable direction.

>> Ein globaler und diachroner Ansatz zur Analyse sozialer Felder <<. This article aims to strengthen and further theorize a global and diachronic reading of social fields. It maintains that, in order to understand social posi-tions in a field - the Cambodian field of power in this case - one needs first to trace the diachronic ruptures between sociocultures. Secondly, it maintains that social fields need to be understood as global configurations. To support this, it argues that the theory of fields developed by Pierre Bourdieu needs to be provincialized, widened to the global on several levels, and freed from a narrow reading of fields as spaces of competitive struggle and investment. This neoliberal reading of Bourdieu's theory risks reducing multiple forms of knowledge and power to an ahistorical miniature struggle happening along the dimensions of symbolic power and symbolic violence. While Bourdieu provides a more complex theory of social inequality, his analysis regularly slips - usually not while studying but when theorizing fields - into a neoliberal explanation of the historical emergence of inequalities: Agents in fields oc-cupy certain positions in society because they have previously been more successful than others in accumulating symbolic power. By contrast, this ar-ticle makes an argument for reading social fields as diachronic pluriverses of power, knowledge, and potentially even ontologies, thereby strengthening a particular line of interpretation of Bourdieu's concepts. It proposes a stronger emphasis on asynchronous and biographical methods to study inequalities and their time-and space-specific configurations. This article supports its ar-guments by analyzing the biographies of two members of the Cambodian field of power: a princess and an oligarch.

The article focuses on a comparative analysis of conflict and elite formation in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia; it argues that societal conflicts in Southeast Asia are grounded in the historical formation of elite social structures within differing sociocultures and that major and long-lasting societal conflicts-both violent and nonviolent-occur in social spaces between 'power elite' groups. Additionally, it shows how up-and-coming elite groups are recruited from the fringes of the old hierarchy, which is why they are-in many respects-social hybrids of old and new sociocultures. Moreover, after those new arrivals were elevated into the 'power elite', the window for upward mobility rapidly re-closed.

The chapter shows how many of the violent practices carried out by staff at the Khmer Rouge central prison S-21 can be understood as a way of utilizing the bodies of inmates for the revolution. The way the body is utilized is structured by different "ontologies of the body," that is, by cultural ideas about the nature of the body, how it is structured, how it functions, and what forces live in it. The medical staff at S-21, among others, utilized the bodies of inmates as blood banks for the revolution, for medical and human experiments, and for the extraction of organs. Despite the fragmented nature of the available information, it is clear that these practices are all aimed at constructing a self-reliant medical system based upon traditional as well as Western medicine. Prisons served not only as facilities for the extraction of fabricated confessions but also for medical testing and the extraction of bodily resources. At S-21, a peculiar – and for the rule of the Khmer Rouge typical – interplay between systemic and ad hoc characteristics of S-21 medical practices becomes evident when demands by the party center to make systematic use of resources (to extract blood or gallbladder liquids and test remedies) are met with improvisations by their cadres to meet the demands.

A critique of current knowledge production on perpetrators which addresses the lack of awareness and discussion of the existence of a fieldwork industry and its impact on data collection in numerous qualitative studies.

The article analyzes the structure, scripts, and procedural logics behind the violent practices in S-21, the central prison of the Khmer Rouge, as a liminal power regime. The institution’s violent practices and operations served to reveal a “Vietnameseness” and/or otherness within the victims and to prove not only their guilt regarding a singular crime but also a long history of treason and collaboration with the Vietnamese, as well as a moral shortcoming that put them outside their own imagined Khmer moral universe and made them part of a larger scheme. The initial and—for the ideology of the revolution—problematic sameness of the victims needed to be reshaped into a profound otherness in terms of thinking, lifestyle, and biography. The process of interning, torturing, and turning subjects into enemies in S-21 (and beyond) resembled a transformative ritual, a violent and enforced rite of passage into a new symbolic status.

This chapter analyzes the current Cambodian political elite as a fragmented social field with competing groups fighting for hegemonic control over the state apparatus. It traces the creation of these competing elite groups, through a historical account of significant transformations within the social fabric of the political field. It argues that transformations such as colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, civil war and genocide, foreign occupation, and capitalism led to the emergence of new elite groups with differing social ontologies; that is, what society is, how it is structured, and the characteristics of that particular group and its correspondence with hierarchical structures, or sociocultures. There are elite groups with roots in the sociocultures of colonialism, of communism, of war culture, and – most recently – of capitalist class transformation. Although this is similar in many ways to elite competition in other countries with similar histories, the history of elite transformation in Cambodia is unique due to the ruptures caused by Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) as well as the Vietnamese occupation (1979–1989). Finally, the chapter provides examples from interviews with members of four elite groups in order to visualize their pathway into the elite and aspects of their conflicting social ontologies.