Today on Scope Conditions: when the bombs don’t go off, the war isn't over.
We tend to think of peace as beginning when the bombs stop falling. But as our guest today shows us, this is only half the story. Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in massive bombing in Cambodia. Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 500,000 tons of explosives there — more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.
Dr. Erin Lin, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University, set out to understand the continued impacts of this cataclysmic bombing campaign on Cambodian society. A landmark 2011 study had given us a partial answer: it had concluded that US bombing had no measurable long-term effects on economic outcomes in Southeast Asia. For years, that finding set the terms of the debate.
In her award-winning book, When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia, published by Princeton University Press, Erin pushes back. She argues that those analyses were looking at the wrong level — that district-level aggregates conceal devastating effects on individual households and farms. More than that, they were looking at only half the intervention. It's the bombs that didn't detonate — an estimated 26 million cluster munitions still embedded in the soil — that are shaping life today in rural Cambodia.
Erin spent years farming alongside families, combing through declassified military records, and building some of the most granular data ever assembled on the American bombing campaign. Her creative multi-method research design allows her to trace the dramatic long-term consequences of unexploded ordinance for the economic livelihood of Cambodian farmers.
We talk with Erin about the many ironies laced through her findings: that cluster munitions are most likely to fail in soft, fertile soil, meaning Cambodia's most agriculturally valuable land is also its most contaminated; that bomb contamination can paradoxically shield farmers from predatory land seizures by political elites; and that unexploded ordnance, rather than forging solidarity among those living with it, tends to deepen ethnic divisions within villages.
We hope you learn from this conversation. To stay informed about future episodes, follow us on X and Bluesky @scopeconditions and check out our website, scopeconditionspodcast.com, where you can also find references to all the academic works we discuss. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
We note that we recorded this interview before the recent US-Israeli war with Iran. Now, here's our conversation with Erin Lin.
Works cited in this episode
Biddle, Steven. 2004. Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton University Press.
Brooks, Rosa. 2014. “Cross-Border Targeted Killings: ‘Lawful but Awful’?” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 38:233–50.
________. 2014. “Drones and the International Rule of Law.” Ethics & International Affairs 28(1):83–103.
________. 2016. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon. Simon and Schuster.
Horowitz, Michael C. 2010. The Diffusion of Military Power. Princeton University Press.
Lyall, Jason, and Isaiah Wilson. 2009. “Rage against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars.” International Organization 63(1):67–106.
Reiter, Dan, and Allan C. Stam. 2010. Democracies at War. Princeton University Press.
Pape, Robert A. 2014. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Cornell University Press.
Schelling, Thomas. 2008. Arms and Influence. Yale University Press.
Sheehan, Neil. 1971. “Should We Have War Crime Trials?” New York Times Book Review.
