In the first week of August, two top Khmer Rouge leaders were convicted by the hybrid Cambodian and UN-backed tribunal—the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea are the highest-ranking officials to be convicted of any crimes related to the mass killings and starvation that occurred under Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979.
In early 2011 I organized a panel by the same title as this post in which we brought together ethnographers and historians to test the Zomia hypothesis against a body of ethnographic and historical material related to two Southeast Asian highland groups - Hmong and Mien. Two of the panelists (including fellow guest-blogger Leif Jonsson) were interviewed for this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that addressed the traction of Zomiography (if I may).
Two recent pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education (available here and here) document something that happened at the past American Anthropological Association meetings that I was not aware of during the meetings. I went to the general business meeting to hear about some of these developments, but what is interesting is that this particular development occurred during the Executive Board Meeting, rather than being presented before the general AAA body for debate and a vote.