Counting Tigers. Estimating the Number of Khmer Rouge During Democratic Kampuchea

While victim numbers are frequently estimated for past events of genocide and authoritarian rule, there has so far been less discussion of perpetrator numbers. This is surprising considering the recent interest in perpetrators, their motivations and their trajectories. In the case of Cambodia, this is primarily due to a lack of archival documentation. While these are indeed not insignificant, this article seeks to contribute to the historical record on the Khmer Rouge by drawing together what we do know about the Khmer Rouge and its organizational structure and providing reasoned estimations where data does not exist. Altogether, we enumerate the number of men and women who were part of the regime as Khmer Rouge and suggest this number to be around half a million individuals: 526,297 (our estimates range from no lower than 386,000 and no higher than 646,000).