To the victors go the spoils: distributed agencies, inhumanities and the case of Comrade Duch of the Khmer Rouge

Can men claim innocence of involvement in massive crimes due to their relative powerlessness to make events transpire otherwise? Should accountability be assigned to the very top level only? Do followers have not only material but also moral responsibilities as facilitators or supporters of bad or evil leadership (Kellerman, 2004)? No: we will argue that even lower-level participants are implicated in power relations and thus can be held responsible (Lukes, 1974). It is not that ‘lower level participants in organizations have power’, as Pfeffer (1992, p. 130) remarked. Clearly not, if we take the meaning of ‘have’ literally: power is not something that one can have, like a cough or a cold, so much as a relational condition. One is always in relations of power for they are inescapable. Power is a constitutive feature of social relations.