Kurniawan Arif Maspul
As the thunder of artillery and the roar of F-16 engines echoed across the Dangrek Mountains in late July 2025, Southeast Asia’s century-old experiment in regional peace hung by a thread. Thailand and Cambodia—once the twin heirs of Angkor and Ayutthaya—turned their border into a battlefield, inflicting civilian casualties, displacing over 300,000 people, and damaging the sacred Preah Vihear complex in the worst clashes since 2011.
On 28 July, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim—backed by ASEAN’s collective will—secured an immediate ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia, halting weeks of artillery exchanges and mass displacement. Yet this pause only highlights the unfinished business: without permanent monitoring, heritage protection protocols, and community reconciliation, the same fault lines will reignite. The ceasefire is a vital pause—but not a solution.
ASEAN’s familiar scripts of ‘quiet diplomacy’ and ‘non-interference’ have thus far yielded only statements of concern, while an urgent recalibration of policy is desperately needed to prevent a slide from intermittent skirmish to full-scale war. The roots of recent Thailand-Cambodia border tensions lie in colonial carve-ups and nationalist mythmaking. The 1904 and 1907 Franco-Siamese treaties left the Preah Vihear precinct ambiguously demarcated, a fault line Europe bequeathed to two emerging nation-states.
Cambodia’s 1962 ICJ victory finally cemented sovereignty over the temple, but successive Thai governments, stung by nationalist politics, have repeatedly reopened the wound—most recently by constructing an unauthorized replica of Angkor Wat in Buri Ram Province, provoking Phnom Penh’s ire under UNESCO rules. Cultural kinship—shared Theravāda Buddhist rituals, intertwined scripts, and common folklore—has thus been perverted into a totem of grievance rather than a bridge of reconciliation.
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