Some States wage war with armies. Others wage it with narratives. Thailand has done both. In its confrontation with Cambodia, narratives have been pressed into service as its pretext for military action. What has emerged is a bespoke theatre of justifications so swift, so internally contradictory and so conspicuously detached from law that each appears designed not to explain conduct, but to outrun responsibility. Landmines yesterday, online scams today, military incapacitation tomorrow, territorial nostalgia always. The script changes; the facts do not. What binds these narratives together is not evidence or legality, but speed. What emerges is not a legal case, but a performance.
The allegation of Cambodia’s newly emplaced landmines best illustrates this inversion. Cambodia is internationally recognised as among the most compliant States under the Ottawa Convention, having transformed profound suffering into humanitarian leadership and sustained a verifiable record of cooperation and faithful adherence to its treaty obligations.
Thailand, by contrast, bears a documented legacy of extensive mine deployment along the border, including the K5 belt, whose civil victims persist decades later. Yet compliance is recast as suspicion and transparency as guilt. One is left to wonder whether these landmines, having served their narrative purpose, simply take a break once Thai military operations begin. A treaty designed to eliminate weapons that maim civilians is repurposed as a rhetorical service against those who honour it. This is not humanitarian law applied, but humanitarian law performed. Treaties, however, are not props. They are obligations — and they demand good faith.
When that narrative faltered, it was replaced without pause. Enter online scams. Transnational fraud, normally addressed through policing cooperation and mutual legal assistance, was elevated into a justification for cross-border military force. International law recognises no doctrine of fraud-induced self-defence. The UN Charter does not permit artillery where subpoenas and cooperation are required. When justifications are interchangeable, principles have already exited the stage.
More revealing still are the public declarations by senior Thai commanders announcing a policy of long-term military incapacitation of Cambodia. This is not the language of defence but of coercive intent. International law listens carefully when States speak plainly: a strategy to disable a neighbour’s military “for a long time” lies far outside lawful self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which permits repelling attack, not redesigning a neighbour’s future.
Threaded through these shifting justifications is a familiar refrain: lost territory, wounded history, national honour. Nostalgia, it seems, has been promoted to strategy. But borders are not heirlooms, and history is not a title deed. They are legal facts, fixed by treaties and affirmed by the ICJ in 1962 and 2013. When history is summoned to overrule law, it usually signals not unresolved legality, but dissatisfaction with it.
This theatre also follows a recognisable domestic rhythm. Periods of internal political turbulence in Thailand — constitutional crisis, contested authority, elite fragmentation — have repeatedly coincided with heightened border tension. In July 2008, escalation around Preah Vihear unfolded amid profound instability at home; national uncertainty was externalised, and the border became a stage on which unity was performed when domestic legitimacy faltered.
The present episode follows the same choreography: border tension as distraction, narrative as substitute. This is not security planning; it is political displacement.
International law is indifferent to such manoeuvres. Internal political difficulty does not generate entitlement abroad, nor does it dilute responsibility for unlawful conduct. State responsibility arises from acts, not from narrative management. These justifications create no rights and excuse no breaches. What they do create is mistrust. When explanations shift faster than facts, the international community does not infer complexity but evasion.
That erosion deepens when narratives scripted in Bangkok are enacted along the border — and increasingly inside Cambodian territory. Explanations conceived for domestic audiences are performed through military operations affecting communities that played no role in Thailand’s internal debates. International law draws a firm boundary here: domestic politics end at the border. When theatre crosses sovereignty, it ceases to be metaphor and becomes violation.
Behind the performance lies conduct. Thai operations have resulted in the detention of captured Cambodian soldiers, forced eviction of civilians, encirclement of villages, destruction of civilian property and civilian deaths and injuries — engaging international humanitarian and human rights law. The consequences are severe and worsening: over 470,000 civilians displaced, more than 254,000 students deprived of education as schools close, and military strikes on protected cultural sites, including the Temple of Preah Vihear and Ta Krabei, in violation of the 1954 Hague Convention. These are not temporary disruptions, but the foreseeable effects of a declared war policy.
Beyond competing narratives lies a settled legal reality. As George Scelle warned, the violation of law does not create law; it creates responsibility. Under the law of State responsibility, conduct attributable to State organs that breaches international obligations engages responsibility automatically. No degree of rhetorical agility alters that equation.
What ultimately exposes the poverty of Thailand’s theatre is the contrast it produces. Set against narrative agility and coercive design is Cambodia’s deliberate, consistent commitment to international law, good-faith diplomacy and the peaceful settlement of disputes.
Cambodia has not answered force with imitation or grievance-driven retaliation, but with restraint and resolve — anchoring its position in treaties freely accepted, judgments binding in law and institutions designed to prevent escalation, not theatrically manage it. This reflects confidence, not naïveté: confidence that legality remains the proper language of interstate relations.
Peace, in this understanding, is not merely the absence of war or the pause between narratives. It is the presence of law, applied in good faith. Theatre relies on speed. Law relies on endurance. Narratives may outrun scrutiny for a time. Responsibility does not. History will not ask which justification arrived first. It will ask which State remained anchored to law when pressure rose — and which mistook storytelling for legitimacy.
Dara In is permanent representative of the Kingdom of Cambodia to the UN Office and other International Organisations in Geneva. The views and opinions expressed are his own.
