Dr. Liora Bennett

Conflict, Cambodia vs Thailand: Exposing the Desperate Struggle to Deny Khmer Culture is a forensic examination of one of Southeast Asia's most enduring and misunderstood cultural conflicts. Moving beyond military posturing and nationalist rhetoric, this book exposes the deeper struggle over historical inheritance, symbolic ownership, and narrative control. Through archaeology, architecture, court ritual, dance, iconography, and international law, it traces how Khmer civilization shaped the foundations of Thai state culture-only to see that inheritance gradually detached from its source through denial, ambiguity, and selective memory.
Anchored by the Preah Vihear case and the rulings of the International Court of Justice, the book demonstrates that this conflict is not about borders or access, but about recognition. Cambodia's position emerges not as provocation, but as preservation-an effort to protect cultural authorship in the face of systematic erasure. Meticulously researched, legally grounded, and deliberately restrained in tone, Conflict challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths: that shared heritage is not the same as shared origin, that denial prolongs instability, and that peace cannot be built on ambiguity.
This is not an attack on a people, but a demand for historical honesty-and a call for coexistence rooted in truth rather than silence.