Pasit Wongngamdee

In mid-2025, both an armed military conflict and an economic conflict broke out between Cambodia and Thailand. The border conflict—which involved land and aerial fights and threats of a naval blockade—killed dozens of people, displaced roughly a million civilians, and reshaped the domestic politics and foreign policy stances of each country. The conflict’s economic dimension has been less discussed, but is no less important.

Editor’s note: this piece was first published by AcademiaSG, a scholarly site promoting scholarship of/by/for Singapore. Its contents draw on the author’s book The Albatross Files Unredacted: What the Official Story Leaves Out (Pagesetters, 2026). • • • • • • • The irony of The Albatross File Exhibition at Singapore’s National Library, and its accompanying book (The Albatross File: Inside Separation) is that, in trying so hard to honour Lee Kuan Yew, it ends up diminishing him.

In Thailand, the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps program (Ruk Sa Din Daen—หลักสูตรรักษาดินแดน [ร.ด.]) is something ordinary people are intimately familiar with. Roughly 15% of Thai high school students participate in the program. It recruits 100,000 new members annually, and its multi-year requirement gives the military access to around 300,000 ROTC students at their disposal in any given year.