MEMORY IN THE PRESENT TENSE: History, Sovereignty, and the Return of the Past
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
– George Orwell, 1984
If Part III examined the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’s (ECCC) institutional legacy and its imperfect success in producing an authoritative judicial record of crimes committed in Democratic Kampuchea, and Part IV considered what follows once such institutions recede, Part V turns to what lies beyond the courtroom: how memory, once dispersed, continues to operate in the present.
Memory is often discussed as though it concerns only the past. Yet its influence extends well beyond recollection. In societies that have experienced profound upheaval, the past rarely disappears entirely. Instead, it becomes embedded in institutions, family histories, educational systems, public commemorations, collective habits of thought, and individual psyches. As a result, memory does more than preserve experience. It helps shape perception itself, influencing how information is received, how events are interpreted, how competing explanations are evaluated, and how communities understand periods of tension, uncertainty, and change.
Memories may be personal and lived. They may also be inherited through schools, museums, archives, family stories, films, memorials, and public narratives. Both matter and shape the lens through which contemporary events are viewed.
The ECCC was created, in part, on the assumption that establishing an authoritative historical record would contribute to a more informed future. Whether courts can fully achieve that ambition remains open to debate. What is less debatable is that judicial findings eventually leave the courtroom and enter the broader ecosystem of collective memory. There, they coexist with family recollections, political narratives, educational curricula, cultural interpretations, and lived experience, becoming one voice among many in an ongoing conversation between past and present.
This dynamic is hardly unique to Cambodia. In many post-conflict societies, current tensions often reawaken older layers of collective memory. The past rarely returns in its full complexity. More often, it reappears in simplified form–compressed into familiar narratives that explain uncertainty, assign meaning, and connect past experience to present events.
A version of this dynamic is evident in the current border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand. The underlying issues are neither new nor easily reduced to simple explanations. They involve historical boundary questions, competing interpretations of sovereignty, and political realities that extend well beyond any single incident. Their legal, diplomatic, and historical dimensions are considerable and largely lie beyond the scope of these reflections.
What interests me here is something different.
There is another dimension to the discussion that sets the present apart from many of the periods examined throughout this series. Previous generations often struggled because information was scarce, incomplete, or deliberately controlled. Today, the challenge is almost the opposite. Information is abundant. Images, videos, commentary, analysis, and opinion circulate continuously across social media platforms, messaging apps, podcasts, online news outlets, and increasingly through artificial intelligence systems capable of generating highly convincing content. Access to information has never been easier, yet determining its reliability has seemingly never been more difficult.
In today’s information environment, the challenge is no longer simply access but the ability to distinguish what is authentic, what is misleading, and what is entirely fabricated. Open-source material – once assumed to provide a democratizing corrective to official narratives – is now equally capable of distorting them. The same platforms that allow eyewitness footage of events also enable the circulation of manipulated images, selectively edited videos, algorithmically amplified narratives, and, increasingly, AI-generated content that is indistinguishable from genuine recordings. Deepfakes and synthetic media have further blurred the line between observation and construction, and between documentation and fabrication.
This creates a particular vulnerability during moments of political tension, when emotionally charged narratives often outpace verification. Information that appears immediate, visual, and “authentic” often gains persuasive force precisely because it bypasses deliberation. Yet plausibility is not proof, and circulation is not corroboration. In such conditions, memory and prior experience can quietly fill evidentiary gaps, shaping how ambiguous material is interpreted and, at times, confirming what one is already inclined to believe. The result is not only informational uncertainty but also interpretive convergence around pre-existing narratives, in which the appearance of certainty masks unresolved factual complexity.
Paradoxically, the unprecedented availability of information has not necessarily led to greater understanding. In some respects, it may have complicated understanding. The sheer volume of competing claims, images, interpretations, and commentary can make careful evaluation more difficult rather than easier. What once required access now requires discernment. What once demanded investigation increasingly requires verification.
In moments of heightened tension, this becomes especially significant. Information often travels faster than verification. Emotion often travels faster than nuance. Narratives can take hold long before all the relevant facts are known. Understanding current events therefore requires a degree of caution, humility, and intellectual patience that modern information ecosystems do not always foster.
Against this backdrop, I paid particular attention during my recent visit to Cambodia. I was not trying to determine who was right or wrong in the evolving tensions between Cambodia and Thailand, nor to resolve questions that diplomats, governments, military officials, and eventually academics and even lawyers may debate for years. My interest was more modest: to understand how ordinary people were discussing the situation, how they understood it, and what assumptions shaped their understanding.
Over several weeks, I spoke with government officials, civil servants, academics, business owners, laborers, students, expatriates, friends, and countless others. I also followed local reporting, public commentary, and discussions on social media. Strong views were hardly surprising during a period of tension. What stayed with me was the speed with which complexity seemed to disappear.
I had been in Cambodia a year earlier when tensions first emerged. At the time, it seemed – at least to me – that cooler heads would eventually prevail. Yet even then, rhetoric on both sides escalated with surprising speed. Historical grievances surfaced almost immediately, and questions that might otherwise have been treated as legal, diplomatic, or technical matters quickly became entangled with broader discussions of sovereignty, identity, history, and national memory. Border disputes are hardly uncommon – but the speed with which certainty replaced complexity was striking.
People who, in other contexts, would insist upon nuance, evidence, context, and careful analysis often appeared remarkably certain about facts that remained disputed and events that were still unfolding. I encountered this not only among ordinary citizens, but also among individuals many Cambodians would regard as informed and measured observers – activists, commentators, human rights advocates, academics, and self-described experts. It served as a reminder that the temptation of certainty is not confined to the uninformed. Indeed, it may be most persuasive when it presents itself in the language of expertise.
The details varied. The pattern felt familiar.
During the proceedings in Case 002, Nuon Chea frequently argued that one could not “focus on the body of the crocodile while refusing to consider its head and tail.” He was referring to what he regarded as the broader historical context of Democratic Kampuchea, including the effects of war, foreign intervention, and perceived external threats. Whether one accepts or rejects the argument is beside the point; the metaphor’s value lies elsewhere.
Complex events rarely emerge in isolation. They develop within broader political, historical, and social contexts that shape how individuals and societies perceive threats, opportunities, and risks. Recognizing context does not excuse conduct, justify crimes, or diminish responsibility. It simply acknowledges that actions occur within a framework of perceptions, fears, assumptions, and experiences that may not be immediately apparent in retrospect.
That lesson extends beyond the history of Democratic Kampuchea. In periods of contemporary tension, people often gravitate toward narratives that offer clarity and certainty. Competing explanations are reduced to simpler stories. Ambiguity becomes uncomfortable, and historical experience, inherited memory, and collective assumptions begin to fill gaps where facts are incomplete. The result is not necessarily deliberate distortion but a natural human tendency to interpret unfolding events through familiar frames of reference.
What struck me was not whether such narratives were correct or incorrect, but their persistence. Once established, historical narratives rarely disappear entirely; they often lie dormant until circumstances make them relevant again.
One manifestation of this dynamic became evident during my visit. As tensions escalated, public reactions extended beyond the immediate dispute. Calls to boycott Thai products spread widely, and businesses associated with Thailand came under pressure. In some cases, establishments with Thai names or branding reportedly altered their appearance. Social media amplified these dynamics, often framing them as expressions of patriotism and national solidarity.
Such reactions are hardly unique to Cambodia. Similar patterns emerge whenever political disputes intertwine with questions of national identity. Economic relationships that took years or decades to develop can suddenly become symbols of broader grievances, and distinctions among governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens begin to blur.
Some targeted responses may be understandable when particular companies are perceived as supporting policies or institutions associated with a dispute. Consumers may reasonably choose to withhold support. More concerning is when resentment spreads indiscriminately, transforming political disagreement into broader suspicion of an entire people, culture, or society.
The danger is not merely economic but also social and psychological. Once entire populations are linked to political grievances, the distinction between disagreement and animosity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Historical memory can reinforce this process: old grievances become attached to contemporary disputes, new experiences are incorporated into existing narratives, and what begins as a reaction to a specific event can harden into a more durable perception of the “other.”
This matters because disputes between neighboring states eventually require accommodation. Cambodia and Thailand will remain neighbors long after the present tensions subside, and their economies, communities, histories, and futures are deeply interconnected. The danger of simplified narratives is not merely that they distort present realities but that they can leave lasting social scars, making eventual reconciliation more difficult once the immediate crisis has passed.
None of this is unique to Cambodia. Similar dynamics appear in many societies during periods of heightened tension. Public attention narrows. Political language grows more charged. Historical grievances become easier to invoke. Narratives simplify. The space for ambiguity contracts.
Yet Cambodia presents an additional dimension: different generations encounter these developments through very different relationships to the past.
For older Cambodians, memories of conflict, instability, displacement, and uncertainty remain part of their lived experience. Many lived through Democratic Kampuchea and endured the difficult years that followed. Contemporary tensions may therefore resonate with memories formed during periods when questions of security and survival carried immediate, deeply personal consequences.
For some, the present may reopen wounds that never fully healed. Decades after violence ends, psychological effects often persist. A sound, an image, a rumor, a border incident, or the return of familiar political rhetoric can revive anxieties that seem long buried. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often associated with this phenomenon: past experiences of extreme fear, violence, or insecurity intruding unexpectedly into the present. Not all survivors experience such reactions the same way, and many may never describe them in clinical terms. Yet trauma often persists beneath the surface of ordinary life, resurfacing when events evoke earlier experiences of loss, displacement, uncertainty, or danger.
Despite important improvements in Cambodia’s healthcare system, the psychological legacy of prolonged conflict has often received less attention than its physical and material consequences. This is understandable yet significant. The trauma experienced by many Cambodians did not begin in 1975 or end in 1979; it persisted through years of war, displacement, uncertainty, refugee camps, and reconstruction. For some, these experiences remain as much part of the present as of the past. Trauma-related conditions, including PTSD, may be more widespread than formal diagnosis rates indicate, particularly among those who lived through multiple periods of conflict and upheaval.
Viewed from that perspective, even relatively limited contemporary tensions can carry significance that extends beyond their immediate political or military dimensions. The concern is not simply what happens in the present, but how present events interact with the memories held by those who lived through earlier periods of conflict. The costs of confrontation are not measured solely by casualties or territorial outcomes, but by the memories conflicts create and the psychological burdens they leave behind. The current tensions are minor compared with the catastrophes Cambodia experienced during the latter half of the twentieth century, or with contemporary conflicts in places such as Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, or Iran. Yet the possibility that new experiences of fear, uncertainty, and hostility may become embedded in memory is not merely speculative. To the extent that conflict can be avoided, rhetoric moderated, and the demonization of the “other” resisted, quiet, sustained, and measured diplomacy remains preferable. These dynamics are not confined to any one side of the dispute.
Hyperbolic rhetoric built on incomplete, unsubstantiated, or misleading information may yield short-term political advantage, but it also shapes memory. Repeated often enough, narratives harden into assumptions, assumptions into certainties, and certainties into convictions increasingly resistant to scrutiny. Over time, such narratives make it harder to step back, reflect, reconsider, or view events from a broader perspective. More importantly, they discourage the effort to understand how the same events may appear from others’ perspectives.
Younger Cambodians encounter the past differently. Their understanding of Democratic Kampuchea is largely inherited rather than lived. They know it through education, family narratives, archives, museums, memorials, documentaries, and institutions such as the ECCC. Yet they are now experiencing their own moment of uncertainty – not remembering these events but living through them. That distinction matters.
There is also irony here. For many years, Cambodia’s principal memory challenge concerned transmission: how to ensure that younger generations understood events they had never experienced. Today, a different process is unfolding. Younger Cambodians are no longer merely inheriting memory but are beginning to accumulate their own. Whatever lessons they draw from current events will eventually become part of the historical inheritance passed to the next generation.
The older generation carries memories. The younger generation is creating them. However the present tensions are resolved, a new layer of historical experience is already being formed.
Years from now, younger Cambodians will remember these events not as history learned from others, but as events they experienced firsthand. Perhaps that is what these reflections have been about all along: memory is not a destination but a process.
Courts establish records. Archives preserve them. Museums and memorials transmit them. Educational institutions teach them. Yet none can determine what the past ultimately means. Meaning emerges through engagement, reinterpretation, disagreement, and reflection. Cambodia’s relationship with its past therefore remains unfinished – not because every question lacks an answer, but because each generation must decide how to interpret the inheritance it receives. The task is not merely to remember, but to remember thoughtfully.
Border disputes are rarely simple: they involve competing historical narratives, legal claims, diplomatic considerations, domestic politics, security concerns, and facts that are often incomplete or contested. Yet public discussion often moves in the opposite direction. In moments of tension, societies often gravitate toward narratives that offer clarity, certainty, and moral comfort. Ambiguity becomes difficult to tolerate; nuance can come to resemble disloyalty, and questions can be mistaken for opposition.
Historians face the same challenge when examining the past. Democratic Kampuchea illustrates the point. Over the years, countless narratives have emerged to explain how Cambodia descended into catastrophe – some focused on ideology, others on evidence-based portraits, foreign intervention, civil war, colonial legacies, Cold War rivalries, or domestic political failure. None is entirely wrong, and none is sufficient.
Memory preserves experience, but it does not automatically produce understanding. That unease is not new; in many respects, it has accompanied my relationship with Cambodia for more than three decades. The older I become, the less interested I am in certainties. Years spent working in Cambodia, studying its history, participating in legal proceedings, and speaking with people whose experiences differ profoundly from mine have left me increasingly cautious about simple explanations.
As I look back on these reflections, I suspect that part of the reason for writing them is now clearer to me than when I began. Returning to Cambodia recently stirred memories that had long remained dormant beneath the routines of professional life. Visiting the ECCC Resource Centre, walking again through the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek killing fields memorial, traveling familiar roads, and reconnecting with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances from different periods of Cambodia’s modern history brought me back to my earliest encounters with the country more than three decades ago.
Those memories span many chapters. They include training advocates of the Cambodian Defender Project, meeting judges, prosecutors and government officials as legal institutions were being rebuilt, traveling through provinces still marked by the legacies of conflict, and spending countless hours in conversation with scholars, journalists, diplomats, advocates, and the many Cambodian hands whose insights shaped my understanding of Cambodia’s past and present.
They include discussions with Michael Vickery, Craig Etcheson, Al Rockoff, Dr. Lao Mong Hay, Michael Hayes, David Hawk, Nate Thayer, and many others. Later came my work before the ECCC, including the privilege of representing Ieng Sary and Meas Muth, which gave me a perspective on history that few practitioners are ever afforded.
They also include conversations with journalists, scholars, chroniclers, diplomats, and lawyers whose paths crossed Cambodia’s modern history at critical moments. Among the most memorable was Jacques Vergès. I first met him at the ECCC as International Co-Lawyer for Khieu Samphan, later visited him in his Paris office, and spent additional time with him whenever he traveled to Phnom Penh. One memorable evening at the Elephant Bar at Le Royal Hotel stands out. Vergès would hear nothing of my preference for red wine and insisted that the evening be conducted over champagne. Over successive bottles, we talked about law, politics, advocacy, and the small circle of Cambodian students he had known in Paris, among them Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. Vergès had even officiated the marriage of Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith, decades before any of them would become part of history. Those conversations offered a glimpse into a world that existed before the Cambodian communist movement took shape, before the years in the maquis (Northeast highlands), before the collapse of the Lon Nol regime, and before the tragedy that would engulf the country.
Equally significant were my conversations with Ieng Sary himself. He spoke of the Paris years, of friendships and rivalries, of personalities and ambitions, and of people who would later become central actors in one of the twentieth century’s most devastating tragedies. What struck me was not that these conversations provided answers. Quite the opposite: they complicated them. Historical figures often appear fixed in retrospect, as though their trajectories were inevitable. Yet listening to those who knew them before history intervened is a reminder that individuals are rarely as simple as the roles they eventually occupy.
I do not claim any special insight into Democratic Kampuchea or the personalities who shaped it. But these encounters added texture to my understanding and left me with questions that have never entirely disappeared. Even now, fragments of those discussions return unexpectedly – when reading a new account, revisiting old documents, or reflecting on events that continue to resist easy explanation. How do individuals become the people history remembers them as? How does a young man more interested in courtship and dancing become the architect of a revolutionary movement? How do political movements evolve into systems capable of extraordinary brutality? To what extent are such transformations shaped by ideology, circumstance, personality, fear, contingency, or historical accident?
I have never found entirely satisfactory answers. None seem to exist. Yet memory has a way of returning to unfinished questions. It revisits uncertainties, contradictions, and gaps in understanding. And that is part of why Cambodia continues to occupy a place in my thinking long after many of the events themselves have passed into history.
What returned most forcefully was not any single event or conversation, but an appreciation for complexity. This is the enduring lesson I carry away from Cambodia: not that history can be settled or that memory can be made complete, but that understanding is always provisional, always revisited, and always shaped by what remains unseen or unresolved. The struggle is not only against forgetting but also against the temptation to settle too comfortably upon certainty.
Cambodia resists simplification. The longer one studies its history, the more unstable simple explanations become. Causes and consequences blur. Perspectives multiply. Historical actors who initially seem legible reveal unexpected contradictions. Certainty repeatedly gives way to doubt.
Yet this is not only an intellectual condition but also a personal one. Years spent working in Cambodia, participating in legal proceedings, engaging with historical material, and speaking with those whose lives intersected with these events have made it increasingly difficult to hold onto tidy interpretations. What once seemed intelligible now often seems contingent.
I do not claim to resolve these tensions – and have not. Many of the questions that first drew me to Cambodia remain unresolved. They return, often unexpectedly, when reading, revisiting archives, or encountering present events that echo older ones in unfamiliar ways.
Maybe that is why Cambodia continues to occupy a place in my thinking long after many of the events themselves have passed into history – not as a set of conclusions, but as a set of recurring questions about individuals, responsibility, and how historical violence becomes legible only in retrospect.
History is indispensable, yet it rarely provides closure. It offers context, perspective, and caution, but not certainty. The closer one comes to complex events – whether the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea, the reconstruction that followed, or tensions in the present – the more one encounters ambiguity rather than resolution.
If there is a thread running through these reflections, it is not explanation but attention: the discipline of resisting premature closure, of staying alert to complexity even when narratives become persuasive, and of holding open the space between what is known and what is assumed.
The past is never as settled as it seems, and the present is never as transparent as it feels.
Memory, at its best, does not resolve this tension. It sustains it.
Postscript: Parting Thoughts
When I first began writing these reflections, my intention was modest. Having recently visited the ECCC Resource Centre, I wanted to write a short piece about the importance of preserving the judicial record of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. What I imagined would be a brief commentary on archives, documentation, and institutional legacy unexpectedly became something far more expansive.
The journey took me back through more than three decades of engagement with Cambodia. One memory led to another. Old conversations resurfaced. Familiar documents were revisited. Assumptions that once seemed settled grew less certain. What began as a reflection on a building evolved into an odyssey through history, memory, institutions, and the enduring questions that Cambodia continues to provoke.
Along the way, I kept returning to a simple realization: memory and understanding are not the same thing.
Courts establish records. Archives preserve them. Museums and memorials transmit them. Historians interpret them. Yet none can definitively determine what the past ultimately means. The events themselves remain fixed; their significance does not. Meaning emerges gradually through reflection, disagreement, reinterpretation, and engagement across generations.
That insight runs through every part of this series. It informed my discussion of genocide and the need to maintain conceptual distinctions even amid overwhelming human suffering. It shaped my assessment of the ECCC, whose judicial record, however incomplete, provides an indispensable foundation for future inquiry without claiming to exhaust historical truth. It influenced my reflections on memory institutions and my growing appreciation that legitimacy often arises less from architectural ambition than from sustained practice, use, and public engagement. And it informed my observations about contemporary tensions, which served as a reminder that memory is never merely about the past. Historical experiences, inherited narratives, and collective assumptions continue to shape how societies interpret uncertainty, perceive threats, and understand the political challenges of the present.
Perhaps this is why Cambodia continues to hold such a persistent place in my thinking. Not because it has provided answers, but because it continues to raise questions.
How does a young man more interested in courtship and dancing become one of the principal architects of a revolutionary movement that culminates in mass atrocity? How do political movements evolve into systems capable of extraordinary brutality? To what extent are such transformations shaped by ideology, circumstance, personality, fear, contingency, or historical accident?
Decades of reading, litigation, archival research, and conversations with historians, journalists, diplomats, colleagues, clients, and countless Cambodians have convinced me that no single discipline, institution, or narrative can fully answer such questions. The longer I have reflected on Cambodia, the more skeptical I have become of certainty itself.
Yet this is not cause for pessimism. Quite the contrary. The enduring value of memory lies not in providing closure, but in sustaining inquiry. It compels us to revisit uncomfortable questions, challenge settled assumptions, and remain humble before the complexity of history and human behavior.
As the generation that experienced Democratic Kampuchea firsthand gradually moves from living memory into history, that task assumes even greater importance. The responsibility for remembrance increasingly rests with institutions, educators, scholars, families, and younger generations, who must decide for themselves why this history still matters. Whether memory endures meaningfully will depend not only on what has been preserved, but also on whether future generations continue to engage with the past critically, thoughtfully, and with sufficient humility to recognize that no single account can ever exhaust its meaning.
If Cambodia has taught me anything over the past three decades, it is that understanding the past is not a destination but an ongoing process of reflection, reconsideration, and return. The more closely one examines history, the less it yields certainty and the more it demands humility.
Milan Kundera famously observed that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” He was right. Yet memory serves another purpose as well. It reminds us how much remains uncertain, contested, and unresolved. The struggle is not simply against forgetting. It is also against the false comfort of believing we have finally understood everything that needs to be understood.
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