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Thailand and Cambodia share eight hundred kilometres of border drawn by French surveyors in 1907, when Cambodia was a French protectorate. Parts of it have never been marked on the ground, among them the land around several Khmer temples on the escarpment that divides the two countries. In 2025 a skirmish that killed one Cambodian soldier grew into two rounds of open fighting, with artillery, rockets and Thai air strikes, in which dozens died and hundreds of thousands fled their homes. A ceasefire has held since the end of December. The argument has now moved out to sea, where the two states' claims overlap above gas fields and around a Thai island.
On 14 September the United Nations began a hearing on the Thai-Cambodian sea border dispute. On 17 September the Thai Army reported that the Si Sa Ket border trench issue had been resolved with Cambodia.
The map. The 1904 treaty said the border follows the watershed. The map the French drew puts the temple of Preah Vihear, which stands on the Thai side of the watershed, in Cambodia. The International Court of Justice ruled in 1962 that Thailand had accepted the map by its silence, and gave the temple to Cambodia. Cambodia wants the whole border marked from that map. Thailand uses its own larger-scale maps and wants each stretch settled in a bilateral commission.
Who decides. Cambodia, the weaker party, has gone to the International Court of Justice and the United Nations. Thailand does not accept the court's jurisdiction and says outsiders have no place in a bilateral matter.
The sea. Cambodia's claim line of 1972 runs across the Thai island of Koh Kood. A 2001 memorandum committed both sides to negotiate the boundary and the sharing of the gas together. Thai nationalists want the memorandum cancelled.
A small country faces a neighbour with four times its population and an air force. The border was fixed by treaty and confirmed twice by the world's highest court. Thailand refuses the court, uses maps of its own making to move into Cambodian land, bombed Cambodian villages with jets in 2025, and has closed the border to strangle Cambodia's economy. Cambodia seeks only what the law gives it and asks for international judges because a bilateral table favours the strong.
Cambodia's soldiers moved into undemarcated ground, fired first in July 2025, launched rockets at Thai civilians, a hospital and a petrol station, and laid new landmines that maimed Thai troops in breach of the treaty banning them. Thailand answered attacks on its territory. The 1962 ruling covered a temple, not the border. Cambodia's rulers, a father and son, inflame the quarrel to unite their public, and Cambodian soil shelters fraud compounds that rob Thais. Two memoranda provide the way to settle everything between the two of them.
Cambodia's leaves out that its rockets killed Thai civilians on the first day of the July fighting; that its former prime minister published a private telephone call with Thailand's prime minister, which brought her down and inflamed the crisis; that Thai soldiers were maimed by mines which independent observers judged to be newly laid; and that the fraud compounds are real and have had protection from powerful Cambodians.
Thailand's leaves out that it lost at the International Court of Justice twice and declines to return there; that its air force bombed a neighbour that has none; that its army, by many Thai accounts, acted with little reference to the elected government, and that border nationalism has helped bring down Thai governments in 2008 and 2025; and that closing the border sent hundreds of thousands of Cambodian workers home from jobs Thailand needed filled.
The mediators' leaves out that the ceasefire signed in front of the American president in October collapsed within weeks and fighting resumed in December; that the regional observers have no power to enforce anything; and that none of them has touched the question of the map.
Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.
Per-week distribution of events. Click a bar to see that week's top events.
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Malaysia as chair of ASEAN, and then the Philippines, brought the two armies to a ceasefire and observers to the border. The United States used the threat of tariffs to stop the shooting in July 2025 and its president presided at the signing in Kuala Lumpur. China hosted talks of its own and says its mediation advanced the peace. Each presents the ceasefire as proof of its way of doing things.
Hundreds of thousands displaced twice in one year on both sides; markets and crossings that fed them still shut.