Republican Archives: Crossed Perspectives on the Khmer Republic and the Republic of South Vietnam

“Republican moment(s)” 

The 1954 Geneva Accords ended French colonial rule in Indochina and divided the region into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Vietnam was split in two zones along the 17th parallel, the North under communist rule and the South anti-communist. The two zones were to be reunited after the general elections scheduled in 1956. However, these elections never materialized. In the South, after a rigged referendum, Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm ousted head of state Bảo Đại (Vietnam’s former emperor) and proclaimed himself president of the newly founded Republic of Vietnam (1955). War broke out between North and South. With the help of China and the Soviet Union, Hanoi supported the struggle of the communist dissidents (the ‘Việt Cộng’) in the South. Concerned over the possible Soviet advance in the region, the US increased the level of its military and political assistance to the RVN. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident (the alleged attack of US destroyers by North Vietnamese boats) gave the American government a pretext for direct intervention. The war escalated and spilled over the borders. Domestically, Diệm’s policies – for example his persecution of Buddhist followers – made him unpopular and led to his assassination in a CIA-backed coup (1963). General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s election as president in 1967 brought to South Vietnam some stability after several years of short-lived military governments. He remained in power until the fall of Saigon. 

Unlike Bảo Đại, Cambodia’s king Norodom Sihanouk refused to be sidelined. Fortified by the success of his campaign for the country’s independence (1953), he abdicated in 1955 and founded his own political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum. After the death of the king (his own father), he became Cambodia’s head of state (1960). In the following decade, Sihanouk tried to keep Cambodia neutral. However, he allowed Vietnamese communist sanctuaries on Cambodian soil, prompting a series of covert carpet-bombing operations by the US Air Force to disrupt their lines. The bombardments drew the Vietnamese further inside Cambodia, where they joined forces with the indigenous communist insurgency (the ‘Khmer Rouge’, as Sihanouk called them). Discontent grew over Sihanouk’s policies, especially as his iron rule left little space for political opposition. Despite his later rapprochement with the Americans and his repression of the communist guerrillas, he was overthrown in a right-wing coup led by his cousin Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak and General Lon Nol (1970). The Khmer Republic was proclaimed a few months later. Sihanouk found shelter in Beijing. On the advice of China and North Vietnam, he formed an alliance with the Khmer Rouge, the National United Front for Kampuchea (NUFK). He urged the population to take up arms against the new authorities in Phnom Penh. The civil war in Cambodia soon became further entangled with the conflict in Vietnam, as the Khmer Republic declared war on the Vietnamese communist ‘aggressors’, with the backing of the United States. 

Despite the Paris Peace Agreements (1973), fighting continued in both countries until April 1975, when the two republican regimes collapsed within days of each other. It is not surprising thus that war keeps dominating views of the Khmer Republic and the RVN since it impacted their trajectories to such an extent. For a long time, there has been little scholarly and public consideration given to nation-building in republican Cambodia and South Vietnam, or to their vision of national identity, programs of economic modernization and political reform, and importantly the interactions between society and state. Yet, since Philip Catton’s book Diem’s Final Failure (2002), there has been an outpouring of new scholarship on the RVN. Shifting away from Americentric views and foregrounding local agency, this literature covers a large range of topics like civil society, ideology, urban life, domestic media, feminism, photography, and the experiences of refugees. It is impossible to do justice to all authors, yet it is worth mentioning the works of Tuong Vu, Andrew Wiest, Nu-Anh Tran, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Pierre Asselin, Olga Dror, Trinh Luu, Sean Fear, Duy Lap Nguyen, Yến Lê Esperitu, Lan Duong, and Tam Ngo. In contrast, the Khmer Republic or Lon Nol regime [Fig. 1] has been little examined to this day. The first studies were published in the 1980s and early 1990s (David Chandler, Ros Chantrabot, and Justin Corfield), with later additions on US-Cambodian relations (Kenton Clymer and the as-yet-unpublished work of the late Ray Leos) and the Khmer Republic’s wartime economy (Margaret Slocomb) in the 2000s. Even more recently, William Chickering has published a book on FULRO (United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races), 2 A War of Their Own: FULRO: The Other National Liberation Front, Vietnam 1955-75 (Casemate Publishers, 2025). and Steve Heder maintains ongoing research on the Cambodian civil war. 

Lately, though, there has been a renewed interest in the Khmer Republic from a cohort of younger scholars (some of who discuss their research here). 3 For example, see the work of Linda Saphan, Shintani Haruno, Thun Theara, and Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier. It is tempting to see this body of work as the harbinger of a “republican moment” in Cambodia’s modern history studies, finally echoing what has happened in Vietnamese studies in past years. According to historian Peter Zinoman, the “republican moment” refers to a shift in scholarly focus onto South Vietnam and, more broadly, onto Vietnamese republican political traditions across the colonial and postcolonial periods. 4 Peter Zinoman propounds this idea of a “republican moment” in Vietnamese studies in his talk at the workshop “Studying Republican Vietnam” organized by Tuong Vu at the University of Oregon (14-15 October 2019). The video and transcript of his talk are available at: https://usvietnam.uoregon.edu/en/a-republican-moment-in-the-study-of-modern-vietnam/. In her PhD dissertation Contested Identities: Nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (University of California, 2013), Nu-Anh Tran refers to “waves” of research. It is the fifth wave that takes South Vietnam as its primary focus, p. 5. The Focus section seeks to bring into dialogue this subfield emerging in Khmer studies and the more advanced scholarship on the RVN. This dialogue is first of all historical, a discussion of the wartime connections between the two regimes. It is also historiographical. The “republican moment” provides the opportunity to take stock of the state of the field today, its evolution, and its debates. Finally, this dialogue is a methodological one. Research on the Khmer Republic is, at this stage, both thrilling and discouraging (depending on the day). There’s so much to be done. The motivation behind this Focus section is to compare research notes and see how the tools and concepts used by colleagues who work on South Vietnam may help chart this gigantic territory.  

Scholarly contact zones

In recent years, there has been a tendency to approach the “Vietnam War” from a global viewpoint. However, the relationship between the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam has been little studied so far. The fact that the Cambodian civil war has long been seen as just a “sideshow” to the conflict in Vietnam 5 William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). might explain in part why this academic conversation has not really taken place yet. This 50th “anniversary” seems the right moment to kick it off. Many contact zones between the two republican states could be researched productively, for example their economic and military cooperation, cultural exchanges, anticommunist nationalism, and the cross-border movements of goods and people (e.g., refugees, soldiers, and defectors). 

Moreover, although they were fighting a “common” enemy, tensions ran high between the Lon Nol regime and the RVN. In the weeks after the coup that ousted Sihanouk, anti-Vietnamese feelings in Cambodia reached a fever pitch. Violence erupted against the ethnic Vietnamese communities living in the country, some of whom had lived there for decades or longer. Within a year, over 200,000 people were “repatriated” to South Vietnam via aerial and fluvial operations. A commission involving representatives from the two governments was established, but the extent to which its members collaborated is not known. How were the refugees received and integrated in the RVN? What was the impact for the Khmer Republic, which had deprived itself of many skilled workers? In retaliation, some South Vietnamese units based in Cambodia carried out abuses against civilians and their properties. There were reports and talks of compensation. These episodes of violence laid the ground for a difficult entente. And yet, despite their impact on the relations between the supposed allies, they have hardly been discussed until now. 

The idea of “resonance” could also be fruitful. The 1963 coup and killing of Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu certainly fueled Sihanouk’s suspicions vis-à-vis American intentions in Cambodia, as his 1973 memoirs on his “war with the CIA” made clear. A few years later, how did these events influence Lon Nol’s grasp on power and his ever-increasing seclusion? How did the 1968 Tet Offensive inform the strategies of the generals from the Khmer National Armed Forces (FANK) for the protection of Phnom Penh and other big cities in 1970-1975? These and many other questions give an idea of the numerous topics to be explored and the potential of crossed perspectives on the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam to yield new insights into the Second Indochina War. 

And the archive in all this? 

The idea of a “republican archive” provides the framework for this multilevel dialogue. The term encompasses the records produced by, in, and about the Khmer Republic and the RVN. It is beyond this introduction’s scope to give an exhaustive idea of existing sources. It can only give an overview that points out the commonalities and differences between the two corpuses. As any researcher knows, it is not always easy to say if it is the object of inquiry or the available sources that determines one’s research. Dead ends for lack of materials, alongside serendipity, equally shape archival research. This applies, perhaps, even more strongly to the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam. 

There is at the core of the “republican archive” a structural and narrative imbalance. For decades, the republican regimes have been seen primarily through the eyes of foreigners (i.e., diplomats, policymakers, military officers, humanitarian organizations, intelligence agencies, journalists, and activists) and through the communist lens, especially in the case of the RVN. Easily consultable, these reports, stories, and pictures are in large part at the root of enduring negative views of the two republics. Indeed, today’s reader cannot but be struck by their oversimplifications and patronizing tone. Obviously, these documents form an essential source of information. But they require a reading “against the grain” and – as anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler famously suggested – a reading “along the grain” too, which reveals their affective states. 6 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).    

This imbalance has been reinforced by the assumption that “failed states” like the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam do not leave as many traces as other states. It is partly true since there is no official authority that remains to take care of their records. Yet this idea must be nuanced. There are well-kept South Vietnamese records, but consulting them in Vietnam today might sometimes be complicated due to restricted access. Similarly, while the extent of destruction and loss caused by the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) did – and still does – hamper research on the Khmer Republic, the work of collection done by archives and research institutions in Cambodia since the early 2000s has improved the situation. 7 Some examples include The National Archives (with the help of Cornell University) as well as the more recently founded Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), and Bophana Audiovisual Center. I do not say that there are meters and meters of consultable archives. Still, it is not a situation of archival indigence. There are decrees, reports from ministries and commissions, newsreels, books and memoirs, illustrated magazines and newspapers, and bulletins from institutions like the National Bank and the Chamber of Commerce [Fig. 2].

For researchers interested in history from below, however, the official or semi-official nature of these records quickly becomes a methodological problem. Such documents do not give much access to “ordinary” people’s views and daily realities. Of course, advertisements for the “high class” rice wine Mekong in the pictorial The Khmer Republic or recipes for a roasted orange pork rack in the daily Le Républicain (16 September 1972) say something about life in wartime Phnom Penh, but it’s about the life of elites and expats, not the life of the poor, the refugees, or the villagers [Figs. 3 and 4]. Now and then, researchers come across written traces of everyday life. Historian Heather Stur, for example, studied over 100 request letters sent by families and soldiers to the RVN’s Ministry of Armed Forces and Ministry of Justice. 8 “Blurred Lines: the Home Front, the Battle Front, and the Wartime Relationship between Citizens and Government in the Republic of Vietnam,” War & Society 38:1 (2019), 57-79. In general, however, scholars have to rely on an “expanded” corpus of images, sounds, bodies, textiles, architectures, and landscapes.

Of course, interviews and oral history yield some much-needed information. Witnesses, though, are now getting elderly, and collecting their testimonies has become more than ever a pressing task. Regrettably, not much – or rather not enough – is being done, despite numerous institutional, community, and artistic initiatives. Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh was founded in 2006 by film directors Rithy Panh and Ieu Pannakar. This prominent institution does not only collect and preserve Cambodia’s cinematographic heritage. It supports the creation of documentary movies about Cambodian history. Bophana Center’s director Chea Sopheap once mentioned the urgency of recording wartime life stories of people from the countryside – the effect of the bombardments, the disruption of village life, the forms of (gender-based) violence they experienced, and the way they saw Phnom Penh politics. But it is an enormous and costly undertaking. 9 Conversation with the author in Phnom Penh in August 2023.

It is important to underline here the impact of digital technologies and social media on research. With the transition from “hard” to “hybrid” archives, more and more people outside institutions have been able to retrieve existing corpuses and, crucially, to make new ones. 10 Sune Haugbolle, “Archival Activists and the Hybrid Archives of the Arab Left,” in The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, ed. by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020). In her book Warring Visions (2022), art historian Thy Phu writes about “orphaned images,” the photos left behind by South Vietnamese refugees and now sold in vintage shops in Vietnam. 11 Warring Visions: Vietnam and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), pp. 151-152. Obviously, looking at family pictures online has nothing to do with this kind of affective encounter. Still, YouTube, Facebook/Meta, Instagram, and Spotify are gamechangers in terms of research. They give access to previously “lost” pictures, movies, radio programs, and songs from the Khmer Republic and the RVN. Being an entryway into refugees’ counter-narratives and “emotional connections to the lost country,” 12 Scarlette Nhi Do, “YouTube as the Pirate Archive: South Vietnamese Cinema and Memories of the Second Indochina War,” Senses of Cinema 105 (2023), available at: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/cinema-and-piracy/youtube-as-the-pirate-archive-south-vietnamese-cinema-and-memories-of-the-second-indochina-war/ they generate new questions and types of ethnographic inquiry. Research on the Lon Nol regime and South Vietnam is not only about things past, but also about intergenerational transmission and the survivance of these vanished states in today’s diasporic practices and imaginaries. 

As well, the recent upsurge of research projects combining environmental sources (soils, rivers, plants, animals) with geospatial visualization technologies to study the lasting and multiscale effects of wars points to a further expansion of the idea of archives. Gender studies scholar Lina Chhun, for instance, explores the role of trees and vegetation in her study of the traces left by the American (mistake) bombardment of Neak Luong, Cambodia, in August 1973. 13 “Sometime American… Can Make Mistake Too…: Contested Memory, Documentary Registers, and Cambodian/American Histories of Violence,” Amerasia Journal 42:2 (2016), 160-188. The discussion of “ecological warfare” in the Vietnam War context is an old one. 14 Yves Lacoste, “An Illustration of Geographical Warfare: Bombing of the Dikes on the Red River, North Vietnam,” Antipode 5 (1973), 1-13. But the rethink of human-nonhuman interaction and current debates on the linkages between genocide and “ecocide” (a concept historically tied to the region) lend it a renewed significance and a different analytical toolkit. 15 See for example David Bigg’s Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018) and Erin Lin’s When The Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).

In line with critical archival practices, the researchers and artists in this Focus section explain how they have worked with existing records and addressed the lacks, gaps, and silences of republican archives. All use a broad range of sources, including textual, visual, sonic, material, and architectural ones. All mobilize a wide array of disciplines such as history, anthropology, visual studies, material culture, and forensics. They discuss their methodologies and share personal memories and fieldwork stories. The diversity of their approaches illustrates the interdisciplinarity of the field. Furthermore, it points to the possible directions crossed or even joint research on the Khmer Republic and South Vietnam may take in the future.   

Conclusion: towards comparative studies of postcolonial “Indochina”? 

On 30 April 2025 in Vietnam, the fall of Saigon was officially commemorated as Reunification Day with a grand parade of thousands of marching troops in Ho Chi Minh City. In Phnom Penh, however, 17 April 2025 was nothing special aside from Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit as part of his larger Southeast Asia tour. Interestingly, though, Cambodia’s former Prime Minister Hun Sen attended the commemorations in Ho Chi Minh City. 16 Tep Sony, “Hun Sen leads Cambodian delegation to Vietnam for Reunification Anniversary,” Khmer Times, 29 April 2025. Available at: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501676565/video-hun-sen-leads-cambodian-delegation-to-vietnam-for-reunification-anniversary/ It is not the place here to discuss the geopolitical background of this show of friendship and solidarity. Yet Hun Sen’s presence in Vietnam indirectly prompts the question of how 17 April is seen in Cambodia nowadays. For many Cambodians, it marks the beginning of four years of horror. At the same time, does it have any other or additional meanings, for instance, for the members of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)? During the 1970-1975 civil war, some, including Hun Sen, had fought on the side of the NUFK, the alliance between the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk. But they defected in 1977-1978 and returned to Cambodia in late 1978 to fight the Pol Pot regime with the support of the Vietnamese army. To them, the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975 meant also the fall of their enemy, the Khmer Republic, and, vicariously, the defeat of American imperialism. To what extent does this narrative survive today and how is it woven with official views of the past?

Researching the history of republican ideas in Cambodia and Vietnam is not only about contributing to the analysis of the Second Indochina War. It is not only about revisiting a contested past. It is central to our understanding of present-day political cultures and state historical narratives in the two countries. Comparative perspectives on nation-building and entanglements in postcolonial “Indochina” are not new (see the work of Christopher Goscha and Philippe Peycam, for instance). By providing a shared framework for widely diverse approaches, the “republican moment” is the occasion to address in an interdisciplinary fashion fundamental questions like continuities in elites, relations between revolution and reformism, long-term social changes, and local and Western roots of political ideas. It does not only reinforce the rethink of decolonization processes in Indochina (i.e., periodization, spaces, actors). It also opens the way to a more granular understanding of national projects and their afterlives in today’s imaginaries. 

Yet, it is an educational challenge. As historian Nu-Anh Tran and political scientist Tuong Vu argue, while republicanism’s moment has finally arrived, “much remains to be done to change [the] popular understanding” of it. 17 Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam (1920-1963) (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2023), p. 19. The enthusiastic reception in Cambodia of John Pirozzi’s documentary movie Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten (2016) with its interviews of film and music stars from the late 1960s and early 1970s shows that there is a lot of curiosity, especially among the youth, about that overlooked period. The same can be said of Greg Cahill’s and Kat Baumann’s graphic novel The Golden Voice (April 2022) about singer Ros Sereysothea (1948-1977). It is thus essential to devise new and creative ways to make this scholarship accessible to a variety of audiences. This edition of “The Focus” hopes to take a further step in that direction.

Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier is a visual historian, currently a Research Fellow at IIAS. Her work explores violence, archives, memory, and activism in Cambodia. Email: sd.benzaquengautier@gmail.com