The recurring crisis along the Thailand-Cambodia border is not merely a territorial dispute between two nation-states of Southeast Asia. Rather, it is a concrete manifestation of the structural tension that runs through the architecture of ASEAN regionalism, a tension between the ideal of cooperation among equals and the reality of a regional formation shaped by asymmetric power relations, state hegemonies, and transnational logics of accumulation.

The border is not just a geopolitical line; it is the theater in which ideological struggles, class interests, and strategies of political legitimation crystallize. Its performative role goes far beyond administrative or military function,  the border is the space where state elites stage their sovereignty, discipline it, and transmit it as social truth. In this configuration, the border crisis becomes a dramatization of sovereignty, a staging in which the contested territory serves as a platform to reinforce the hegemony of dominant classes, often in crisis of internal consensus. The use of national symbols, sacrificial rhetoric, and military mobilizations does not respond to strategic logic, but rather to a political necessity: that of reconfiguring internal hierarchies through the construction of an external enemy.

This symbolic function of the border has a long genealogy in the region. Colonial maps, drawn according to exogenous logics, produced borders that were disconnected from historical, ethnic, and cultural realities, generating a fractured geographical memory. Yet these fractures are selectively reactivated today for contemporary purposes of consensus management and reproduction of internal order. The dispute over Preah Vihear is not merely about a temple on a plateau; it concerns the state’s capacity to re-legitimize itself through the language of sovereignty, reformulating its role within an increasingly polarized political and social context. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a form of sovereignty scripting, in which the state, confronted with internal challenges to its legitimacy, projects the crisis outward. Far from being anomalous, this behavior reflects a rationality consolidated within the post-Westphalian international system, where sovereignty is constantly reinterpreted through symbolic mediations and border practices. The performative function of the border thus fits into a broader dynamic of political order construction, in which the liminal space of the frontier becomes the privileged device for the emplacement of state power.

Regionalism as a Hegemonic Mirror

In this context, ASEAN regionalism appears structurally inadequate to contain, let alone transform, this type of conflict. Its institutional architecture, based on the principles of consensus and non-interference, produces a regionalism that is not regulatory but reflective; it does not intervene in power dynamics, but rather reflects and often amplifies them. Instead of functioning as a contested space for normative coordination and functional redistribution of responsibility, ASEAN acts as a container for pre-existing state hegemonies, systematically avoiding the politicization of regional asymmetries. In theoretical terms, this coincides with the view that international and regional institutions are not neutral entities but historically situated formations; they exist in function of dominant power relations and tend to reproduce the existing hegemonic historical bloc rather than challenge it. Thus, ASEAN does not represent an institution of rebalancing, but a mechanism of compatibility between unequal social formations. It protects the state form as such, but does not promote a collective ethos capable of addressing the structural injustices embedded in regional relations.

Far from representing a progressive integration, ASEAN ends up operating as a regime of compatibility among different configurations of oligarchic-statist power, in which the principle of formal sovereignty is safeguarded at the expense of building shared and collective sovereignty. The result is a regionalism weak in its transformative dimension but strong in protecting the balance among national elites. ASEAN does not (and largely does not intend to) articulate a collective response to conflict, because doing so would imply questioning interests that constitute the very foundations of its order. This mechanism fits perfectly into a logic of passive regionalism, where the priority is not the construction of a political community but the management of systemic contradictions. Non-interference thus becomes an instrument of depoliticizing conflict, a clause of silence functional to maintaining the oligarchic order. And when regionalism is constituted on the basis of silence rather than transformative struggle, it becomes complicit in a regressive reproduction of sovereignty. In this sense, the border becomes the rupture point between two rationalities: on the one hand, the normative rationality of regionalism, one that preaches peace, cooperation, mutual respect; on the other, the material rationality of power, one that operates through co-optation, extraction, and fragmentation. The border is the space where this contradiction expresses itself most clearly, revealing the profoundly selective and stratified nature of the regional project. It shows us how security is continuously redefined to serve not the regional collective, but dominant actors who, though internally differentiated, share an interest in preserving the existing structure of decision-making.

The Frontier as Economic and Legal Device

In its current configuration, ASEAN lacks the critical intelligence required to confront the contradictions produced by the political economies of the border. Special economic zones, extractive concessions, transboundary infrastructure projects, all these elements are part of the accumulation device that reconfigures contested territories as states of exception, gray zones where international law, regional governance, and national responsibility dissolve, leaving space for regimes of high-intensity exploitation and low-intensity regulation. The construction of the border as a productive margin, as a semi-autonomous space where flexible rules favor capital, transforms the frontier into a central node in regional accumulation strategies. Unsurprisingly, the borderlands in ASEAN today are those most integrated into logistical corridors, Belt and Road Initiative projects, and zones of intensive natural resource extraction.

In these areas, sovereignty is not abolished but negotiated, delegated, and fragmented, a modular sovereignty, functional to capital flexibility. Regionalism, therefore, cannot be explained solely through functionalist or institutionalist theories. It requires a historical-structural approach, one that sees ASEAN as a concrete expression of a regional hegemonic formation, not born to correct inequalities, but to govern them through consensual instruments. Relations among member states do not develop in a vacuum, but within a historical layering of hierarchies and compromises. Inequality among states, in terms of power, access to resources, and normative capacity, is as structural as it is normalized. This regionalism has never truly produced a political community. It has produced, rather, a community of governability, a form of order that neutralizes conflict by depoliticizing its material causes. In this vision, ASEAN appears as a regional hegemonic bloc, where consensus among states is built not on shared normative visions, but on the tactical convergence of oligarchic interests.

Conclusion

The Thailand-Cambodia crisis is not an anomaly within the ASEAN system, but one of its functional expressions. It demonstrates that regionalism cannot be reduced to an institutional space, but must be understood as a social relation, traversed by power dynamics, historical sedimentations, and hegemonic strategies. ASEAN’s non-intervention, or its systematic neutrality, is not simply an operational shortcoming: it is a political choice coherent with a structure that privileges the preservation of existing order over its transformation. In this sense, the Thailand - Cambodia crisis forces us to radically rethink the meaning of regionalism in ASEAN. Not as a neutral space of cooperation, but as a hegemonic field, where the production of consensus occurs as much through the rhetoric of unity as through the systematic concealment of material conflicts. The border is not the periphery of regionalism, it is its dark center, its unspeakable truth. And it is from there that we must begin again, if we are to understand and challenge the current shape of the regional order in Southeast Asia.