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The listing of the ruins of the ancient Khmer temple of Preah Vihear on the Thai/Cambodian border as a UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cambodia in 2008 stirred up a century-old conflict about the ownership of these monuments and the boundary between the two nations. The demarcation of geographic boundaries took place at the instigation of the French colonial power in the early-20th century and was, subsquently, challenged by Thailand. Over time, the area became a borderland with different legal orders issued by various actors at specific points in history. These legal orders created borderland regimes consisting of concepts, norms and regulations set up by different national (Cambodian or Thai government and its colonical predecessor) and international authorities, such as the International Court of Justice and UNESCO World Heritage Committee. However, the validity and consequences of a particular regime did not always end when a new political order or regime was installed. Some regulations and people's sentiments and memories of their implementation created a factual temporal overlapping of these regulations and – in a certain sense – even a situation of what one might call a kind of “legal pluralism”. In this chapter, the authors examine these changing, temporarily overlaying, spatially overlapping regimes from an anthropological and legal perspective. These regimes were organised in a legally hierarchical order in such a way that some orders temporarily suspended others – with impacts up to the present day.

Notions of property in recent years have become more restricted in use in legal and financial terms. The main focus considering properties is now increasingly being shifted from viewing them just as “goods” or “objects” bequeathed from ancestors, former rulers, dignitaries, communities, or states to be safeguarded, to associations and relationships of individual actors, communities and the environment with properties. It is, therefore, no longer adequate that we consider properties in isolation, but viewing them as important parts of heritage which contain such associations, relationships and socio-cultural values is required. This wider view of properties is no doubt indebted to the popularization of UNESCO’s World Heritage Program and advanced democratization of countries in many parts of the world. The promotion of universalising heritage since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972 has, however, come to challenge old traditional notions of property, rules of ownership and practices in a number of heritage sites. A heritage site, once nominated as a World Heritage Site, is considered as public goods, even though it might contain private properties. Several new actors, some collective and others individual, also emerge who may impose their claims on old actors. In this way, we have seen conflicts in a number of World Heritage Sites over what is heritage, who is the rightful owner, what can be practised and what not, what rules of ownership should be adopted, how much access to heritage various actors be allowed, who is to manage heritage, and how to do it. Some conflicts may occur based on different notions of heritage held by various actors, who may pursue different agendas of cultural, social, economic, legal, or political nature or some of these compounded. This chapter begins briefly with how the French dealt with Angkor firstly as a reservoir of cultural property consisting of buildings and monuments, and the successive formati

The border between Cambodia and Thailand along the Dangrek Mountains, as set up in 1907 after negotiations between France and Siam by the French colonial power more than one hundred years ago, has been disputed since the 1930s. The temple of Preah Vihear1, the monumental remains of a huge Khmer temple complex, situated right on the border, has been an extremely sensitive issue since that time. Its listing by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2008 fiercely revived the old border conflict, the monumental “heritage” and the question to whom it really “belongs”. The temple complex was built at the beginning of the 11th century (during the reign of King Suryavarman I, who ruled over Angkor) and is located on the tip of the southern precipice of the Dangrek Mountains which overlooks the Cambodian plain. Preah Vihear has become a bone of contention between Cambodia and Thailand, and the armed conflict that arose immediately after the UNESCO listing shows the political dimension such a certification may have. For both countries, the official recognition of the ruins by one of the most important international organizations that actually stands not only for education and culture, but also for promoting co-operation and peace, touched national feelings and sensitivities. For Thailand, the temple of Preah Vihear symbolizes “lost territories” (Denes 2006:35-43), that is, the territories Siam was persuaded to cede to France in the early-20th century. The international recognition of Preah Vihear as the property of Cambodia was interpreted by Thailand as a further validation of a wrong that the International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) had legitimated nine years after Cambodia had gained independence in its decree of 1962.

The study of World Heritage making is highly important today for World Heritage has become a global language, a world of its own, recreating and representing particular cultures, ethnic groups, and/or national icons to be shared universally. This trend has been accelerated through modern media, especially visual media such as TV, films, DVDs and the internet with highly developed technologies and its world-wide distributions and flows. It provides us with a variety of ways to reconstruct, present and represent the past and heritage with particular meanings, especially as World Heritage Sites. The media-production of World Heritage Sites has no doubt contributed to the increase in the interest and the number of tourists to visit and “gaze” real and reconstructed World Heritage Sites simultaneously. These global phenomena have consequently affected the countries possessing them in their ways of producing and displaying the sites. Waterton and Watson (2010) also stress the visuality of heritage based on a vivid materiality and its representations as dominant discourses in heritage studies, but that it is now moving towards more heterogeneous discourses to be debated. Because of the need for tourism revenue for conservation and at times conservation being required to tackle with negative consequences followed from excessive tourism development, the nexus of conservation and tourism development has become a highly important issue for heritage managers, which received much academic attention in the last two decades (e. g. Boniface and Fowler 1993; Robinson, et al. 2000; Harrison and Hitchcock 2005; Winter 2007; Timothy 2007; Prideaux, Timothy and Chon 2008; Timothy and Nyaupane 2009; Hitchcock, King and Parnwell 2010). The heritage making also involves recontextualizing, selecting, renaming, reframing, reorganizing and representing the existing space as heritage where we see an emergence of global, regional, national and local actors – both institutional