ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to review Professor Michael Leifer's contribution to the study of Cambodia and the Third Indochina Conflict from the perspective of an international historian of contemporary Southeast Asia. Leifer's writings also display the best practices of contemporary international history. Contemporary history remains a controversial sub-field of history which Jonathan Haslam described as ‘the most contentious and problematic history of all’. The opening of the once secret communist archives has enabled historians to construct a fuller picture of the Cold War period which until its end had been largely shaped by the reading of primary documents declassified regularly by the non-communist Western governments, particularly the United States and Britain. Leifer drew attention to the fact that independent Cambodia faced a security problem that had been in abeyance during the colonial period.
