The Battle of Thakhek, 21 March 1946: Traces of a colonial massacre on the Lao–Thai border.

This article examines the 21 March 1946 massacre during the Battle of Thakhek in the First Indochina War, focusing on its enduring but largely unacknowledged impact on local communities in Nakhon Phanom, northeastern Thailand, where many survivors fled. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's concept of the "mnemonic act" and Avery Gordon's notion of "haunting," the study explores how the event's memory persists through inconspicuous sites—a river mound, a clock tower, and a shrine—that embody layered and divergent narratives beyond official commemorations. While the massacre is publicly memorialized in Laos, it remains absent from Thai public memory and historiography, reflecting complex histories of displacement, repression, and ethnic marginalization of Vietnamese refugees in Thailand. The article highlights how these material and symbolic traces sustain the event's afterlife by evoking suppressed histories and social violence, illustrating the multifaceted temporalities and meanings that violent events can acquire outside dominant national narratives.