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High-Dependency Border Fractures and National ‘Cascading Vulnerability’: A Framework for Identifying Critical Vulnerabilities, Intelligence-Driven Simulation, and Early Warning in Cambodia Based on Structured Knowledge Graphs, with a Discussion on Thailand's Compliance Economic Action Portfolio Amidst Border Conflict Spillover

Submitted:

15 December 2025

Posted:

16 December 2025

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Abstract
Against a backdrop of increasingly frequent external shocks and deepening cross-sectoral coupling, traditional national risk assessments centred on ‘industry/sector’ units often struggle to explain why seemingly localised disturbances rapidly evolve into systemic instability. This paper proposes an integrated ‘Dependency Network–Knowledge Graph (DN-KG)’ framework tailored for intelligence research and academic discourse. This framework abstracts Cambodia's macroeconomic, financial, real estate, fuel and power supply, border security, climate agriculture, tourism services, and governance regulatory systems into node sets. It integrates cross-system constraints and operationalises the DN-KG framework to: DN-KG)‘ framework for intelligence research and academic discourse. This framework abstracts Cambodia's macroeconomic, financial, real estate, fuel and power supply, border security, climate-agriculture, tourism services, and governance-regulation sectors into node sets, while cross-system constraints and transmission relationships are abstracted into edge sets. ’High-betweenness dependency edges" serve as the core indicator for identifying systemic vulnerabilities. Building upon verifiable OSINT data, this paper constructs a reproducible node-edge inventory and cascade mechanism model. This enables evidence-anchored causal chain interpretation and scenario simulation for short-term trigger points (fuel channels and supply chains), medium-term structural vulnerabilities (US export concentration—employment—household debt—financial asset quality), and risk amplifiers (property correction—collateral — non-performing exposures—credit supply contraction). Research indicates that Cambodia's most critical vulnerability lies not in the weakness of any single sector, but in the cascading structure formed by the combined effects of ‘disruptability × cross-sector spillover × recovery difficulty’ along a few high-degree dependency edges. Therefore, resilience-building priorities should shift from ‘sectoral blood transfusions’ to ‘alternative pathways for critical dependency edges, inventory buffers, and institutional stabilisers’. Furthermore, strictly refraining from providing operational coordination or violence optimisation recommendations, this paper proposes a ‘compliant, auditable, reversible, humanitarian exception’ economic action portfolio for Thailand to adopt in the context of conflict spillover. This aims to reduce regional systemic risk and create conditions for de-escalation negotiations.
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Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
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