Southeast Asia has been witness to a multitude of violent conflicts over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. This conceptual paper is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Postmemory work and the digital in Southeast Asia’ that explores how, within its distinctive historical, sociopolitical and media contexts, the digital is being used by predominantly young actors — the so-called postmemory generation — to remember, contest and reimagine violent pasts. The article aims to prepare the conceptual ground for the contributions to follow, but also more generally for future research looking into postmemory work and the digital in Southeast Asia and beyond.

The Khmer Republic (1970–1975) is generally remembered as a shell state, a by-product of the Vietnam War in the hands of the Americans. Marginalised in academic research, the republican regime has left a limited and scattered hard archive of memoirs, official records, publications, newsreels and pictures. Against this backdrop, this paper tries to assess the space the digital provides to Khmers in Cambodia and the diaspora to articulate their memories of the Khmer Republic and the civil war. It also seeks to analyse both the kind of tools the digital gives to researchers to extend this archive and the ways in which this expanded or hybrid archive may support forms of activism. To do so, this paper looks at a selected set of 30 videos of the Khmer Republic on YouTube and their comments and explores the affective, historiographical and political dimensions of online memory practices. Through this analysis, it proposes postmemory not only as a topic to be investigated, but also as a research practice central to the generation of a critical archive of that period in Cambodia.

Timor–Leste’s independence generation are recording theirs visions of the future, challenging past inequalities. Here the concept of ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2007) is brought into conversation with reproductive justice, exploring how these two theoretical concepts and their applied practice, can be generative. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016–2026 this paper analyses performances from youth groups reccorded by local radio journalists. Here I argue that (post)memory work may be a considered a form of reproductive justice in praxis. The digital as a reproductive medium is part of this praxis as a tool of communication and replication. The digital serves as a space for remembering, reimagining and reproducing a more equal and just future. As present the possibilities of this are constrained by equal access to digital resources, which is undergoing rapid change.

This article analyses vernacular discourses of war memory in user commentary on the 1945 Battle of Manila on YouTube. This pivotal yet overlooked event of the Pacific War resulted in unprecedented casualties and infrastructure damage in the Philippines. Our sequential mixed-method analysis of user commentary on selected videos identified a predominant focus on postmemory sharing and infrastructure destruction, with little intersection with discussions of justice and accountability. We argue that overlooking the battle’s human cost as a matter of justice contributes to its marginalisation in collective memory, highlighting a failure to acknowledge the conflict’s broader historical and ethical implications.

Current research on the Second Indochina War has largely focused on memory narratives of prominent figures and institutions while overlooking the lived experiences of Vietnamese people. As a work of autoethnography, this paper tells reflective stories about my Vietnamese Australian family and our use of digital and non-digital media to construct memories of the War both in Việt Nam and Australia. These stories bring forth important nuances of intergenerational and transnational memories rooted in the legacies of the War and the expansion of global digitality. This paper contributes to the shift towards storytelling, personal and family histories, and (auto)ethnography as innovative ways to study post-conflict memories in digital and non-digital spaces.

This article examines how digital media in Myanmar enables postmemory transmission amid Ethno-political conflict. Using Hirsch’s concept, I analyse how rights activists and Ethnic Armed Organisations employ postmemory work to construct belonging. Based on Yangon fieldwork (2019–2020), the study contrasts two modes: one transcending Ethnic boundaries through shared oppression narratives, another reinforcing Ethnic distinctions. A digital rights activist links minority persecution with activists’ suffering, creating cross-ethnic solidarities. Conversely, the YouTube film The Way of Rakhita mobilises postmemory to affirm Rakhine identity and armed struggle. Conceptualising postmemory as transmission clarifies how memory work perpetuates conflict or generates inclusive belonging.

A pyramidal composite of figures standing 18 metres high, Manila’s People Power Monument commemorates the events of the 1986 People Power Revolution, in which over a million people gathered to bring to an end the 20-year-long dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. Designed by Philippine sculptor Eduardo Castrillo in 1993, the monument stands at the site on which the protestors converged and has become the focal point of public commemorations, which take place annually from the 22 to 25 February to mark the anniversary of the revolution. This article examines the ways in which digital memory work around the People Power Monument is used to reconnect with the past and to both contest and support the Marcos family following the 2022 election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the presidency.