Cambodia's Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy

Cambodia's Second Kingdom is an exploration of the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses, and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 reintroduction of a multiparty democratic system. Competing nationalist imaginings are shown to be a more prominent part of political party contestation in the Kingdom of Cambodia than typically believed. For political parties, nationalistic imaginings became the basis for strategies to attract popular support, electoral victories, and moral legitimacy. This book uses uncommon sources, such as interviews with key contemporary political actors, to analyse Cambodia's post-conflict reconstruction politics. It exposes how nationalist imaginings, typically understood to be associated with political opposition, have been central to the reworking of political identities and legitimacy bids across the political spectrum. The author examines the entanglement of notions of democracy and national identity, and traces out a tension between domestic elite imaginings and the liberal deomcractic frame in which they operate.