Kheang Un is Assistant Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at North Illinois University. His interests include democratization, human rights, NGOs, and political economy. Like Caroline Hughes, he serves as a research advisor to the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh.
Kheang Un is Assistant Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at North Illinois University. His interests include democratization, human rights, NGOs, and political economy. Like Caroline Hughes, he serves as a research advisor to the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh.
At the 2011 ICAS-AAS conference in Honolulu, Kheang agreed that we film an interview with him about his research and about his latest book. This was a long interview, which we have split into two clips. In the first, Kheang discusses Cambodian studies in general; he argues that certain long-standing scholarly perspectives on Cambodia (not least the focus on democratic transition and past national traumas) need to change. In the second clip, he describes why and how Cambodia’s Economic Transformation came to be written.