Astrid Norén Nilsson

Astrid Norén-Nilsson is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, which she joined as an Associate Senior Lecturer in 2016. She is also the Director of Studies for the MSc Asian Studies programme.

She received her Ph.D. in Politics & International Studies (2013) from the University of Cambridge, U.K., where she was a Gates Scholar. She was a research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden, the Netherlands, 2013-15. Her scholarship focuses on the politics of Cambodia in the post-conflict reconstruction era (1993 -).

She is the author of the monograph Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell SEAP, 2016). The book was shortlisted for EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize 2017, with the motivation "Astrid Noren-Nilsson’s Cambodia's Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program 2016) is a thought-provoking book about Cambodia’s politics that is highly original in its approach, and grounded in some remarkable research, including numerous interviews with prominent figures. Noren-Nilsson explores notions of monarchy and politics that resonate well beyond the Cambodian case. Highlights include a wonderful chapter on prime minister Hun Sen’s appropriation of the Sdech Kan narrative to identify himself with a sixteenth-century commoner who briefly occupied the Khmer throne; as well as an extended discussion of the rise and fall of the royalist political party FUNCINPEC, which won the 1993 post-UNTAC election but within two decades had been practically wiped out by Hun Sen’s CPP. Cambodia’s Second Kingdom throws new analytical light on Cambodian politics and is essential reading for all serious students of the country."  See here for more information

She has published on themes related to the politics of contemporary Cambodia, addressing in particular the role of nationalist imaginings in shaping the era of multi-party elections, as well as the role of transforming perceptions of legitimate power and of citizenship.  

Research

My research examines Cambodia’s post-conflict reconstruction politics since the 1993 reintroduction of multi-party elections until present.

For my PhD research at the University of Cambridge, I explored the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses and narratives in Cambodia’s new political order. Based on this research, I published the monograph Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell SEAP, 2016). For my postdoctoral research, I shifted to analyse Cambodia's political trajectory through the lens of citizenship. As part of the KITLV research project “From clients to citizens?”, I examined popular ideas of provision, political gift-giving, and citizen rights in the aftermath of the contested 2013 elections.

At Lund, I participated in the VR-funded research project "Civil Society Elites: New Perspectives on Civil Society in Cambodia and Indonesia" (2018-2020). I am currently the PI of a research project which looks at the impact of the pandemic on political developments in Cambodia (2022-24).  

Teaching

Astrid supervises Masters theses.