Pathways to Leadership within and beyond Cambodian Civil Society: Elite Status and Boundary-Crossing

Elitisation in Cambodian civil society and how such processes relate to holding elite status in the state, electoral politics, and economic fields, is poorly understood. This article seeks to identify different pathways to becoming an elite within and beyond Cambodian civil society. We focus on four case studies, representing different forms of organisations within the sectors of agriculture and youth. Three main questions are explored. Firstly, we identify different forms of capital needed to reach elite status in civil society. Secondly, we explore how elite status within civil society is related to elite status within other fields, by identifying three pathways of boundary-crossing (Lewis, 2008a) from civil society into the state, electoral politics, and economic fields. Thirdly, we map the perceived possibilities and limitations of each field. In exploring these questions, this article argues for a reappraisal of Cambodian civil society, shifting attention to the networks and platforms that fall outside of the dominant focus on professional NGOs. By empirically tracing how elites move between fields, it aspires to provide a better understanding of the contours of, and relations between, civil society and other fields (including government, electoral politics, and business), including in terms of what particular forms of power pertain to each

Erik den helige - katolsk nationalsymbol i protestantiskt land

I föreliggande uppsats studerar jag en avhandling, De Erico IX sive Sancto, från 1700-talet. Avhandlingen handlar om Erik den helige och författaren heter Petrus Schvantesson Höök. Den framlades vid Uppsala universitet 1712 under professor Fabian Törner. Min undersökning är en jämförelse mellan den medeltida Erikslegenden och ovannämnda avhandling, där jag koncentrerat mig på att undersöka innehållet i respektive text, och i mindre utsträckning granskat språket. Vad gäller innehållet är de båda texterna så gott som identiska: Alla elementen ur legenden finns med i avhandlingen. De båda verken skiljer sig dock ändå åt; till att börja med är avhandlingen mycket längre än legenden. Detta kan delvis förklaras med att det är skilda genrer; i en helgonlegend citerar man normalt inte andra författare som man gör i en avhandling. En annan skillnad som inte enbart kan förklaras med genrebytet är att Erik lyfts ur det katolska sammanhanget och införs i ett protestantiskt: hans obestridliga katolska tillhörighet placeras i skymundan och i stället framhävs hans kungliga börd. Erik slutar räknas som helgon i första hand och blir i stället svensk erövrarkung som ska ha kristnat och kuvat Finland – en värdig föregångare till Gustav II Adolf och Karl XII. Den oftast fientliga relationen till Danmark blir också tydlig i Hööks text när han omtolkar begreppet ondska: ond betyder i avhandlingen inte längre "anknuten till djävulen", som i legenden, utan i stället "dansk". I avhandlingen finns dessutom spår av göticistiska tankar och av intresset för antikvarisk vetenskap som tog fart under 1600-talet

Imagining Cambodia: Competing Nationalisms in the Second Kingdom (1993-)

This dissertation examines the national imaginations advanced by political party actors in the Kingdom of Cambodia (KOC, 1993 - ). lt explores three interrelated questions: What do different Cambodian political projects imagine the political contents of the nation to be? How do these competing imaginations bear on political party actors' claims to represent the nation? How do competing imaginations of the nation play out in contemporary Cambodian politics? This leads to a fourth question: How useful can attention to national imaginings be for understanding political developments in a post-conflict setting? In 1993, multi-party democratic elections were held and a constitutional monarchy reinstated in Cambodia, in the wake of more than two decades of civil war. Whilst the imperative of nation-building loomed larger than ever, the main political actors continued to advance radically different imaginations of the Cambodian nation, each laying claims to exclusively represent it. Taking Benedict Anderson's definition of the nation as an "imagined community" as a starting point, this thesis considers contemporary political contestation in Cambodia in terms of competing, unfinished, imagined communities. They are $\textit{competing}$ insofar as they are elite imaginations, each striving to disseminate a particular understanding of the nation, and $\textit{unfinished}$, since they are continuously subject to practices of reimagination. This thesis proposes that these competing national imaginings fanned a prominent dynamic inseparable from wider political contestation in the KOC. It is argued that to make the new democratic politics mean something, all political party actors turned to the nation as the most important part of the answer. Political actors redefined their political projects by rearticulating ideas of the political contents of the nation, and their own role in representing, embodying or defending it. This defined bids for political legitimacy. Key notions of the new political setting such as democracy, royalism and populism were articulated as part of the same process. The dissertation maps out the national imaginations advanced by political actors with an institutional base in Cambodia's main political parties competing electorally in the KOC. It examines these as three contending sets of political actors: the Cambodian People's Party, royalist parties, and democratic parties. From different angles, it explores conceptions of the contours and characteristics of the nation and how it is to be politically represented, entailing questions of the nature of democracy, constructions of the people, elected versus inherited leadership, embodiment, and, ultimately, continuity and change in such conceptualisations