Associate Professor Caroline Hughes

MA, PhD(Hull)

Caroline Hughes is Director of the Asia Research Centre and Associate Professor of Governance Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Murdoch University. She is a graduate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Oxford and she obtained her MA and PhD as an ESRC Scholar at the Centre for South East Asian Studies, University of Hull, in the UK. She held two post-doctoral fellowships, first as a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellow at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and then at the University of Nottingham in the UK. Caroline subsequently held teaching and research appointments at Nottingham and Birmingham Universities in the UK, most recently as Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Asian Studies in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, at the University of Birmingham. She has also held visiting fellowships at the ANU’s Centre for Humanities Research and at Melbourne University’s Institute for Asian Languages and Societies. She is currently an external research advisor to the Governance Team at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh.

Caroline’s research interests focus on two related questions: the politics of post-colonial state-building in South East Asia; and the politics of post-conflict reconstruction and international aid policy. In pursuit of these interests, she has conducted a number of studies on the ways in which international aid politics and policy prescriptions relating to human rights, democracy promotion and ‘good governance’ have affected indigenous processes of state-building and concstruction of state-society relations. To date her field research on these questions has been focused on two post-conflict countries in South East Asia: Cambodia and Timor-Leste.

Publications

Recent publications include:

  • “Democratization and Communication in Asia,” Special Issue, Pacific Affairs, 78.1 (2005) (editor).
Projects
Caroline is currently working on four projects.
  • an individual project entitled, “Mainland Southeast Asia: Soldiers, Monks, Borders” which examines the militarization of borders in the context of economic integration in the Mekong region, and the impact on ethnic minorities, and political and religious dissidents in Cambodia, southern Vietnam, Thailand and Eastern Burma.
  • a joint project with Professor Garry Rodan examining the politics of accountability in comparative context across South East Asia.
  • Collaboration with Dr Kheang Un of Northern Illinois University in editing a book entitled Cambodia's Economic Transformation which examines the political impact of national, regional and global integration in Cambodia over the period from 2003-2008;
  • Collaboration with Professor Dick Robison, Dr Ian Wilson, Dr Jane Hutchison from the Asia Research Centre, and with a team from Gadah Majah University in Indonesia on the Political Economy of Governance Reform in Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia.
Contact Details
  • Director, Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Murdoch 6150, Australia, Tel: (618) 9360 6658, Fax: (618) 9360 6381, Email: C.Hughes@murdoch.edu.au
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