Associate Professor Caroline Hughes

MA, PhD(Hull)

Caroline Hughes is 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.

Associate Professor Governance Studies, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Murdoch University, Murdoch 6150, Australia, Tel: (618) 9360 6658, Fax: (618) 9360 6381, Email: C.Hughes@murdoch.edu.au