RUPP has been a bastion of Cambodian intellectual training and talent cultivation for the past thirty-two years since its reopening in 1980. Particularly, it has significantly contributed to the building of human and institutional capital, and practical knowledge in Cambodia’s development.

While the country is playing an increasingly important role in the regional and global economic, political and cultural dynamics, the past thirty-two years of integration into the international political, capital and cultural flows have brought about challenges and opportunities specific to Cambodia but highly relevant in various ways to countries in both the region and of the world. This Cambodian development experience – of negotiating cultural (knowledge) exchange and identity, confronting the (new) order of international capitalism, western ideologies and dominant knowledge, and engaging in various forms of regionalism and internationalism – and the Cambodian development perspectives of the increasingly connected world remain inadequately understood and under-theorized.