Cambodia's second kingdom is a fine piece of research on elite discourses in post-civil war Cambodia. Following the first general elections organised by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in May 1993, Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) was reinstated as King in September 1993, whereby the second kingdom of Cambodia was reborn after having been abolished in 1970. Norén-Nilsson's book critically addresses the elite's ideological contestations to represent the nation after Sihanouk took over the throne.

Splitting the elite into three major groups—the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), the royalists, and the democrats—the book's major aim is to examine the key political actors who electorally competed with one another within the framework of a multiparty democratic system (p. 35). Prime Minister Hun Sen is the most important actor of the CPP; his efforts to build himself as the only legitimate leader have gone far beyond the ideology of his own political party. Through his manipulation of the narrative concerning a sixteenth-century anti-monarchical figure, Kân, Hun Sen worked to justify his defeat of the royalists and, at the same time, to assert himself as modern Cambodia's national hero. Hun Sen's idea of a people's democracy is the core policy of the CPP, which defines populism as a truly national form of democracy (p. 119). Sihanouk's son Prince Norodom Ranariddh is a key actor representing the royalist party FUNCINPEC, which later split into several different parties and suffered a huge defeat in the general elections in 2008. Ranariddh as well as several other key royal family members utilised Sihanouk's image and turned it into various forms of royalist democracy, including the idea of forming a national union that would allow all parties with seats in the parliament to create a coalition government. The democrats were represented by Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha, former members of FUNCINPEC who formed the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) in July 2012. As both Rainsy and Sokha emerged from a political identity with an anti-Vietnamese and anti-Communist ideology, the two leaders claimed to represent the nation through global liberal democratic discourses and the teachings of Buddha.

Though Norén-Nilsson's focus is on the ruling elite, she brings to light a great deal of original information and interesting points useful for understanding and discussing the post-civil war Cambodian political landscape. The information that she obtained from interviewing 39 key political leaders, including Hun Sen, Ranariddh, Rainsy, and Sokha, together with her close reading of these leaders’ memoirs, is one of the book's most important contributions. Her effective and skilful merging of information from primary sources with scholarship by Caroline Hughes and others display the author's deep understanding of the Second Kingdom's political ideas and events. Moreover, although Norén-Nilsson has concentrated her study on elite discourses during the post-1993 election, her comparative reflections on the Sihanouk regime (1955–70) are useful for understanding the continuities and changes in political thought, particularly among the royalists, between the two regimes.

Norén-Nilsson's extensive discussion on post-conflict Cambodia also raises some questions, however. The author realises that it was not the royalists alone who have drawn on Sihanouk to claim legitimacy and popularity. Hun Sen has also done so, and his supporters have even claimed that he has inherited Sihanouk's moral prowess (p. 194). But Norén-Nilsson does not mention Hun Sen's discourse concerning his success in registering the Preah Vihear temple as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 7 July 2008, just 20 days before the general election. Besides helping the CPP to win by a landslide in the election, the Preah Vihear issue gave Hun Sen the best opportunity to link himself to Sihanouk, who had brought the temple dispute with Thailand to the International Court of Justice and obtained a decision in Cambodia's favour in 1962. Hun Sen's success in putting Preah Vihear on the UNESCO list not only justifies his duty to protect and carry on Sihanouk's legacy, but also enables him to promote Sihanouk's victory over neighbouring Thailand among the Cambodian public as well as the international community.

Readers would also benefit from a more in-depth discussion of the factors that caused FUNCINPEC to collapse. A focus on the top elite's political ideas as well as their perspectives on leadership, in certain respects, is a useful approach to capture the party's core ideology. However, this method also restrains the discussion from seeing a broader picture of the story as these key actors’ political ideology is not always the main factor that determines their party's success or failure. FUNCINPEC failed because of poor leadership and interference by the CPP. The party experienced its first loss in the general election in 1998 mainly because it had suffered from a conflict with the military in July 1997 in which Hun Sen took away Ranariddh's military power and forced the prince into exile. As FUNCINPEC's internal divisions are widely known to have been caused by corruption and Hun Sen's interference, leading to Ranariddh's removal as party head in 2006, its losses in the general elections in 2008 and 2013 should be interpreted above and beyond Ranariddh's efforts to embody the image of his father.