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 $competing$ insofar as they are elite imaginations, each striving to disseminate a particular understanding of the nation, and $unfinished$, 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.