18/08/2004

"Nothing but history repeating? The colonial nature of ‘Asian Values’"

The Asian Law Institute (ASLI) is proud to invite you to a seminar on the effects of Western colonialism on 'Asian Values' and the development of human rights discourse in Asia, by Ms Kerstin Steiner, a Doctoral Candidate at the Asian Law Centre, Faculty of Law, The University of Melbourne.

Are 'Asian Values' rooted in Western colonialism? Are the ideologies underlying 'Asian Values' in fact a relict of the Western colonial period? The 'Asian Values' debate has been a key focus of the human rights discourse in the past 15 years and during this time, the debate has been redefined to accommodate various political, socal and economic developments. This seminar explores a different perspective to human rights debates and whether former colonised countries undergo, under certain circumstances, a similar development with respect to human rights policies.

Ms Kerstin Steiner
PhD Candidate, Asian Law Centre, Faculty of Law, The University of Melbourne

Ms Kerstin Steiner is a Doctoral Candidate at the Asian Law Centre, Faculty of Law at The University of Melbourne. She is also the Editor of the Asian Law Centre and was previously its Research Assistant where her responsibilities included research coordination of Asian Law Online, the world's largest online bibliographic database which provides English-language materials on Asian Law and related subjects free of charge.

Ms Steiner will be speaking at the 4th EUROSEAS Conference, Paris, 1-4 September 2004 on ‘Singapore’s Role in Developing ‘Asian Values’ – Role Model for the Region?’, Singapore, Central and Singular and on ‘Globalisation, Economic Development and Human Rights in Asia’, Southeast Asia in the New Global Context. She also has a forthcoming publication (written with Nguyen Hung Quang), ‘Ideology and Professionalism: The Resurgence of the Vietnamese Bar’ with John Gillespie and Pip Nicholson (eds),'Asian Socialism and Legal Change: The Dynamics of Vietnamese and Chinese Reform'.

Ms Steiner has spoken on ‘Asian Values’ and Human Rights – In Search of a New Taxonomy for Analysing Comparative Human Rights Studies in Southeast Asia’, Japan Society of Comparative Law Symposium, ‘Agenda and Approach for Comparative Law in the 21 Century Asia’, at Kanazawa University on 5 June 2004. She has also spoken on 'Human Rights and Asian Values’ as a Guest Lecturer in ‘Law and Society in Southeast Asia’ at The University of Melbourne, Faculty of Law in March 2004.