About the Book:This book offers a critical reassessment of the “Asian values” debate, which dominated the human rights discourse in the late 1990s, and a reappraisal of the human rights situation in Asia sincethen. In this book Asian and non-Asian scholars contextualize the “Asian values” debate and examine in what ways the issues raised then continue to trouble Asian societies. Human rights are seen both in the context of political developments in individual Asian countries as well as in relation to global issues such as the Global War on Terror. The book challenges the reader to critically examine human rights rhetoric and practice both in Asia and globally.