Brendan Howe
Brendan Howe (PhD Political Science, Trinity College, Dublin; MA International Conflict Analysis, Canterbury; BA/MA Modern History, Oxford) is Dean and Full Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University, Korea. He is currently President of the Asian Political and International Studies Association, and Co-President of the Korean International Studies Association. He researches on human security, peacebuilding, middle power diplomacy, and democratic governance in East Asia, and has published a dozen books and over 90 articles and book chapters on related topics. Recent major publications include Niche Diplomacy of Asian Middle Powers (Lexington, 2021), UN Governance: Cambodia and East Timor (with Sorpong Peou and Yuji Uesugi, Palgrave, 2020), Regional Cooperation for Peace and Development (Routledge, 2018), National Security, Statecentricity, and Governance in East Asia (Springer, 2017), Peacekeeping and the Asia-Pacific (with Boris Kondoch, Brill, 2016), Democratic Governance in Northeast Asia: A Human-Centred Approach to Evaluating Democracy (Palgrave, 2015). Post-Conflict Development in East Asia (Ashgate, 2014), and The Protection and Promotion of Human Security in East Asia (Palgrave, 2013). He is the Editor of the Asian International Studies Review, and a series editor for Palgrave Macmillan (Security, Development, and Human Rights in East Asia).
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Method: This research project used a qualitative approach consisting of literature review and document analysis. The results of this study should be supplemented by quantitative and qualitative studies in the future. The literature review consists of a comprehensive assessment of scholarly academic publications from competing perspectives in the fields of political philosophy, public administration and international relations. The document survey is mainly related to the policy documentation output of national governments and international organizations.
Results: The research identifies how the divide between the Western (European) and non-Western (Asian) traditions has regularly manifested in competing governance policy prescription. Yet, due to further divergence within these traditions, and a degree of overlapping consensus between them, the paper also rejects the discredited but still influential Asian values, Clash of Civilizations, and communitarian relativist paradigms.
Conclusion: The research project engaged holistically with the contemporary values debates between universal and relativist perspectives at multiple levels of governance, from national, through regional, to international organizational, and ultimately global. Ultimately it rejects both extreme positions at all levels of governance – nowhere is there a completely shared understanding of universal values or their implications in terms of governance responsibilities, but at the same time the mutual exclusivity of relativism is also disproven. Instead, the findings of the research point towards an overlapping consensus of value understandings from competing epistemological perspectives.
Method: This research project used a qualitative approach consisting of literature review and document analysis. The results of this study should be supplemented by quantitative and qualitative studies in the future. The literature review consists of a comprehensive assessment of scholarly academic publications from competing perspectives in the fields of political philosophy, public administration and international relations. The document survey is mainly related to the policy documentation output of national governments and international organizations.
Results: The research identifies how the divide between the Western (European) and non-Western (Asian) traditions has regularly manifested in competing governance policy prescription. Yet, due to further divergence within these traditions, and a degree of overlapping consensus between them, the paper also rejects the discredited but still influential Asian values, Clash of Civilizations, and communitarian relativist paradigms.
Conclusion: The research project engaged holistically with the contemporary values debates between universal and relativist perspectives at multiple levels of governance, from national, through regional, to international organizational, and ultimately global. Ultimately it rejects both extreme positions at all levels of governance – nowhere is there a completely shared understanding of universal values or their implications in terms of governance responsibilities, but at the same time the mutual exclusivity of relativism is also disproven. Instead, the findings of the research point towards an overlapping consensus of value understandings from competing epistemological perspectives.