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This article uses recently declassified archival documents from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) concerning the Calcutta Youth Conference of February 1948. This evidence contradicts speculation that ‘orders from Moscow’ were passed to Southeast Asian communists at this time, helping to spark the rebellions in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma and the Philippines later that year. Secret working papers now available to researchers show no signs that the Soviet leadership planned to call upon Asian communists to rise up against their national bourgeois governments at this point in time. This article outlines the real story behind Soviet involvement in events leading up to the Calcutta Youth Conference, showing both a desire to increase information and links, and yet also a degree of caution over the prospects of local parties.

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The Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR), launched in late 2009, draws together experts, practitioners and policymakers from the University of Cambridge and far beyond to think critically and innovatively about pressing governance and human rights issues throughout the world, with a special focus on Africa. The Centre aims to be a world-class interdisciplinary hub for fresh thinking, collaborative research and improving practice.The CGHR Working Papers Series is a collection of papers, largely peer-reviewed, focussed on cross-disciplinary research on issues of governance and human rights. The series includes papers presented at the CGHR Research Group and occasional papers written by CGHR Associates related to the Centre's research projects. It also welcomes papers from further afield on topics related to the CGHR research agenda. Abstract: This paper assesses the supposed dichotomies between Western and Asian perspectives on human rights and shows how such tensions are often false and should be rejected. Despite the deep flaws inherent in the "Asian values" approach, however, its ideology remains a powerful internal framework that continues to influence the political and judicial elite in Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore. This is chiefly due to the lack of any competing theory regarding the conceptualization of human rights in the Asian context. The paper point out the gap in the jurisprudence in this area and concludes with some general observations on how to advance a model of rights protection to fill this lacuna.

The article examines the role and place of the Islamic universities of Indonesia in training personnel for foreign policy activities and the dissemination of the values and ideals of Indonesian moderate Islam on a global scale.