22 Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.4, No.2, 2012 ISSN: 1837-5391; http://utsescholarship.lib.uts.edu.au/epress/journals/index.php/mcs CCS Journal is published under the auspices of UTSePress, Sydney, Australia Reconciling Universality and Particularity through a Cosmopolitan Outlook on Human Rights Rebecca Adami Stockholm University, Sweden Abstract Human rights are today criticized as not compatible with different cultural values and the debate has circulated around Asian values and Islamic values as in dichotomy with human rights as universal ethics (Ignatieff, 2003). The theoretical dichotomy between universality and particularity is questioned pragmatically in this paper through a historical study. The working process of drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1946-48, which included thousands of people, is explored as a cosmopolitan space in which individuals from different cultural contexts met to negotiate human rights through cultural narratives. The process where particular values were negotiated with universal notion on human rights resulted in a common proclamation (UDHR) without a common philosophical or ideological ground. This paper puts forth a thesis that human rights discourse can work as a cosmopolitan space, in which particular value systems meet in processes characterized by conflict and cohesion. Hence human rights can be understood as a master narrative compatible with different conflicting cultural narratives (Gibson & Somers, 1994). Introduction The tension between particularity and universality has been articulated within cosmopolitanism in many ways, from Nussbaum’s (2003) words of ‘transcending boundaries of class, gender and nation with narrative imagination’ to Benhabib’s (2008) notion of ‘universalist norms mediated with the self-understanding of local communities’ (Benhabib 2008, p.71). Hence, we have seen a shift in cosmopolitanism from an abstract cosmopolitanism from above (Nussbaum 2003) towards a rooted cosmopolitanism from below (Benhabib 2008). Still, the articulated theoretical problem of a dichotomy between universalism and particularism continues being debated within cosmopolitanism. Negotiating and reconciling universality of human rights with particularity of local, cultural values is one example of a presumed dichotomy between universality and particularity. Human rights can be seen as cosmopolitan ethics, a suggestion made already in 1998 by John Charvet (Charvet 1998). What I aim to do in this paper is to explore empirically the supposed dichotomy between universalism and particularism by facing some allegations of Eurocentrism against the