Negotiating Culture and Human Rights

Since the human-rights atrocities of World War II, this critical issue has stood at the forefront of international relations. The question of universal human rights is inherently embroiled in power politics, but it has also given rise to a renewed intellectual debate over issues of cultural relativism versus universalism. This volume draws essays from a summer seminar for college teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at Columbia University. Central to their discussion is the "Asian values debate", so named because of the relativist ideals embraced by recent Asian governments. By tracing the relativist and universalist arguments of human rights through such issues as criminal justice, women's rights, and ethnicity, the contributors forge a new way of looking at this dichotomy. This new view is articulated as a sort of "chastened universalism," not as concerned with searching for pre-existing common values among different cultures, but for ways to create them.