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Since its adoption in 1948, the 'universal' in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been subject to much academic debate. For its defenders, it is precisely the universality of human rights that guarantees their legitimacy as the normative foundation for a global liberal order.1For its detractors, human rights have often been thought of as reflective of a particular Euro-Western historical experience of atomistic individualism, and not necessarily applicable to, nor inherently desirable for, localities outside their historical emergence.2In recent years, however, the theoretical debate on human rights has largely shifted from attempts to theorise the claimed universality of human rights in terms of a philosophical, religious, or even sociobiological foundation, to conceiving of rights discourse as a particular kind of political practice.3Such approaches tend to prioritise local demands over formal legal precepts of the global human rights regime. At the same time, they also steer clear of an uncritical culturalism, where rights discourses are a priori dismissed as a culturally coded 'foreign' imposition. In short, they focus on the political, instead of legal or philosophical, importance of rights. This article aims to further advance a political understanding of rights claiming, elaborated in dialogue with debates in contemporary post-foundationalist political theory.4
To that effect, the article defends theoretically and illustrates empirically the fundamental importance of claims to universality in contemporary rights discourse, which, as I will argue below, is an issue of central importance in elaborating a political understanding of rights. The first question that I address is what claims to the universal as conveyed through rights discourse do in political struggles. The second question addressed is how the universal ought to be conceived in human rights claiming. Much is at stake here, since it is precisely the claimed universality of human rights that has attracted criticism, not only for being 'particulars in disguise', but also for being opposed to political contestation. Such a function of the universal has been criticised for its ostensibly depoliticising and de-democratising effects on social relations. In this article, I challenge this position and instead argue for the significance of the political potential that universal rights claiming hold.
Drawing in particular on philosopher Jacques Rancière's notion of political subjectification,...