The Politics of World Heritage Visions, Custodians, and Futures of Humanity

What does it take to construct humanity's cultural history and what do these efforts produce in the world? In The Politics of World Heritage, Elif Kalaycioglu analyzes UNESCO's flagship regime, which seeks to curate a cultural history of humanity, attached to "outstanding universal value" and tethered to goals of peace and solidarity. Kalaycioglu's analysis tracks that construction across fifty years of the regime and maps it onto three distinct visions: humanity as a rarified transhistorical subject, humanity as a diverse subject, and humanity as a subject that is adequately represented by the community of nation states. In each of these constructions, experts and states take up the cultural and historical resources that circulate within the regime to narrate a humanity into being, and position themselves as its adjudicators, contributors and custodians. Each construction comes with remainders, that is, parts of humanity excluded from this cultural history, and internal hierarchies between those at its center and others that remain on the margins.

These hierarchies challenge the aspiration to peace and solidarity. While these aspirations have changed across the three iterations of humanity, across the different forms, the regime's structures and participants have been ill-equipped and hesitant to engage with the underbellies of humanity towards robust visions of peace and solidarity. In contrast to this general tendency, Kalaycioglu excavates from select nomination files nested constructions of humanity that hold onto the globality and unevenness of its political conditions and presents the possibility of robust visions of peace and solidarity, and humanity's different futures.

Elif Kalaycioglu, Assistant Professor of Political Science, The University of Alabama

Elif Kalaycioglu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at The University of Alabama. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Kalaycioglu conducts research at the intersection of politics of humanity and global cultural politics, centred on questions of order-making, subjectivity, and recognition. Her work has appeared in Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of International Studies, as well as in the edited volumes Culture and Order in World Politics and Islamic Architecture Today and Tomorrow: (Re)Defining the Field.