The Politics of World Heritage: Visions, Custodians, and Futures of Humanity. Oxford University Press, 2025.
In The Politics of World Heritage, Elif Kalaycioglu analyzes UNESCO’s flagship regime, which seeks to curate a cultural history of humanity, attached to “universal value,” and tethered to goals of peace and solidarity. Kalaycioglu’s analysis tracks that construction across fifty years of the regime and under three distinct visions: humanity as a rarefied transhistorical and transgeographic subject, humanity as a diverse subject, and humanity as a subject that is adequately represented by the community of nation states. Each of these constructions relies on epistemic and discursive resources that substantiate and bring into being this cultural-historical humanity. By scrutinizing how these resources are marshaled to the construction of humanity by experts and states, Kalaycioglu’s analysis reveals the desirous entanglements in humanity, and its coproduction as a subject that organizes a hierarchical social, in this case cultural and historical, order. If so, then what about the aspiration to humanity’s peace and solidarity? The book takes up these possibilities as they emerge in relation to various constructions of humanity. It locates in nested narratives of humanity, constructed from its margins and underlining both the interconnectedness and the unevenness of its global politics, visions of peace and solidarity that open up to more robust future possibilities.
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