Book:
Kalaycioglu, Elif 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.
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “World Heritage and the Construction of Inter/national Prestige.” Review of International Studies, forthcoming.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “Confirming, suturing and transforming international recognition: the case of world heritage.” International Theory. 2025.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “Wonder and Nature-Thinking: Beyond Terra Nullius and into the Anthropocene” Millennium Journal of International Relations. 2024.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “Cultural Diversity and World Politics.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. 2020.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “Aesthetic Elisions: The Ruins of Palmyra and the 'Good Life' of Liberal Multiculturalism.” International Political Sociology, 2020.
Tagma, Halit Mustafa, Elif Kalaycioglu, and Emel Akcali. “ ‘Taming’ Arab social movements: Exporting neoliberal governmentality.” Security Dialogue 44.5-6 (2013): 375-392.
Book Chapters:
Kalaycioglu, Elif. The Tourist Gaze, Visiting Mosques, and the Folds of Architecture. In Mohammed Gharipour and Daniel E. Coslett (eds). Islamic Architecture Today and Tomorrow: (Re)defining the Field. Intellect Books, 2022: 355-371.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. Governing Culture ‘Credibly’: Contestation in the World Heritage Regime. In A. Phillips & C. Reus-Smit (Eds.), Culture and Order in World Politics (LSE International Studies). Cambridge University Press, 2020: 294-316.
Book Reviews:
Kalaycioglu, Elif. (New) Constructivism and Power: Theories, Pragmatics and Relations, H-Diplo. 2023.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. Cultural Heritage and the Politics of Sovereignty in Palestine, MERIP. 2021.
Public Writing:
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “Odesa and World Heritage Politics.” Duck of Minerva, 14 March 2023.
Kalaycioglu, Elif. Calling Ukrainian refugees more ‘civilized’ than Syrians requires willful amnesia. The Monkey Cage, 22 March 2023 (with Oumar Ba and Lina Benabdallah).
Kalaycioglu, Elif. “Hagia Sophia and the Multi-Level Politics of Heritage.” Duck of Minerva, 15 Jul 2020.