Elif Kalaycioglu, "The Politics of World Heritage: Visions, Custodians, and Futures of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Oct 30, 2025

Elif Kalaycioglu, an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, dives deep into UNESCO's World Heritage Regime, exploring how it shapes our understanding of cultural history. She discusses how the destruction of Palmyra ignited her passion for this topic. Kalaycioglu breaks down three frameworks of 'humanity' in global politics, highlighting the roles of experts and nation-states in dictating cultural narratives. She raises critical questions about the politics surrounding heritage sites and the future's potential for inclusion and representation.

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INSIGHT

World Heritage As Global Politics

World Heritage is a field of global politics, not just tourism or art history.
States, experts, and institutions pursue heritage for recognition, prestige, and future-making.

ANECDOTE

Palmyra Sparked The Research

The destruction of Palmyra by ISIS motivated Kalaycioglu's research interest.
International emotional attachments to Palmyra revealed how sites become globally meaningful.

ADVICE

Research Method: Read Files And Meetings

Read nomination files and expert evaluations to see how 'humanity' is narrated through sites.
Use meeting records to trace paradigm shifts and state-expert tensions over time.

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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 (Oxford UP, 2025), 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 is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at The University of Alabama.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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