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

Oct 30, 2025

Elif Kalaycioglu, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, sheds light on her groundbreaking work, The Politics of World Heritage. She explores how UNESCO constructs a cultural history of humanity through various political lenses. Kalaycioglu discusses the evolution from viewing humanity as a rarefied subject to recognizing its diversity, highlighting the tensions between state power and expert judgment. She also addresses the challenges within contested memory sites and shares insights on her upcoming research on Silk Roads cultural diplomacy.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Heritage As Global Political Currency

UNESCO's World Heritage regime is a site of global politics where states seek cultural recognition and prestige beyond military or economic power.
States and experts craft narratives about desirable global futures through heritage designation.

ANECDOTE

Palmyra Sparked The Research

The destruction of Palmyra by ISIS motivated Kalaycioglu to study how sites elicit global emotional attachments.
International reactions revealed how World Heritage status shapes claims of shared value beyond direct experience.

ADVICE

Treat Files As World-Building Evidence

Read nomination files and expert evaluations as texts that construct narratives of humanity's cultural history.
Use meeting records and archives to trace shifts, discarded options, and the regime's changing politics over time.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory