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

Oct 30, 2025

Elif Kalaycioglu, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama and author focused on UNESCO's World Heritage, dives deep into the complexities of cultural history. She discusses how the World Heritage regime constructs various visions of humanity, often excluding marginalized voices. Kalaycioglu highlights the shift from viewing humanity as a single entity to recognizing its diversity and the growing influence of states in curating this narrative. She also addresses the regime's pitfalls and upcoming research on contested heritage sites.

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INSIGHT

Heritage As Global Political Currency

The destruction of Palmyra revealed World Heritage as a site of global political emotion and attachment.
Elif Kalaycioglu shows that states and publics treat heritage as internationally valuable, not just touristic.

INSIGHT

Texts Make Humanity Real

Nomination files and expert evaluations actively construct narratives of humanity's shared cultural history.
Kalaycioglu reads these texts as mechanisms that bring ‘humanity’ into being within the regime.

ADVICE

Mine Archives For Alternative Histories

Use archives and early meeting records to trace discarded designs and alternative regime visions.
Compare early expert evaluations with state nominations to reveal changing representations.

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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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