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Global politics of cultural heritage: Status, authority, and geopolitics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2025

Elif Kalaycioglu Open the ORCID record for Elif Kalaycioglu [Opens in a new window]  and
Jelena Subotić Open the ORCID record for Jelena Subotić [Opens in a new window]
Elif Kalaycioglu
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
Jelena Subotić*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
*
Corresponding author: Jelena Subotić; Email: jsubotic@gsu.edu
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Abstract

Despite the widespread and creative use of heritage politics by a range of international actors, such as multilateral institutions and states, the field of International Relations (IR) has paid insufficient attention to the topic. To the extent that these politics have entered the field’s attention, it has been primarily through instances of highly publicized cultural heritage destruction during armed conflict. This special issue brings together eight research articles, as well as a framing introduction and a conclusion, with the aim of launching international heritage politics as an important IR research agenda. Moving beyond destruction to the productive politics of heritage, these contributions show the range of these politics from the construction of international cultural status to forging contemporary international alliances along themes of cultural and historical familiarity. Further, they show heritage politics at work in international institutions, from UNESCO to the ICC, in bilateral and multilateral relations, and as moving between international and domestic politics. In these broad deployments, heritage politics are attached to museum collections, travelling exhibits, archaeological digs, DNA tests, restitution demands, and debates on international land swaps.

Keywords

cultural heritageinternational orderinternational statusUNESCOhumanity

Information

Type
Introduction
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 51 , Special Issue 6: The Global Politics of Cultural Heritage , November 2025 , pp. 925 - 937
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British International Studies Association.

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References

1 For further elaboration on defining heritage, and the problematic distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage, as well as the implications of these debates on the UNESCO’s world heritage regime, see Rodney Harrison, ‘What is heritage?’, in Rodney Harrison (ed.), Understanding the Politics of Heritage (Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 5–43, at 9–14, and Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (Routledge, 2012), pp. 114–39.

2 Elif Kalaycioglu, The Politics of World Heritage: Visions, Custodians and Futures of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2025).

3 For a book-length treatment of the role of experts in world heritage, see Luke James, Experts in the World Heritage Regime: Between Protection and Prestige (Springer, 2024).

4 Tim Winter, ‘Heritage diplomacy’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21:10 (2015), pp. 997–1015. For how this is beginning to change, see Ryoko Nakano, ‘A geocultural power competition in UNESCO’s Silk Roads project: China’s initiatives and the responses from Japan and South Korea’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 52:2 (2023), pp. 185–206.

5 For the link between critical heritage studies and UNESCO’s world heritage regime see: Christoph Brumann, ‘Anthropological utopia, closet eurocentrism, and culture chaos in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena’, Anthropological Quarterly, 91:4 (2018), pp. 1203–33. See also Tim Winter, ‘Clarifying the critical in critical heritage studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19:6 (2013), pp. 532–45.

6 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Susie West and Jacqueline Ansell, ‘A history of heritage’, in Susie West (ed.), Understanding Heritage in Practice, Understanding Global Heritage (Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 8–11; Jorge Otero-Pailos, Jason Gaiger, and Susie West, ‘Heritage values’, in Susie West (ed.), Understanding Heritage in Practice, Understanding Global Heritage (Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 47–9; Rodney Harrison, Heritage, pp. 44–6. For comprehensive readers also see Graham Fairclough et al. (eds), The Heritage Reader (Routledge, 2008); Brian J. Graham and Peter Howard (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Ashgate Publishing, 2008); and Sophia Labadi and Colin Long (eds), Heritage and Globalisation (Routledge, 2010).

7 West and Ansell, ‘A history of heritage’, pp. 8–11; Otero-Pailos, Gaiger, and West, ‘Heritage values’, pp. 47–9; Harrison, Heritage, pp. 43–4.

8 West and Ansell, ‘A history of heritage’, pp. 32–35; Harrison, Heritage, pp. 52–6.

9 Jon Beasley-Murray, ‘Vilcashuaman: Telling stories in ruins’, in Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 212–32, at p. 213; Todd Samuel Presner, ‘Hegel’s philosophy of world history via Sebald’s imaginary of ruins: A contrapuntal critique of the “new space” of modernity’, in Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 193–212, at p. 196.

10 Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, p. xv.

11 In distinguishing between authorized and official, we follow Laurajane Smith’s labelling of expert interpretations as authorized heritage discourse. In both cases, the meaning and value of heritage is adjudicated top-down, and at a distance from communities of identification. However, one designation foregrounds the role of experts, whereas the other points to the role of official political structures. In turn, as the hyphen implies, these two streams can work in tandem. Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Routledge, 2006).

12 Lynn Meskell, ‘Negative heritage and past mastering in archaeology’, Anthropological Quarterly, 75:3 (2002), pp. 557–74.

13 John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 84, 94–128 and 223–63.

14 Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, p. 128.

15 Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (Columbia University Press, 2014).

16 Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, pp. 105–47.

17 John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 84, 94–128 and 223–63; Meskell, ‘Negative heritage’.

18 Harrison, Heritage, pp. 32–7. See also Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Theorizing heritage’, Ethnomusicology, 39:3 (1995), pp. 367–80; Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, p. 141.

19 Tim Winter, The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 47, 101–5.

20 Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage, pp. 193–202.

21 Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 24, 47, 78–9, 98–9, 116.

22 Harrison, Heritage, see especially pp. 42–3, 122–7; Jan Turtinen, Globalising Heritage: On UNESCO and the Transnational Construction of a World Heritage (Stockholm Center for Organizational Research, 2000).

23 UNESCO, ‘Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage’, (1972) available at: {https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext}.

24 Preamble, UNESCO 1972 Convention.

25 Sites are nominated by states that have territorial sovereignty over them, and site evaluations are conducted by international experts brought together by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which acts as an advisory body to the regime on matters of cultural heritage. This process, however, has faced severe challenges since 2010, with states often overturning expert evaluations. For a book-length treatment of this shift, see Christoph Brumann, The Best We Share: Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021).

26 Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage, pp. 73–129. See also Brumann, ‘Anthropological utopia’.

27 Smith, Uses of Heritage.

28 Brumann, The Best We Share, pp. 54–60.

29 Harrison, Heritage, see especially pp. 42–3, 122–7.

30 For the process of composing this panel and evaluating world heritage nominations at the time of writing, see available at: {https://www.icomos.org/world-heritage/}.

31 Aurélie Elisa Gfeller, ‘Anthropologizing and indigenizing heritage: The origins of the UNESCO Global Strategy for a representative, balanced and credible World Heritage List’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 15:3 (2015), pp. 366–86. See also Christina Cameron, ‘Recognizing associative values in World Heritage’, PLURAL, 8:1 (2020), pp. 17–26. Important challenges remain in the valorization of Indigenous heritage as world heritage. See for example, Irene Fogarty, ‘Coloniality, natural world heritage and indigenous peoples: A critical analysis of world heritage cultural governance’, in Marie-Theres Albert et al. (eds), 50 Years World Heritage Convention: Shared Responsibility–Conflict & Reconciliation (Springer, 2022), pp. 43–55.

32 Phyllis Mauch Messenger (ed.), The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property: Whose culture? Whose property? (University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Laurajane Smith, ‘The repatriation of human remains – problem or opportunity?’, Antiquity, 78:300 (2004), pp. 404–13.

33 Denis Byrne and Gro Birgit Ween, ‘Bridging cultural and natural heritage’, in Lynn Meskell (ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader (John Wiley & Sons, 2015), pp. 94–111.

34 For an example of world heritage status benefiting an Indigenous community, see Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘The ethics and politics of world heritage: Local application at the site of Laponia’, Journal of Global Ethics, 18:2 (2022), pp. 286–305. For outstanding issues, see Celmara Pocock and Ian Lilley, ‘Who benefits? World heritage and indigenous people’, Heritage & Society, 10:2 (2017), pp. 171–90.

35 See, for example, Royce Kurmelovs, ‘Cultural genocide: Australian state putting industry before heritage, Indigenous women tell UN’, The Guardian (6 July 2022), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/06/cultural-genocide-australian-state-putting-industry-before-heritage-indigenous-women-tell-un}; Lisa Cox, ‘Woodside faces Indigenous legal challenge to seismic blasting at WA gas site’, The Guardian (18 August 2023), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/18/woodside-faces-indigenous-legal-challenge-to-seismic-blasting-at-wa-gas-site}; Eva Corlett, ‘Maori tribes make rare plea to King Charles for intervention in New Zealand politics’, The Guardian (11 December 2024), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/11/new-zealand-maori-tribes-letter-king-charles-treaty-of-waitangi}.

36 Lynn Meskell, ‘UNESCO and the fate of the World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts (WHIPCOE)’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 20:2 (2013), pp. 155–74.

37 United Nations Press Release, ‘Thailand: UN experts warn against heritage status for Kaeng Krachan national park’ (23 July 2021), available at: {https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/07/thailand-un-experts-warn-against-heritage-status-kaeng-krachan-national-park}.

38 Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage, pp. 236–8.

39 Oumar Ba, ‘Contested meanings: Timbuktu and the prosecution of destruction of cultural heritage as war crimes’, African Studies Review, 63:4 (2020), pp. 743–62; Oumar Ba, ‘Governing the souls and community: Why do Islamists destroy world heritage sites?’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 35:1 (2022), pp. 73–90; Elif Kalaycioglu, ‘Aesthetic elisions: The ruins of Palmyra and the “good life” of liberal multiculturalism’, International Political Sociology, 14:3 (2020), pp. 286–303. For a similar exploration that moves beyond the context of destruction see Filip Ejdus, ‘Abjection, materiality and ontological security: A study of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina’, Cooperation and Conflict, 56:3 (2020), pp. 264–85.

40 Matthew S. Weinert, ‘Grounding world society: Spatiality, cultural heritage, and our world as shared geographies’, Review of International Studies, 43:3 (2017), pp. 409–29; Matthew S. Weinert, ‘Reading world society phenomenologically: An illustration drawing upon the cultural heritage of humankind’, International Politics, 55:1 (2018), pp. 26–40, Oumar Ba, ‘Who are the victims of crimes against cultural heritage?’, Human Rights Quarterly, 41:3 (2019), pp. 578–95; Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage.

41 Lerna K. Yanık and Jelena Subotić, ‘Cultural heritage as status seeking: The international politics of Turkey’s restoration wave’, Cooperation and Conflict, 56:3 (2021), pp. 245–63; Deborah Barros Leal Farias, ‘UNESCO’s World Heritage List: Power, national interest, and expertise’, International Relations, 37:4 (2023), pp. 589–612; Elif Kalaycioglu, ‘Confirming, suturing and transforming international recognition: The case of world heritage’, International Theory 17:2 (2025), pp. 208–37; Jelena Subotić, The Art of Status: Looted Treasures and the Global Politics of Restitution (Oxford University Press, 2025).

42 Enrico Bertacchini, Claudia Liuzza, and Lynn Meskell, ‘Shifting the balance of power in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee: An empirical assessment’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23:3 (2017), pp. 331–51; Enrico Bertacchini et al., ‘The politicization of UNESCO World Heritage decision making’, Public Choice, 167:1 (2016), pp. 95–129; Brumann, The Best We Share; Christoph Brumann, ‘Slag heaps and time lags: Undermining southern solidarity in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee’, Ethnos, 84:4 (2019), pp. 719–38; Claudia Liuzza and Lynn Meskell, ‘Power, persuasion and preservation: Exacting times in the World Heritage Committee’, Territory, Politics, Governance 11:7 (2023), pp. 1265–80, Lynn Meskell, ‘Gridlock: UNESCO, global conflict and failed ambitions’, World Archaeology, 47:2 (2015), pp. 225–38, Lynn Meskell, ‘Transacting UNESCO World Heritage: Gifts and exchanges on a global stage’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 23:1 (2015), pp. 3–21, Lynn Meskell, ‘States of conservation: protection, politics, and pacting within UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee’, Anthropological Quarterly, 87:1 (2014), pp. 217–43, Lynn Meskell and Christoph Brumann, ‘UNESCO and new world orders’, in Lynn Meskell (ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader ( John Wiley & Sons, 2015), pp. 22–42; Lynn Meskell and Claudia Liuzza, ‘The world is not enough: New diplomacy and dilemmas for the World Heritage Convention at 50’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 29:4 (2022), pp. 391–407; Lynn Meskell et al., ‘Multilateralism and UNESCO World Heritage: Decision-making, states parties and political processes’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21:5 (2015), pp. 423–40.

43 See for example Steve Wood, ‘Prestige in world politics: History, theory, expression’, International Politics, 50:3 (2013), pp. 387–411, at pp. 389, 392; Deborah Welch Larson, T.V. Paul, and William Wohlforth, ‘Status and world order’, in Deborah Welch Larson, T.V. Paul, and William Wohlforth (eds), Status in World Politics ( Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–29, at pp. 7, 8–9, 12; Paul Musgrave and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘Defending hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic capital and political dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War’, International Organization, 72:3 (2018), pp. 591–626, at p. 596; Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent, ‘The status of status in world politics’, World Politics, 73:2 (2021), pp. 358–91, at p. 26.

44 For an intervention that challenges this long-standing oversight, see Subotić, The Art of Status.

45 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘Soft power’, Foreign Policy, 80 (1990), pp. 153–71.

46 Marc Askew, ‘The magic list of global status: UNESCO, world heritage and the agendas of states’, in Sophia Labadi and Colin Long (eds), Heritage and Globalisation ( Routledge, 2010), pp. 33–58, Barros Leal Farias, ‘UNESCO’s World Heritage List’.

47 Jelena Subotić, ‘The 19th-century “antiquities rush” and the international competition for cultural status’, Review of International Studies, (2025), pp. 1–16, Available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525100892}; Elif Kalaycioglu, ‘World heritage and inter/national cultural prestige’, Review of International Studies (2025), pp. 1–19, Available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052510096X}.

48 Franziska Boehme, ‘Restitution of Colonial Heritage Collections: Partial Norm Implementation in Belgium and the United Kingdom’, Review of International Studies, (2025). For a similar authorization function that emerges in relation to ICOMOS, the advisory body to UNESCO, see James, Experts in the World Heritage Regime and Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage.

49 Matthew S. Weinert, ‘Crimes against cultural heritage: World-building at the International Criminal Court’, Review of International Studies (2025), pp. 1–16, Available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101009}; Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘The protection of cultural property in times of armed conflict: Ethics, gender and coloniality’, Review of International Studies (2025).

50 Filip Edjus and Marina Vulović, ‘Catharsis, rearticulation of desire and ontological insecurity: The case of Serbia’s attachment to Kosovo’, Review of International Studies (2025), pp. 1–21, Available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101058}.

51 Tim Winter, Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Tim Winter, The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Tim Winter, ‘One belt, one road, one heritage: Cultural diplomacy and the Silk Road’, The Diplomat, 29: (2016), pp. 1–5. See also Lina Benabdallah, ‘Spanning thousands of miles and years: Political nostalgia and China’s revival of the Silk Road’, International Studies Quarterly, 65:2 (2021), pp. 294–305.

52 Deborah Barros Leal Farias and Guilherme Casarões, ‘Heritage as power: History and tradition in constructing Brazil’s far-right populism’, Review of International Studies (2025), pp. 1–17, Available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525000233}; Lerna Yanık and Fulya Hisarlıoğlu, ‘Heritage geopolitics: Hegemonic meaning making, international orders and the heritagization of traditional archery in Turkey and beyond’, Review of International Studies (2025), Available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101228}.

53 Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage, pp. 215–22, 231–5.

54 Elif Kalaycioglu, ‘Odesa and World Heritage Politics’, Duck of Minerva (14 March 2023). Available at: {https://www.duckofminerva.com/2023/03/odesa-and-world-heritage-politics.html}.

55 Meskell, Future in Ruins, pp. 153–4.

56 Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) and Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage, pp. 160–8, 207–22, 230.

57 Kalaycioglu, ‘Odesa’.

58 For a field-defining intervention on ontological security, see Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:3 (2006), pp. 341–70. For calls for more inclusive and just memory regimes, see Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star and Kalaycioglu, Politics of World Heritage, pp. 160–8, 207–22, 230.