Heritage is a ubiquitous part of global politics. The destruction by militant Islamist groups of the Buddhas of Bamiyan and of Sufi shrines and mosques in Timbuktu and the ruins of Palmyra have made global heritage politics visible for everyone. The concern with these acts of destruction was not limited to art historians and conservation specialists. They were widely covered by the international news media and resulted in the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) 2016 prosecution of Ahmad Al Faqi al-Mahdi for his role in the destruction of Timbuktu’s Sufi shrines and mosques, most of which had been designated as world heritage sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Beyond these well-publicized cases, heritage has also been integral to the Belt and Road Initiative pursued by the People’s Republic of China. Here, the narrative and material recovery of the Silk Roads heritage, the curation of travelling exhibits, and world heritage nominations have all served important political purposes.
Heritage also plays a role in global politics through restitution demands by postcolonial nations whose art objects populate the world’s greatest museums. Decisions regarding the retention or restitution of artefacts are now a part of bilateral diplomatic relations. States also mobilize the heritage they do have to pursue international cultural status and prestige, and to project cultural and historical influence beyond their borders. Heritage, then, mobilizes a range of actors, including states, international institutions, and museums. It is mobilized for various political ends, from pursuing international alliances, status, and prestige to rejecting and transforming global political visions.
What, then, is heritage, and what makes it politically useful and salient? We define heritage as a configuration of material sites, intangible practices, and their narratives, which together tell cultural histories of communities and attach communities to political ideas and ideals.Footnote 1 These cultural histories regularly draw on past ‘golden ages’ and include mythologized origin stories. In other words, they narrate the past, and then project these communities into the future.
For example, China is currently actively constructing its Silk Road heritage through the excavation and preservation of related material sites. These sites are then presented as testaments to a cultural history of the exchange of ideas and material goods between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This heritage is proposed as a forgotten past. Its recovery seeks to construct the contemporary states in the geographic area of the historical Silk Roads as a community with a shared and cooperative cultural history, but which now operates under the auspices of the Belt and Road Initiative. Instances of heritage destruction similarly highlight this nexus of community and politics. The destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan represented Buddhist histories of the geographical region that is present-day Afghanistan, while the Sufi shrines and mosques in Timbuktu demonstrated the heterodox religious practices of Sufi Islam. These cultural heritage sites, then, challenged fundamentalist claims that these places were home only to religiously orthodox and homogeneous communities, and so they had to be destroyed.
Heritage is, thus, politically potent as a means of constructing political communities. This, then, indicates that heritage narratives do not necessarily emerge over time through bottom-up processes, but are also constructed top-down, with the involvement of political figures, experts, and institutions. The brief history we sketch out here next traces the emergence of heritage as a professional, public, and political endeavour in eighteenth-century Europe. This history illustrates that heritage construction and reconstruction take place in the present and in tandem with contemporary political problems, needs, and goals. Consequently, heritage narratives can strip cultural histories and communities of their complexity and instead strive to provide a usable past. That usable past is curated by dispensing with material and narrative remnants that may be contradictory or jarring, such as sites belonging to ethnic or religious minorities, or by stitching together disparate periods into one continuous narrative, such as by presenting modern ethno-national communities as the direct descendants of ancient civilizations.
One can, then, do a lot with heritage. In this special issue, we draw attention to three critical facets of the global politics of cultural heritage: the generation of international status and prestige, the authorization of political actors and actions, and the construction of communities to forge geopolitical relations and alliances. With sites and artefacts that evoke ‘golden ages’ of cultures and civilizations, heritage is a source of international status and prestige through the holdings of national museums or the designation of world heritage status. As a global political domain, cultural heritage authorizes states and international institutions by expanding their range of action and identification. These actors become the heirs, custodians, contributors, and adjudicators of particular sites and artefacts, and by extension, of the cultural histories and communities they represent – which, at their most ambitious, extend to all of humanity.Footnote 2 Looking at global politics through heritage also reveals the authority of unexpected actors, such as museums or professional cultural organizations, which can grant international cultural status in their own right.Footnote 3 Finally, heritage is part of the construction of communities at the global political level. Sometimes, this is a competitive construction, as states vie to have the highest number of world heritage sites or of precious Greco-Roman artefacts. At other times, carefully curated political efforts seek to generate communities of like-minded states and forge geopolitical alliances between them.
In bringing global heritage politics into International Relations (IR), a discipline that has so far paid it sparse attention, this special issue makes a few claims. First, heritage is a ubiquitous element of global politics, and as such it deserves greater theoretical, empirical, and analytical attention from the field. Second, attending to heritage reveals further expanses of global politics. These expanses involve the unexpected spaces where global politics plays out – national museums, underwater dives to discover submerged heritage sites, or tournaments that bring together traditional archers from Central Asian countries. And it uncovers the broader set of resources mobilized in constructing, challenging, and transforming global politics, which include art objects, ancient ruins, and rejuvenated traditional sports. Third, and relatedly, heritage reveals a new source of authority that enables the states and international institutions that use these sites and artefacts to make claims to power, status, and control.
Heritage, community, and politics
We suspect there are a few reasons for IR’s lack of attention to this facet of global politics. The institutional home of global heritage politics is UNESCO, itself an understudied international organization. Its mandate comprises education, science, and culture, domains that IR has traditionally assumed to be of less import to global politics than political economy, security, or international law. Other sites and actors of global heritage politics are museums and international cultural and expert organizations, which the discipline considers to be even more tangential to its concerns. In fact, the interdisciplinary scholarship we engage with from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and geography, among others, makes the related point that heritage is useful to states precisely because it is not high politics.Footnote 4 It raises fewer eyebrows to hold a Silk Roads exhibition than to hold a high-level meeting for a Belt and Road Initiative agreement. On the contrary, cultural cooperation holds positive connotations for scholars and practitioners of global politics. Finally, and more understandably, heritage politics itself has been gaining salience in the last decade and a half. As our opening examples note, in part, this salience is connected to highly publicized acts of heritage destruction, which motivated IR scholarship to ask why these artefacts had become targets in conflicts. Further, heritage is increasingly tethered to prestige and status projects, bilateral and multilateral relations, order-making, and remaking visions.
In contrast, the interdisciplinary literature on the subject is rich and growing, including that of the young field of critical heritage studies.Footnote 5 A key insight of this scholarship is that heritage sites and artefacts are concrete carriers of abstract ideas and, as such, they have been attached to various social purposes over time.Footnote 6 For example, the remains of the ancient Agora of Athens are valued as material manifestations of an early experiment in participatory democracy. These dynamics operate at both the domestic and international levels – and as multiple contributions to this special issue demonstrate, these levels are often entangled. The questions heritage sites and artefacts have been asked to answer and the social purposes to which they have been marshalled since the eighteenth century have included the origins of humanity and the world, the construction of Enlightened European publics through the preservation and glorification of Greco-Roman antiquities, and – from the nineteenth century onwards – the construction of national myth-histories.Footnote 7 While the international dimension of heritage politics did not ebb with its nineteenth-century attachment to national origin stories, this was a time when heritage moved from the hands of amateur collectors to public institutions, with the establishment of national historical registers in France, the United Kingdom, and Italy.Footnote 8 The nineteenth century, then, marks a turning point in heritage becoming a public and official affair. This was also when the nascent field of archaeology would begin to generate conservation and interpretation expertise, further divorcing heritage from the activities of the intrepid adventurers of earlier centuries.Footnote 9 The scientific claim to interpretation and conservation would only grow over time , existing in a complex relationship with the national-political interest in heritage.
As the foregoing illustrates, and as succinctly put by David Lowenthal, ‘heritage husbands community and identity’.Footnote 10 Material artefacts and their authorized-official interpretationsFootnote 11 are marshalled in the construction of communities around a shared cultural, social, and political history. Decisions on what to place on national heritage registers, and thus treasure and preserve, are inseparable from the production and reproduction of a community’s identity. If a community is defined as multi-ethnic, it is more likely that sites and artefacts associated with minority histories will be placed on heritage registries. In contrast, when communities are defined in ethno-national terms, the fates that befall these sites can range from benign neglect to active destruction.Footnote 12 Further, political transitions that reconstitute community identities are often refracted through heritage sites, as evidenced in debates on what to do with colonial artefacts in postcolonial contexts, earlier debates on the preservation or destruction of Soviet statues in post-Soviet states, and the continued controversy around the fate of statues of white supremacists .Footnote 13 Defined as heritage, then, certain material sites and artefacts, or intangible practices such as ‘national’ dances, become tasked with telling the stories of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going, at levels that range from the local to the national, from the civilizational to humanity at large.
These are, furthermore, narratives that endow the communities in question with prestige and a common purpose.Footnote 14 Heritage narratives regularly draw on episodes that embody the nation’s glorious past, with corresponding preservation of battlefields and sites where foundational treaties and texts were signed, or the construction of monuments to those moments which then enter the heritage repertoire. The preservation of these material remains and their presentation as testaments to golden ages aim to guide the community in the present and future. Heritage sites, however, can also be linked to histories of injustice around which community cohesion, self–Other boundaries, and political ideas are kept alive.Footnote 15
In addition to the selective preservation of material sites and intangible practices, husbanding community and identity also requires carefully curated stories. Returning to Lowenthal, heritage narratives are not necessarily historically accurate, and they rarely offer nuanced interpretations.Footnote 16 Instead, heritage narratives skip over ill-fitting periods and sites, connect disparate episodes into a continuous story, and fail to mention any complexities or tensions.Footnote 17 These selective stories, then, are made and remade in the present, and with contemporary concerns in mind.Footnote 18 For example, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was Japan that sought to activate a Silk Roads heritage. Japan’s narrative curation aimed to illustrate that, in contrast to its military-imperial World War II identity and actions, Japan had previously played an important role in cooperative intra-Asian economic and cultural relations.Footnote 19 What was at stake in that heritage politics was a post-World War II moment when Japan was striving to represent itself as a good member of the international community and its region. From the present, heritage-making travels to the past, engaging with it selectively in sleights of hand that suture distinct periods into one story, excising undesirable elements. For example, current stories of the Silk Roads heritage present ‘China’ as a continuous civilization and political unit. Thus, the world heritage nominations of the Silk Roads submitted by the People’s Republic of China define ‘China’ as always having valued and steered inter-civilizational cooperation, and as being well suited to undertake that role to ensure a shared prosperous future for mankind.Footnote 20
We note that there is a dual, Western-centric thread at work here: namely, the history of heritage politics we have sketched and this particular frame for understanding heritage. As Lynn Meskell puts it, there are and there have always been many ways to relate to, appreciate, and preserve the past.Footnote 21 And yet, the foregoing are the frames that have become dominant, shaping global heritage politics.Footnote 22 UNESCO’s world heritage regime has been a key site for the globalization of Western heritage frames.Footnote 23 The regime is grounded in the idea that some elements of cultural and natural heritage are ‘of outstanding interest’, and thus ‘need to be preserved as part of the World Heritage of mankind as a whole’.Footnote 24 This process involves placing on the prestigious World Heritage List (WHL) sites nominated by states and evaluated by international experts as possessing the requisite ‘outstanding universal value’ (OUV).Footnote 25 The six criteria that were formulated to operationalize OUV placed a premium on monumental materiality and art history, and considered traditional settlements as sites to be preserved against the ravages of time rather than as living heritage sites.Footnote 26 This emphasis on monumental materiality to the detriment of lived, vernacular heritage corresponds to what Laurajane Smith has called ‘authorized heritage discourse’, which she juxtaposes with the embodied and intangible heritage traditions of Indigenous communities in Australia.Footnote 27
The world heritage regime’s preservation approach has also historically relied on a Western conception of material authenticity. This conception considered ‘inauthentic’ – and as therefore potentially lacking OUV – heritage that required material interventions, such as less durable structures that needed partial rebuilding, or Asian spiritual sites that were regularly reconstructed precisely to preserve their authenticity as places of worship.Footnote 28 The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) - advisory body to the world heritage regime on cultural heritage - was instrumental in the formulation of the criteria and preservation standards for OUV.
Heritage scholars have noted both the international influence of conceptions of world heritage and the challenges of applying these frames globally.Footnote 29 Importantly, these conceptions and the resulting practices have (partially) transformed over time, owing to epistemic shifts as well as demands from excluded communities. Whereas, in the early years, ICOMOS evaluations of world heritage nominations were authored by a small group of European experts, today the advisory body’s evaluation panels are carefully selected, taking into account the geographical representation of experts and the nominations on the docket each year.Footnote 30 A pivotal moment in this transformation took place in the mid-1990s, when the French anthropologist Isac Chiva successfully argued for the inclusion of vernacular heritage and know-how in the OUV criteria, and Australian experts introduced the changes that opened the regime up to Indigenous heritage.Footnote 31
Crucially, that latter quest was shaped by Indigenous communities’ mobilization in Australia and North America. The Indigenous peoples’ demands included the return of the human remains that were exhibited in museums and the restitution of their sacred artefacts that were displayed as art objects, as well as an acknowledgement that Indigenous heritage should be respected.Footnote 32 Among other things, that respect would necessitate overcoming the culture–nature boundary that informed Western approaches to heritage.Footnote 33
In certain respects, these demands generated some improvements, most evidently in relation to the return of human remains. There are also good examples of world heritage nominations by Canada and Australia, where Indigenous frames are foregrounded in making the case for a site’s significance and value.Footnote 34 And yet, Indigenous communities continue to face formidable hurdles when it comes to recognition of their heritage, which is inseparable from the recognition of the communities and political ideas that are attached to heritage sites and practices. Some of these challenges and contestations play out at the national level, as evidenced by recent campaigns.Footnote 35 Others are entangled with the global politics of heritage. For example, in 2000, the push for the formation of a new committee with statutory standing, which was to be called the World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts (WHIPCOE), was resisted; it would ultimately be prevented by the United States, France, and Israel.Footnote 36 Instead, the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on World Heritage (IIPFWH) was created in 2017 and joined the annual World Heritage Committee meetings, at which the regime’s implementing decisions are taken, as an observer. However, the regime’s implementation continues to impact the lives of Indigenous communities. For example, UN human rights experts in 2021 urged the deferral of the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex’s world heritage nomination discussion, given the evictions and other rights violations faced by the Karen, the Indigenous group that inhabits this area of Thailand.Footnote 37 The state delegations that make up the World Heritage Committee proceeded with the discussion, and the site was added to the World Heritage List despite these high-level reservations, prompting an IIPFWH observer to call it one of the worst days in the Convention’s history for Indigenous people.Footnote 38
Global heritage politics
So far we have noted that heritage is shot through with political dynamics, including at the international level. While rearticulating that IR scholars have paid insufficient attention to heritage politics, we also note the early work that was carried out on the subject and the increased attention received by this topic in more recent times . In fact, this special issue brings together multiple authors who have already produced relevant scholarship, as well as authors of recent and forthcoming monographs on world heritage and heritage restitution. Some of the existing IR work has taken its cue from heritage destruction, querying why these sites became targets and why their destruction raised an international outcry, questions it has answered by pointing to the political ideas that these sites represent.Footnote 39 Some authors have focused on the world-making aspects in play at UNESCO’s world heritage negotiations, taking stock of the attempt to construct a world and a humanity around a shared cultural history.Footnote 40 Yet others have explored how states use heritage sites as sources of status and prestige.Footnote 41 Building on this existing work, this special issue urges for a more concerted research agenda in order to further our understanding of the global politics of cultural heritage and propose future research directions.
Scholars working within other disciplinary fields have already incorporated insights from IR into their analyses of global heritage politics. This work has focused primarily on UNESCO’s world heritage regime, analysing states’ practices of pact-making and vote-coordinating, and the challenges of gridlock that inflict the regime’s implementation.Footnote 42 These analyses all point to the ways in which heritage is a domain of global politics and governance, and thus all suffer from a similar set of challenges. This special issue, however, takes a different route and places greater emphasis on the particular ways in which heritage is a politically productive and salient domain.
International status and prestige
IR literature has already identified culture as a source of status and prestige.Footnote 43 However, this role of culture has mostly been acknowledged in passing and not developed further.Footnote 44 One oft-cited exception is Joseph Nye’s conceptualization of soft power, which understands cultural prestige and influence as the successful international projection of national attributes.Footnote 45 In fact, some work on world heritage prestige has analysed it in a similar way, viewing that process as the international projection of national cultural identities.Footnote 46
And yet, the contributions by Jelena Subotić and Elif Kalaycioglu here illustrate that global heritage politics emerges at the intersection of international and national cultural prestige.Footnote 47 Specifically, Subotić’s article illustrates how the nineteenth-century imperial competition between France and Great Britain shaped the politics of cultural acquisition and the construction of national cultural heritage in both empires. This status competition then produced the massive collections of artefacts still held in their respective national museums, which continue to mark these countries as international cultural powerhouses. National cultural heritage, therefore, was internationally shaped by the specific artefacts that were desired, and by a competitive quest for their accumulation. Moving further forwards in time, Kalaycioglu’s contribution demonstrates how UNESCO’s world heritage regime generates a distinctly international form of cultural prestige that is nationally coveted. At the crux of this prestige is the regime’s grounding proposition that there is such a thing as the shared heritage of humanity. Further, the regime designates this heritage as possessing outstanding universal value, and as more than the sum of all nationally important heritage sites. This is an unmistakably international cultural distinction. Consequently, Kalaycioglu argues that states’ engagement with world heritage is not limited to international projections of national heritage. World heritage designation is also pursued because it allows states to position themselves as custodians of – or better still, contributors to – this international cultural prestige.
Authorized by heritage
Attending to heritage politics illuminates a greater range of actors who have authority in the conduct of global (cultural) politics and points to a greater range of action for international institutions and states. These authorizing functions entail making decisions on the value and custodianship of cultural sites and artefacts.
Illustrating the first dynamic, the contributions by Subotić and Franziska Boehme highlight the role of museums.Footnote 48 Subotić shows how national museums have long been fundamental to the construction of international cultural status. Focusing on the nineteenth century, Subotić points to a key historical continuity critical to both artefact acquisition and the emergence of the national museum as a source of international cultural status: the endurance of the narratives regarding the ‘heritage of humankind’ and ‘descendance’ that have been used to support claims to the rightful possession and custodianship of looted artefacts. While states have resorted to both narratives, museums have tended to mobilize those of the shared heritage of humankind to refuse restitution demands and make the case for their continued ownership of such artefacts.
It is these contemporary restitution politics that Boehme’s contribution centres to illustrate the authority that museums can have in the matter. Comparing the uptakes of the emerging restitution norm in Great Britain and Belgium, Boehme shows how, while Belgian museums are stuck between the federal government’s support for restitution and stipulations against breaking up collections, private museums in Britain are able to return artefacts permanently or temporarily in the form of long-term loans, despite political resistance by the previous Tory government. Both contributions, then, illustrate how in the global politics of heritage, museums are key actors as providers of cultural status and, at times, as decision-makers that can impact the future of that status.
The articles by Matthew Weinert and Annika Bergman Rosamond focus on the world-making dynamics that emerge in relation to heritage destruction, and illustrate how heritage extends the authority of international institutions.Footnote 49 Weinert turns to the Policy on Cultural Heritage, issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s Office of the Prosecutor. Tracing the efforts to incorporate heritage protection into the ICC’s mandate, Weinert explains the underlying logic at work as one of comprehending the world as a cultural space around which social relations are organized. He identifies these efforts as extending and deepening the ICC’s role as ‘an agent for humanity’, adjudicating on its behalf. In productive contrast, Bergman Rosamond casts a critical-feminist glance at UNESCO’s military manual on heritage destruction. She notes the absence of communities of identification – or legatees, in heritage-speak – from the document, and points to a key ethical question that it fails to mention. Namely, she asks what the potential perils of militarized heritage protection might be, and whether these efforts might, inadvertently, render heritage sites more prone to becoming sites of conflict. Her analysis reveals that heritage politics authorizes not only UNESCO but also Western militaries as actors, due to the material protection both can offer in times of conflict.
Finally, Kalaycioglu’s contribution explicates the stakes of states pursuing the international prestige of world heritage through a regime which allows states, and only states, to nominate sites within their boundaries for consideration for world heritage status. Further, the World Heritage List displays each included site under the name of the state which has territorial sovereignty over it. Kalaycioglu analyses speeches state delegations have given after their nominated sites were placed on the WHL to show how, through ‘their’ world heritage sites, states present themselves as homes to, custodians of, and contributors to humanity’s internationally prestigious heritage.
Geopolitics of heritage: Competitions, negotiations, and alliances
As noted, heritage narratives are marshalled in support of the present-day construction of communities, and for the association of those communities with political ideas. Filip Ejdus and Marina Vulović’s contribution to this special issue illustrates how a proposed land swap between Serbia and Kosovo led to renewed official attention to the medieval Serbian Queen Helen of Anjou’s heritage in Northern Kosovo.Footnote 50 Thus, concerns raised by a present-day territorial dispute resulted in efforts to recover mediaeval heritage and generate national sentiments around it. The aim was to revalorize this land as another site of continuous Serbian presence to compensate for the potential loss of territory that had long been integral to Serbian heritage narratives. Further, the authors note the challenge of audience reception, partially rooted in the substance of this recovered heritage: the figure of Helen, as Western, Catholic-born, and a woman, stood at a distance from the dominant narrative of the Serbian heritage canon, comprised only of male members of the Nemanjić dynasty.
Community building around heritage is not only a domestic endeavour. Field-shaping work by Tim Winter has illustrated how the recovery and mobilization of the Silk Roads’ heritage seeks to foster various international communities as heirs of a shared cultural history, to serve the goals of present-day cooperation around the Belt and Road Initiative.Footnote 51 In this special issue, the contributions by Weinert and Kalaycioglu illustrate the aspirations to a global community that emerge around the idea of humanity’s common heritage. In turn, Subotić draws attention to the competitive dynamics of heritage communities, with inter-imperial artefact accumulation doubling as competition for the claim to be the rightful heir of Greco-Roman civilization.
The contributions by Deborah Barros Leal Farias and Guilherme Casarões, and by Lerna Yanık and Fulya Hisarlıoğlu, foreground the simultaneous and entangled dynamics of domestic and international community building through heritage.Footnote 52 Leal Farias and Casarões zero in on how heritage can be used as a form of political power. Focusing on Bolsonaro’s right-populist approach to heritage, they show how the narrative stitching together of the monarchical and military periods constructs Brazil as a socially conservative Christian community and attaches this community to related political ideals. That suturing, the authors point out, ignores a key historical fact: namely that the military put an end to the Brazilian monarchy. What is at stake, in other words, is the curation of a usable past to construct a political community in the present. At the same time, these conservative heritage narratives, with a demonstrably rhetorical so-called ‘anti-woke’ emphasis, are mobilized internationally to foster a community of like-minded, ethno-nationalist states against liberal globalization, or so-called communist cosmopolitanism, and their proponents.
Turning to another case of right-wing populism, Yanık and Hisarlıoğlu identify similar inter/national heritage politics in Turkey’s revitalization of traditional archery. Foregrounding the productive politics at work, Yanık and Hisarlıoğlu show how this revitalization began at the embodied level, constructing contemporary practitioners of traditional archery as pious sportsmen, and creating a spectatorship. Internationally, traditional sports such as archery are often favoured by populist regimes and juxtaposed with modern sports, which are seen as corrupt, both economically and as a result of the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The Nomad Games, an international tournament of traditional archery, brings together Central Asian countries. It performs a similar function to that of other forms of heritage, using sports to construct an international traditional community, in contradistinction to the liberal-modern one.
These contributions, then, extend existing insights on the global geopolitics of heritage by showing how competitive and community dynamics coexist, and by attending to the productive and multi-scalar politics of heritage tasked with constructing domestic and international communities attached to particular political visions.
Future research directions
In concluding, we lay out some fruitful future research directions and acknowledge some of the limitations of our project. First and foremost, the contributions to this special issue illustrate the political salience of the three facets of global heritage politics we have emphasized: namely, international status and prestige, authorization of actors and actions, and the construction of geopolitical communities. The empirical and analytical exploration of these dynamics is far from exhausted, and more work is needed to uncover how cultural heritage has become part of international statecraft in these ways. Beyond these dynamics, future research can analyse dimensions of global heritage politics that this special issue has not been able to cover, but towards which it provides important initial insights. These are, among others, contested heritage, ‘natural’ heritage, and non-hegemonic heritage politics.
By contested heritage we mean heritage that is contested either in its interpretation or ownership. Both forms of contested heritage have recently become more salient. In the last half decade or so, states have been pushing to include on the World Heritage List sites that are associated with recent conflicts.Footnote 53 In 2023, amidst the war and supported by its allies, Ukraine nominated Odesa as a world heritage site.Footnote 54 Cambodia’s 2008 nomination of Preah Vihear, which lies on a contested Thai–Cambodian border, and the site’s subsequent placement on the list generated diplomatic tensions between the two countries that culminated in border skirmishes.Footnote 55 While these examples are not exhaustive, they point to key, and at times strongly interrelated, dynamics. Sites related to recent conflicts raise issues of interpretation, and specifically the question of whether the sites are presented in ways that foreground justice and human rights and make room for memory solidarity, or whether they become vessels for stabilizing exclusionary, nationalist, or victors’ narratives.Footnote 56 While these dynamics have long existed at the national level, the involvement of international institutions expands the scale of these politics and should be of concern to IR scholars. At the same time, the example of Preah Vihear shows how heritage can become a way of leveraging sovereignty. A similar dynamic is at work in underwater heritage recovery efforts, which seek to discover material proofs of past presence to leverage contemporary claims. And finally, Odesa’s case shows the potent intersection of these dynamics: the nomination framed the city as multicultural and Western, distancing it from its entanglement with Russian history and contemporary Russian claims on it, and sought to institutionalize it as a site of international value and concern.Footnote 57 The interdisciplinary insights we have synthesized on the potency of heritage in constructing communities and political visions provide important starting points from which to analyse politics of contested heritage. Further, the contributions by Subotić, Boehme, Kalaycioglu, and Weinert gesture to the role of discourses and institutions in adjudicating heritage value, possession, and custodianship. These are productive grounds for further investigations on the global politics of contested heritage.
Second, the contributions to this special issue focus on cultural heritage, which as we have noted is a complicated designation, and primarily on its material manifestations, with the exception of Yanık and Hisarlıoğlu’s analysis of the intangible heritage of traditional archery. Future research could expand beyond this focus. While it is well established that cultural heritage sites are linked to tourism and related development networks, natural heritage brings into view other global financial and political connections, which in turn are associated with resource extraction, wildlife preservation challenges, and newer investments in eco-tourism. They are important sites of global economics and geopolitics. Further, these dynamics often play out to the detriment of local populations, who are displaced, dispossessed, or fail to benefit from the profits generated by these sites’ renewed international visibility. And last but not least, these dynamics illustrate a long-standing critique by Indigenous communities, who have argued that the natural and cultural heritage binary is a flawed one, as it continues to come at the cost of cultural devaluation and political dispossession. Illustratively, the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex in Thailand was designated as world heritage not only despite the displacement of the Karen Indigenous community, but also as a natural rather than cultural or mixed heritage site. And, lest we forget, insofar as they regularly involve unceded sovereignty, these politics of Indigenous heritage are also international.
Finally, heritage politics are not the exclusive domain of hegemonic, official engagements. Official efforts to present simplified and exclusionary heritage narratives are regularly resisted on the ground. This resistance includes grassroots mobilizations that demand more inclusionary and just narratives. In making an initial case for IR to take heritage politics seriously, the contributions to this special issue have focused on their official uptake by states and by international and cultural institutions. In doing so, the contributions have cast a critical gaze on these efforts, in particular for their competitive-accumulative dynamics, nationalist mobilization, geopolitical ambitions, and contributions to militarization. The articles have also brought in glimpses of the resistance to these efforts. Ejdus and Vulović note how the local population understood the official efforts at heritage recovery as strategic and insincere, whereas Boehme’s contribution brings in the voices of grassroots activists for artefact restitution, and their responses to the actions and inactions of museums.
There is, however, greater room to explore these counter-mobilizations, and the more inclusionary possibilities and politics of heritage they advance. Some of these counter-mobilizations object to existing material artefacts, demanding the removal of statues that honour white supremacy. Those mobilizations target the exclusionary visions of community and politics that, for example, monuments to the Confederacy or statues of Cecil Rhodes represent. Other counter-mobilizations advance more inclusionary memory regimes by challenging official narratives, advancing more capacious ones, or by seeking to protect minority heritage sites that suffer from benign neglect or active destruction. In urging for further attentiveness to these counter-mobilizations, the challenges they face, and the inclusionary heritage narratives they present, we recall a key insight of ontological security scholarship: as subjects – individual and collective – we navigate the world with narratives of who we are. Heritage is a key site of establishing those narratives for communities in the present and for the future. Therefore, the normative call that we make is not to dispense with heritage, but to think about its more just and inclusive possibilities.Footnote 58
