This paper examines the 2016 trial of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi by the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the lenses of discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology, with a focus on how trial actors navigated legitimacy challenges. Al Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, was charged with the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu, which were UNESCO World Heritage sites. This paper argues that the trial actors used a rhetorical “local-to-global parallelism” which sought to consolidate a global range of constituencies and legitimate the ICC’s actions both normatively and sociologically. The local-to-global parallelism served to “talk into existence” a broad-based victimhood, which reinforced the court’s symbolic authority and its claims to jurisdiction. It also relied heavily on intertextual connections between the ICC and UNESCO, thereby legitimating the prosecution of cultural heritage destruction as a grave international crime.

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023, a rich body of legal scholarship has tackled various legal issues arising from Israel’s overall military conduct. One issue that has received very little attention is Israel’s destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage. In this article, I demonstrate how Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage has been facilitated through reliance on sources and language of law. Considering this unprecedented level of destruction, I examine the role of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in applying protection and accountability measures in response to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian heritage. I suggest that these three organizations provide the State of Palestine with an entry point to demand recognition, protection, and accountability for the destruction of this heritage. Rather than approaching each organization as an end in itself, I propose engaging with the three organizations simultaneously as tools to be utilized.

This paper examines the underrepresentation of underwater cultural heritage (UCH) within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 1972 World Heritage Convention. Although the 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage provides a dedicated framework, submerged heritage remains inconsistently recognized in World Heritage processes. The paper traces the historical development of UCH recognition, outlines challenges in classification and protection, and considers the potential of sites to be evaluated as possessing Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). It highlights the cultural–natural interconnections of UCH, the risks posed by climate change and human activities, and the need to consider sites in international waters. The authors argue for clearer criteria, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the systematic integration of UCH into nomination dossiers and management plans. This work seeks to inspire stakeholders to prioritize UCH within heritage management systems, ensuring its preservation for future generations and thereby ensuring a balanced representation of human history in the World Heritage List.

Assessing the physical integrity of archaeological sites is vital for heritage conservation management. Using the example of Arslantepe, a prehistoric tell site in south-eastern Türkiye, this article demonstrates the application of RUSLE modelling to estimate surface erosion vulnerability, employing ultra-high-resolution photogrammetry and a field-based geoarchaeological framework. The results reveal contained erosion across the site with localised degradation limited to steep trench walls and spoil heaps, indicating remarkably good site conservation and consolidating the effectiveness of RUSLE modelling as a scalable method for evaluating surface processes and informing conservation strategies on individual archaeological sites.

The History of Mankind-project (HoM) was carried out from 1944–76 under the auspices of UNESCO with the aim of producing a non-eurocentric history of the world from prehistory to the present. The article analyses how the mid-century wave of independence changed the HoM-project. In hindsight a trajectory can be identified from decolonisation as a marginal concern to a new situation where decolonisation as political process and epistemological agenda influenced the HoM with respect to its political aims, organisational structure, the selection of authors, and the narrative of world history it presented. As such it is a clear story of how the end of empire altered how world history has been conceptualised and written. The article explores this theme across four HoM volumes and breaks fresh ground by investigating the agency of individual author-editors and the actual historical narratives they produced in the published volumes. We argue that the approaches and the organisation of the HoM were challenged as anti-eurocentrism in history writing became coupled increasingly to decolonisation and the quest for epistemological sovereignty.

In this article I discuss the issue of place in the creation of decolonised historiography and argue that the location from where a historian produces historiography matters in terms of both conceptual and ideological influences as well as in regards to material circumstances. Making use of a case-study on the UNESCO General History of Africa Project (1964-1998), I bring postcolonial critique on the conceptual nature of academic history writing into conversation with a study of the scholarly practice of the UNESCO project to show that conceptual critique has its limits if it does not take material circumstances into consideration. Political decolonisation in Africa was connected to history writing, thereby blending conceptual and material considerations. Secondly, I look at some of the discussions that were ongoing within the UNESCO project to show that the historians working on it discussed these issues amongst themselves and were aware of critique levelled against them. In doing so I argue that decolonisation of knowledge production as a result of becoming politically independent is a multivarious and ongoing process which has to take into account all these different elements.

This article maps how cultural heritage has been securitized in international discourse by analyzing seven key United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UN Security Council (UNSC) documents (2003–2017). Drawing on the Copenhagen School’s framework and its distinction between identification and mobilization, the study reveals a two-stage process. Initially, heritage destruction was framed as a human rights violation, later escalating into a global security threat linked to terrorism and conflict financing. Through a sectoral and scalar typology of referent objects, the analysis highlights divergent framings by UNESCO (societal, normative) and the UNSC (military, strategic). Despite strong discursive alignment—culminating in UNSC Resolution 2347—the mobilization of extraordinary measures remained limited. The article concludes that heritage securitization is discursively robust but operationally incomplete, shaped by institutional capacities, leadership shifts, and evolving geopolitical contexts. These findings contribute to the broader literature on security politics, norm diffusion, and the symbolic power of heritage in global governance.

As artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber-related challenges become increasingly important in twenty-first-century life, education systems worldwide face pressure to adapt their curricula to meet these demands. Global organizations, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as international EdTech standard-setting bodies, have issued frameworks and policy recommendations to guide the integration of AI and cyber literacy in K-12 (publicly supported primary and secondary) education. This paper examines important information to analyse the role of these international institutions in shaping curriculum reforms, with a focus on AI and cyber education. It evaluates documents such as UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the OECD’s AI Guidelines, and standards from the International Society for Technology in Education and the World Economic Forum. Through a comparative analysis of policy implementation in Singapore, Finland and India, this paper will explore how global norms are being localized. It also examines the implementation gaps, particularly in developing countries, and provides a strategic roadmap for aligning national policies with international norms, while taking into account infrastructure and cultural diversity.

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.

Since the mid-2010s, conflicts at UNESCO over the interpretation of Japanese colonial rule and wartime actions in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, South Korea, and China have been fierce. Contested nominations include the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites for the World Heritage List (Japan), the Documents of Nanjing Massacre for the Memory of the World (MoW) Register (China), and two still pending applications on the Documents on the Comfort Women (South Korean and Japanese NGOs). This paper examines the recent “heritage war” negotiations at UNESCO as they unfolded in a changing political, economic, and security environment. Linking World Heritage and MoW nominations together for a holistic analysis, this paper clarifies the interests of State actors and of various non-State actors, such as NGOs, experts, and the UNESCO secretariat. We discuss the prospects for these contested nominations and recommend further involvement of non-State actors to ensure more constructive and inclusive heritage interpretation to enable a more comprehensive understanding of history.

World heritage has become UNESCO’s flagship programme, and it is a site of active state engagement. At the crux of that engagement is the prestigious World Heritage List. This engagement is regularly analysed as pursuits of national prestige. In this article, I advance a Bourdieusian analysis of world heritage as a field that generates international cultural prestige. I identify humanity as the field’s doxa that allows for a vertical separation and the generation of more-than-national cultural value. I show how states’ desire for this prestige jeopardised the field’s autonomy at a critical juncture in 2010 and analyse the field’s aftermath as involving fraught attempts by states to discursively reconstruct the field’s vertical and functional separations in the quest for international cultural prestige. This reconstruction involves nothing less than reinterpreting humanity as the community-of-states, pointing at once to humanity’s indispensability for more-than-national value and undermining its ability to generate that value.

In this study, a novel measure of interest in all (264) natural or mixed World Heritage sites sourced from an online platform is contrasted with the degree and number of threats as formally identified by the UNESCO (in its State of Conservation database) and the IUCN (in its Conservation Outlook Assessment reporting), when typical site characteristics are accounted for. Information on TripAdvisor reviews is the digitally sourced measure, and the site characteristics originate from the UNESCO World Heritage database including size, year of inscription, kind of site as well as a distinction between mixed and fully natural sites. Results reveal that the number of reviews and threats both relate to years of inscription, kind of site and to a certain extent continent. The degree of threat reacts to all site characteristics except continent. The analysis reveals that TripAdvisor measures the popularity of the site, although this does not automatically mean that it is also threatened.

In 1946, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to promote peace through education and cross-cultural understanding. In the postwar atomic age, American leaders saw UNESCO and education for world citizenship as critical to the prevention of future war, the promotion of a new pluralistic vision, and the development of a well-informed society. A hyper-local case study, this article follows the story of Milton S. Eisenhower, leading UNESCO delegate and president of Kansas State College, and the series of progressive reforms he pursued to promote democracy, citizenship, and global peacebuilding at a rural land-grant college in the center of the former “isolationist belt” of America. This article traces the impact of these curricular reforms, the UNESCO campus-community partnership they inspired, and the subsequent peacebuilding movement that agitated for humanitarian action, civic participation, and desegregation from 1947 to 1950.

This paper seeks to explain the process of collaboration among civil society organizations towards preserving the voices of the “comfort women” and registering related documents with UNESCO. The 14 civil society organizations from 8 countries, mostly those that suffered Japanese invasion and occupation, but also including one from Japan itself, have worked together to compile a dossier of “comfort women” documents for the submission of a joint nomination proposal to UNESCO. However, this project was threatened first by the political deal between South Korea and Japan in December 2015, and later by attempts to use money and state power to subvert UNESCO’s Memory of the World program (MoW). The resulting temporary freeze on the MoW program, talk of changes to its statutes and regulations, and UNESCO’s continued delay in implementing its own decisions raise serious doubts concerning the legitimacy and meaning of the program. A more fundamental question concerns whether and how the voices of victims of violation or discrimination, in this case of the “comfort women”, will be heard, preserved and transmitted to future generations to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities. If the efforts of the recent civil society movement end in failure, what alternative strategies are open to us?

Japan has nominated the Sado Gold Mine for UNESECO World Heritage inscription despite South Korean opposition due to Japan's refusal to recognize the role of wartime Korean forced labor at this location. Japan's previous industrial World Heritage inscription is criticized for similar denials of forced labor history. In this way, the Japanese government has embarked on a “history war” against Korea and the memories of the wartime victims of forced labor. In addition to providing victim testimony, historical sources and local and Korean research reveals that Mitsubishi forced Korean laborers to work in deadly conditions in the Sado mines. Korean forced laborers were taken to Sado Island where they faced racial discrimination and abuse. This article explains why Japan chose to worsen relations with Korea by nominating the Sado mines for World Heritage inscription while concealing the use of forced Korean labor and examines evidence of forced labor at the site.

In October 2017, the application to list the Voices of the Comfort Women archive on UNESCO's “Memory of the World Register” was rejected (or “postponed”). In this paper, I set that decision in the context of other recent instances of “heritage diplomacy” in East Asia, highlighting the tensions between nationalistic agendas and UNESCO's universalist pretensions. I then discuss the nature and extent of similar tensions in the framing of the “comfort women” issue, as manifested in “comfort women museums” (institutions closely associated with the preparation of the 2016-17 Memory of the World application). I focus especially on the case of China, where the Xi Jinping regime first sought to weaponize this issue against Japan, only to pull back in 2018 as Sino-Japanese ties warmed. I conclude by considering how the story of the comfort women might be reframed to underline its global significance (or “outstanding universal value”), in a manner that makes it more difficult for Japanese nationalists to portray the campaign for recognition and commemoration as an anti-Japan conspiracy.