Possibilities Of Global Governance: World Heritage And The Politics Of Universal Value And Expertise

Abstract

This dissertation turns to UNESCO’s world heritage regime to analyze the possibilities of global governance in a pluralizing world order. By pluralizing world order, I mean the contemporary global political context in which a greater number of actors take part in making and the remaking of the order, based on a range of substantive visions and demand recognition for these visions. Within this context, culture has emerged as an axis of plurality and demand-making. Established in 1972, UNESCO’s world heritage regime, has governed cultural heritage, based on a conception of culture as universalizable, through a universal value adjudicated by international experts, and towards a convergent heritage of humanity. The challenges it has faced to these foundations since the mid-1990s, and the resulting renegotiation of the regime provide a critical vantage point onto my analytical question. Towards this analysis, I develop a theoretical framework that foregrounds the relation between the world order and global governance. In a context of plurality, this link is negotiated through contentious participation: actors engage in piecemeal renegotiations of the ideational-institutional contours of existing regimes. I trace the emergence and early implementation of the world heritage regime in a permissive political context and ideational hegemony. This stands in contrast to the contestation and renegotiation of the regime’s universalist conception of culture since the mid-1990s, connected to the changing global politics of culture. I analyze the challenges to the actors and relations of authority, grounded in similar dynamics and consequential for how the regime can act in the world. Lastly, I focus on a recent trend of nominating contentious sites, which conflict with the world order’s historiography of maintaining peace and with the regime’s congruently progressive universal historiography. In a pluralizing world order, these nominations bring Other histories of the order onto the regime’s stage. It is, not a putative universal, but an engagement with plurality that can foster the renegotiation of these contested histories, and point the way to not only the possibility but also the desirability of the world heritage regime.