Book dossier

UNESCO, cultural heritage, and outstanding universal value

by Sophia Labadi

"Explores the international legal framework developed by UNESCO to identify and protect world heritage, as well as its implementation at the national level. Drawing on close policy analysis of UNESCO's major documents and extensive professional experience at UNESCO, as well as in-depth analyses of case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Sophia Labadi offers a nuanced discussion of the constitutive role of national understandings of a universalist framework. The discussion departs from considerations of the World Heritage Convention as Eurocentric and offers a more complex analysis of how official narratives relating to non-European and non-traditional heritage mark a subversion of the dominant and canonical European representation of heritage. This book engages simultaneously with a diversity of discourses across the humanities and social sciences and with related theories pertaining not only to tangible and intangible heritage, conservation, and archaeology but also to political science, social theory, tourism and development studies, economics, and cultural and gender studies"--Unedited summary from book cover.