Last updated: July 20, 2023
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Podcast 127: The Past and Future of UNESCO World Heritage After 50 Years
An Ethnography of UNESCO and Site Designation
Lynn Meskell
Lynn Meskell: With Lynn Meskell. I'm a PIK professor, which is Penn Integrates Knowledge professor at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations in a School of Design here, Historic Preservation, Penn Museum, and in anthropology.
Sadie Schoeffler: Wonderful. Okay, so we're here talking with you today about your publication, A Future In Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. And it's a great time to be talking about this book because a lot of conversations right now are centered around world heritage, with the 50 year anniversary of the World Heritage Convention coming up. So Lynn, could you tell us a little bit about your publication, A Future in Ruins?
Lynn Meskell: The book started really because I was fascinated as an archeologist that world heritage sites, I'd worked at a few myself, were seemingly so important, and yet as archeologists we knew so little about UNESCO and its processes. How it works, the politics is behind it, and so on. So that's why I embarked on that ethnography. And in fact, I'm still working on UNESCO a decade or more later. It's one of those things you can't really get away from. And in a world of conflict and human rights violations, UNESCO is still central to those debates.
Yeah, I think what the drafters of that convention would say, one of the most significant things is that they put natural and cultural heritage together in one document. And so the conservation itself wasn't simply monuments, but also landscapes. And I think as we approach serious issues around climate change, for example, and environmental justice, that was actually very farsighted.
Shifting Focus around Climate Change
Sadie Schoeffler: So you see the future of UNESCO focusing more on topics such as climate change and environmental justice that come up now when we're focusing on sites that are already on the World Heritage List, and maybe future sites?
Lynn Meskell: I think climate change is very, very important, and we're going to see that debated pretty hotly with the Great Barrier Reef coming up this year being discussed as being potentially put on the World Heritage List in danger. But given the capacity of UNESCO, which is severely limited, particularly after the US withdrew its funding from the organization, there's not a lot that UNESCO can really do. It is a standard-setting agency. It does look after the World Heritage List and inscriptions, and I think we're just going to see more of the same.
It has really grappled with conflict, perhaps not as effectively as other agencies. And I think its resources, its personnel, its funding is severely depleted. So the glory days in some ways are kind of behind, like the Nubian campaign or Angkor. And now it just faces this raft of challenges, whether it's conflict or climate change, Indigenous rights, things that it's really not particularly well set up to do, wasn't designed to do, and has not mobilized very effectively. Hasn't even harmonized very effectively with other UN agencies.
Lynn Meskell: I think climate change is very, very important, and we're going to see that debated pretty hotly with the Great Barrier Reef coming up this year being discussed as being potentially put on the World Heritage List in danger. But given the capacity of UNESCO, which is severely limited, particularly after the US withdrew its funding from the organization, there's not a lot that UNESCO can really do. It is a standard-setting agency. It does look after the World Heritage List and inscriptions, and I think we're just going to see more of the same.
It has really grappled with conflict, perhaps not as effectively as other agencies. And I think its resources, its personnel, its funding is severely depleted. So the glory days in some ways are kind of behind, like the Nubian campaign or Angkor. And now it just faces this raft of challenges, whether it's conflict or climate change, Indigenous rights, things that it's really not particularly well set up to do, wasn't designed to do, and has not mobilized very effectively. Hasn't even harmonized very effectively with other UN agencies.
Challenges in UNESCO Designations
Sadie Schoeffler: So now we're talking a little bit about the challenges that world heritage is facing, has faced, and continues to face, and how those challenges are evolving. Do you think that the processes for addressing these challenges are going to be something that'll be brought up at the coming up convention? And how do you think professionals like yourself are incorporating the legacies of UNESCO's convention into your own work?
Lynn Meskell: So to answer the first part of that question, given the structure of UNESCO, this is the United Nations. So the nations are the most powerful decision makers. And as you might imagine, they are not very amenable to critique. So anything that would change the convention, that would add additional oversight or scrutiny is going to be vetoed by the member states. So think of the power of the UN Security Council. It's that sort of mechanism.
And so the committee, which is made up of 21 nation states, are the most powerful players in the room, and they're the ones that are going to decide whether to put a site on the list in danger, whether to adhere to human rights policies, and so on. And states are very reluctant to do that. What they really want to do is inscribe more and more sites on the list so that they can garner this social and economic prestige of doing that within their own territory.
In terms of the second part of your question, what can academics and practitioners really do? I think it falls to us to work in the interstices, really. To work on issues like human rights or conflict. To do the things that UNESCO really can't do. So we have this incredible list that draws attention to sites, but in fact UNESCO is not a research agency and they don't really read our work for the most part. So we have to just go on independently and hope that some of our findings can be useful.
But we do additional work. UNESCO always wanted Civil Society to be involved, and it is very keen on academic networks. So I think it's really up to us to just carry on and do the best work that we can and realize that they can't do everything, and they certainly don't have the funds or personnel to do that. And I think that's a popular misconception about the power of UNESCO, particularly in the United States.
Lynn Meskell: So to answer the first part of that question, given the structure of UNESCO, this is the United Nations. So the nations are the most powerful decision makers. And as you might imagine, they are not very amenable to critique. So anything that would change the convention, that would add additional oversight or scrutiny is going to be vetoed by the member states. So think of the power of the UN Security Council. It's that sort of mechanism.
And so the committee, which is made up of 21 nation states, are the most powerful players in the room, and they're the ones that are going to decide whether to put a site on the list in danger, whether to adhere to human rights policies, and so on. And states are very reluctant to do that. What they really want to do is inscribe more and more sites on the list so that they can garner this social and economic prestige of doing that within their own territory.
In terms of the second part of your question, what can academics and practitioners really do? I think it falls to us to work in the interstices, really. To work on issues like human rights or conflict. To do the things that UNESCO really can't do. So we have this incredible list that draws attention to sites, but in fact UNESCO is not a research agency and they don't really read our work for the most part. So we have to just go on independently and hope that some of our findings can be useful.
But we do additional work. UNESCO always wanted Civil Society to be involved, and it is very keen on academic networks. So I think it's really up to us to just carry on and do the best work that we can and realize that they can't do everything, and they certainly don't have the funds or personnel to do that. And I think that's a popular misconception about the power of UNESCO, particularly in the United States.
Projects in Academia and UNESCO
Lynn Meskell: I have two fairly new projects since I came to the University of Pennsylvania. One is with the Arab Barometer, which looks at public opinion. And in fact it's the first large scale public opinion around cultural heritage for Iraq and Syria. And it's based in Mosul and Aleppo. And that's garnering interviews, long-standing interviews with 1,600 participants in each city about how they feel about the destruction of sites, the reconstruction, who should be involved, responsible, who should fund it, what are their priorities for heritage reconstruction. A lot of very emotional responses, too, about what they prioritized and what they felt most upset about during those sort of conflicts.
And so that's been very telling. You may not be surprised that heritage and its reconstruction comes quite low in priorities compared to other humanitarian concerns like health, security, stability, employment, education and so on. And that's a wake-up call for those of us who think that heritage is all about world peace and brings repair. That it's not enough to reconstruct a museum or an archeological site that we're interested in. We have to think about what people on the ground actually want and to try and make heritage much more about socioeconomic benefits and social goods as it were, and perhaps link more with other UN partners, in International Committee for the Red Cross, other sorts of things if we actually want to do something meaningful.
And the second project is with my colleagues at Wharton Business School here at Penn, looking at the 1,154 world heritage sites around the world and how they are positioned in terms of cooperation and conflict. And unfortunately what we're finding is that evermore increasingly the nomination of world heritage properties leads to increased conflict. And that's around everything from working with NGOs to the environment to the presence of rebels to bad labor practices and so on.
And that's a study that's done on every world heritage site and is a AI data scrape that includes 80 languages and sentiment analysis. And that's actually a pretty depressing set of results that show that world heritage has become less about cooperation and peace-building and benefits and more about the scramble for economic advantage, for exclusion, for moving people out, alienation, and so on. So it doesn't actually necessarily bring sustainable development and all the promises that are made by so many agencies. And also archeologists think that we're doing great things, but in fact we may be exacerbating tension.
And so that's been very telling. You may not be surprised that heritage and its reconstruction comes quite low in priorities compared to other humanitarian concerns like health, security, stability, employment, education and so on. And that's a wake-up call for those of us who think that heritage is all about world peace and brings repair. That it's not enough to reconstruct a museum or an archeological site that we're interested in. We have to think about what people on the ground actually want and to try and make heritage much more about socioeconomic benefits and social goods as it were, and perhaps link more with other UN partners, in International Committee for the Red Cross, other sorts of things if we actually want to do something meaningful.
And the second project is with my colleagues at Wharton Business School here at Penn, looking at the 1,154 world heritage sites around the world and how they are positioned in terms of cooperation and conflict. And unfortunately what we're finding is that evermore increasingly the nomination of world heritage properties leads to increased conflict. And that's around everything from working with NGOs to the environment to the presence of rebels to bad labor practices and so on.
And that's a study that's done on every world heritage site and is a AI data scrape that includes 80 languages and sentiment analysis. And that's actually a pretty depressing set of results that show that world heritage has become less about cooperation and peace-building and benefits and more about the scramble for economic advantage, for exclusion, for moving people out, alienation, and so on. So it doesn't actually necessarily bring sustainable development and all the promises that are made by so many agencies. And also archeologists think that we're doing great things, but in fact we may be exacerbating tension.
The Importance of Community Engagement
Lynn Meskell: Certainly, my colleagues in historic preservation here at Penn work very effectively with communities. And I have colleagues that have worked in the southwest, in the Middle East, and also in countries like Rwanda. And I think they're very impressive. In fact, if anything, I think maybe archeology could learn something from that historic preservation perspective. Archeologists, and particularly American archeologists, have traditionally thought, "Past subjects are dead, so we don't need to really worry." But in fact, a preservation angle is much more community-driven in living communities.
And that's what we're getting also clearly from our more global research as well, that this is not something that's anchored entirely in the past. This is absolutely a living heritage that matters to people. So I think there needs to be more interdisciplinary crossover too. And most of my work has been with people in other fields, including political scientists and economists and international lawyers. And the sort of work that heritage is so complex now that you do have to work across disciplines. That you can't do it otherwise. We need to understand how all this is playing out. And the last thing I'd say is that heritage is increasingly being used in the security sphere.
So there's the nexus around cultural property protection and the military. And we see that playing out in Ukraine most recently, but it has also been the case across the Middle East. And we've seen that also in Thailand, Cambodia, Mali, Afghanistan. Plenty of other places as well. So our materials are being taken up and considered and given some priority, and we're not part of that conversation. So I think we need to learn how others use our material or see its value or see it as a liability, and so on. So that heritage security nexus is I think our next big challenge, and it's already here.
I have another project that looks at not just world heritage, but other sorts of heritage sites in India. And I should say that, whilst UNESCO wants to privilege, obviously, the 1972 list, and the media take up on that, and that, in the popular realm, is obviously the thing that people think of when they refer to cultural heritage. They think of the pyramids or the Acropolis, or the Taj Mahal, and so on. But there are of course so many other thousands of sites.
So I'm interested in what's happening in India, particularly around heritage and conflict. India doesn't have to be a war zone to actually have conflicts or social conflicts, or those around gender, caste, and class. And so I think that's a whole other project in a country that has some 4,000 official sites on a register, and then 10,000 unofficial, and then many other thousands that are not necessarily reported. There's nothing like India for the scale of monuments and heritage. And so I think we need to diversify also and look at how other people are doing these sorts of preservation projects. Other countries, other sorts of living heritage, and so on.
Sadie Schoeffler: Thank you so much for talking with me today and for sharing with everyone your perspectives and experiences.
Lynn Meskell: Thank you very much.
And that's what we're getting also clearly from our more global research as well, that this is not something that's anchored entirely in the past. This is absolutely a living heritage that matters to people. So I think there needs to be more interdisciplinary crossover too. And most of my work has been with people in other fields, including political scientists and economists and international lawyers. And the sort of work that heritage is so complex now that you do have to work across disciplines. That you can't do it otherwise. We need to understand how all this is playing out. And the last thing I'd say is that heritage is increasingly being used in the security sphere.
So there's the nexus around cultural property protection and the military. And we see that playing out in Ukraine most recently, but it has also been the case across the Middle East. And we've seen that also in Thailand, Cambodia, Mali, Afghanistan. Plenty of other places as well. So our materials are being taken up and considered and given some priority, and we're not part of that conversation. So I think we need to learn how others use our material or see its value or see it as a liability, and so on. So that heritage security nexus is I think our next big challenge, and it's already here.
I have another project that looks at not just world heritage, but other sorts of heritage sites in India. And I should say that, whilst UNESCO wants to privilege, obviously, the 1972 list, and the media take up on that, and that, in the popular realm, is obviously the thing that people think of when they refer to cultural heritage. They think of the pyramids or the Acropolis, or the Taj Mahal, and so on. But there are of course so many other thousands of sites.
So I'm interested in what's happening in India, particularly around heritage and conflict. India doesn't have to be a war zone to actually have conflicts or social conflicts, or those around gender, caste, and class. And so I think that's a whole other project in a country that has some 4,000 official sites on a register, and then 10,000 unofficial, and then many other thousands that are not necessarily reported. There's nothing like India for the scale of monuments and heritage. And so I think we need to diversify also and look at how other people are doing these sorts of preservation projects. Other countries, other sorts of living heritage, and so on.
Sadie Schoeffler: Thank you so much for talking with me today and for sharing with everyone your perspectives and experiences.
Lynn Meskell: Thank you very much.
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