Introduction
International society remains one of the English School’s (ES) most recognisable contributions to the theoretical study of international relations. Less appreciated, both within and outside the ES, is the world society concept. While it has increasingly attracted attention, especially in the wake of the 2004 publication of Barry Buzan’s From International to World Society?,Footnote 1 world society, understood in the ES as the aggregate of ‘individuals, non-state organizations, and ultimately the global population … as the focus of global societal identities and arrangements’,Footnote 2 elicits sharp criticism and dismissal as ‘diffuse and amorphous’ since, being defined in terms of norms, ideas, values, institutions, identities, and social relations centered not on the state but on individuals, and, ultimately, humankind,Footnote 3 it conceivably extends ‘to any form of social activity involving the billions of the earth’s inhabitants’.Footnote 4 Because of its framing and subsequent under-theorisation, world society became a ‘residual category’ into which all human beings, non-governmental organisations, and transnational social activity – or, according to Buzan, all the things ES scholars ‘did not want to talk about’ – were disposed.Footnote 5 Inclusivity and extensivity neuter the concept.
To address and overcome these shortcomings, this article reconfigures world society as a spatialised concept – that is, as a ‘horizon of intelligibility’ that produces and is produced by specific social practices.Footnote 6 The move pits the concept in direct conversation with globalisation-inspired scholarship and imports into the ES a salient observation made by Anthony McGrew regarding globality, or a ‘growing awareness or consciousness of the world as a shared social space’,Footnote 7 which suggests that the world itself is becoming the pivot on which some forms of political action and responsibility turn. To break from the seeming impasse caused by world society’s conceptual overreach, I narrow world society’s parameters by attaching transnational social relations to something. I propose, therefore, that we begin not from the social, but instead focus on the very concept that conceivably underpins the concept: the world. By rejecting the view that any transborder social relations constitute world society, the move foregrounds specific constellations of relations that have emerged in connection to discrete conceptions of the spaces – natural, economic, cyberspatial, cultural, or anthropic – within which humans interact. World society is, in short, found in the persistent efforts to cognise and construct a world.
The world, however, need not be understood as a unitary whole. Politically speaking, the world is comprised of discrete (worldly) spaces that have generated practices, institutions, and normative commitments endemic to them. For example, the planetary environment – a notion arguably traceable to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1968 appearance Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the 1972 Stockholm conference – has spawned specific epistemes, social practices, institutions, public policies, and normative dispositions characterised as ‘green’ or environmentalist in orientation that aim to alter human behaviour and prepare peoples to confront and manage the realities of environmental crisis, disaster, and collapse by promoting an ethos of sustainability, conservation, preservation and protection, renewability, and intergenerational regard if not equity.Footnote 8 Alongside the planetary environment, which, according to Matthew Patterson, the ES has mostly ignored, ES scholarship has also occasionally identified global communications systems and cyberspace,Footnote 9 and the global economic system,Footnote 10 as other likely candidates to permit reconfiguration of world society as a spatial concept.Footnote 11
Here, I append to that list an underexplored topic not merely in the ES but in International Relations scholarship writ large: the world understood as cultural heritage, by which I mean the ensemble of tangible objects and immaterial practices and knowledges developed by communities of people and identified as integral to their distinct identities, histories, and understandings of the world, and which, by virtue of stewardship practices of care, conservation, preservation, and cultivation, are passed on from generation to generation. An extensive international legal and programmatic architecture underlines cultural heritage’s importance as manifesting human diversity, functioning as the medium by which identity and memory are generationally transmitted and stabilised, and constituting a universal narrative of human creativity, ingenuity, and history.
The next section surveys the ES concept of world society with a view to extracting four theses from the literature – teleological or purposive, spatial, pluralist, and stewardship – to aid in our conceptual renovation. The third section uses the example of cultural heritage to illustrate the theoretical claims made, while the conclusion outlines the added value of such an approach.
Locating the world in world society
In the English School tradition of International Relations theory, world society refers to a set of norms, ideas, values, institutions, and identities centered not on the state but on individuals, and, ultimately, humankind. Normative readings underscore the moral considerations and demands for justice made by various non-state actors in ways that transform the sovereign state and the international society of states. Structural readings foreground alternative conceptualisations or organisational schematics for global politics,Footnote 12 in part by tracing ‘patterns of shared identity that group human beings into various forms of community’.Footnote 13 The two are not mutually exclusive. Normative positions (re)order the state and sometimes instigate the creation of new, and the revision of existing, practices and institutions (for example, the International Criminal Court and the World Trade Organization) to effectuate cosmopolitan normative commitments associated with world society. Structural readings predicated on identity invariably highlight cleavages and congruence between groups, their differing normative commitments, and how identity politics influence and shape world politics.
The two readings coalesce in Hedley Bull’s conception of world society, which he defined as a world political system, or ‘a worldwide network of interaction’ embracing state and non-state actors who share certain interests and values upon which common institutions and rules could be constructed.Footnote 14 Integrative systems presumably institutionalize and develop cognitive and normative commitments. Yet in the absence of well-defined political institutions, Bull labelled world society as merely embryonic, however normatively desirable it may be.Footnote 15
Practical developments since Bull’s death have enabled others to be much less tentative in their assessments. John Williams and Christian Reus-Smit describe world society as championing ‘the good state’ predicated on an understanding of its ‘moral nature and purpose’;Footnote 16 international society and world society interplay as normative commitments associated with the latter amend the excesses of the former. In Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami’s account, normative commitments function either as hypothetical or categorical imperatives. As ‘hypothetical imperatives’, norms possess ‘instrumental value; agents only need to comply with them if they wish to achieve particular ends’.Footnote 17 On this reading, world society loses distinction as it collapses into state-based rational calculations. As categorical imperatives, normative commitments ‘are unconditionally binding [and] their claim on agents does not depend on the contingent fact that they happen to want particular goals’.Footnote 18 Ian Clark traces the genesis of that schematic by examining (non-state) sources of international legitimacy with respect to issues ‘peripheral to the interests of international society’ yet resonant with transnational actors. Abolitionism, humanizing warfare, racial equality, labour rights, human rights, and democracy appeared on international society’s agenda at significant historical junctures and revealed how ‘world society has … colonize[d] the normative bases of international society’.Footnote 19 On this view, world society morphs into solidarist international society as logics of the good state gain currency in international discourse and global public policy.
Jason Ralph similarly frames the matter. If the state withers away in strong or ‘revolutionary’ conceptions of world society, defined in terms of relations between individuals and non-state actors unmediated by states, then in the weak or Kantian version of world society – one shared by Clark – states ‘are not only expected to be agents of humanity, they are also expected to give up their sovereignty to supranational or world institutions charged with the same function’.Footnote 20 The sovereignty-amending function of cosmopolitan normative commitments to humanity, in conjunction with the presence of organisational structures and mechanisms to deliver on moral claims and demands of justice, matter in, and indeed come to define, world society. On this point, Clark parts with Bull since distinctive political institutions appear to be ancillary to the objective being pursued. I call this world society’s teleological or purposive thesis.
If normative conceptions of world society tend to imply a homogeneity or universality based on a unitary conception of humanity as comprised of all Homo sapiens, then structural readings see sharper distinctions not only between human beings and the norms they advocate, but also between world and international societies since the former ‘implies something that reaches well beyond the state towards more cosmopolitan images of how humankind is, or should be, organized’.Footnote 21 Yet even on this view, there is slippage between international and world societies. For instance, in Martin Wight’s appraisal of world society, two visions ‘assimilate international to domestic politics’:Footnote 22 structural uniformity’s state-centrism (for example, Kant’s plan for perpetual peace as a federation of states with republican constitutions) deflects attention away from world society and towards solidarist international society, while cosmopolitanism’s prioritisation of the individual above and against the state is manifested in state policy. In both, world society is code for domestic policy homogenisation.Footnote 23 Only in the doctrinal or ideological imperialist vision of world society (for example, messianic universalism, whether secular – Napoleonic empire, Nazi racial hierarchy, or communist classless society – or theological) do world society and the international society of states remain distinct.
The need for analytical and ontological clarity may have compelled Bull to equate world society with ‘all parts of the human community’,Footnote 24 which James Mayall later echoed with the ‘view that humanity is one’.Footnote 25 In this reading, relations between a multiplicity of actors beget structural and social differentiation between international and world societies. But this raises questions, especially if, as for Bull, world society is defined partly in terms of common values and interests. Must all human beings share these interests and values? Are interpretive and operational variations permissible, or must they be nearly uniform? Does world society entail inclusion of all individual human beings, or might a majority of groups, or only the most powerful collectives, suffice? Do historical practices of exclusion and marginalisation render the world society concept merely theoretical and thus ill-equipped to capture and analyse historical inter-human relations – notwithstanding Clark’s presentation of ‘a tangible scheme for tracking the evolution of world society’ by examining (non-state) sources of international legitimacy?Footnote 26 Mayall’s response to ambiguity charged diplomacy with translating ‘latent or immanent solidarity of interests and values into reality’Footnote 27 in a manner anticipative of Clark and Ralph. Likewise, the non-English School work of Theodor Meron on the humanisation of the laws of war; Ruti Teitel on ‘humanity’s law’, or the emergence of transnational law centered on the protection of persons and peoples; and Erin Daly on dignity and comparative constitutional law, ground Mayall’s point in international legal and practical realities.Footnote 28 However, while his approach charges the researcher with identifying common interests and values, producing an account of how and why they arise, and assessing how they link otherwise disparate human beings together in ways that constitute and shape world politics, critics might contend that it replicates Wight’s assimilationist, state-centric view: world society once again disappears into the recesses of international society. Yet as we learn from Clark and Ralph, the inordinate focus on structural differentiation obscures the interplay between world and international societies, and with it an important insight about world society’s normative emendatory function.
Moving away from the more conventional association of world society with humanity, Buzan defines world society in terms of structural regularities such as the world economy, the planetary environment, and subglobal / regional projects which shape actor identities, interests, and roles. Structures are at root material – and material conditions, whether in terms of natural resources associated with the planetary environment, or ‘technologies that determine the possibilities for transportation and communication within any social system’, shape the behavioural and institutional make-up of social systems.Footnote 29 This leads him to conclude that while ‘the social structures of humankind are substantially driven by internal logics and contributions, they are also shaped by the physical environment within which they operate’.Footnote 30 We can disentangle two salient points from this claim. Specifically, actors develop interests and normative commitments based on their uneven and unequal structural locations, whether those are economic, environmental, or regional – a point to which I return below. More generally, physical environments do more than shape pre-existing social structures and relations; they engender new ones oriented around the very environment from which they emerged. If the planetary environment had long been treated as an unlimited resource—‘an independent variable running on its own logic’Footnote 31 – environmental degradation produced an awareness that the planetary environment has been negatively affected by human activity; this in turn engendered ‘green’ movements to counteract depredatory human behaviours and preserve and protect the environment.
The idea that physical environments are social / relational ones underpins Martin Coward’s Heidegerrian-inspired study of urbicide, or the deliberate destruction of our built environments (cities), especially those with distinct ethnographies and cultural connotations. Far from being simply physical spaces, cities (to draw upon Coward) represent amalgamations of stabilised relationships. In other words, spaces assume (social) meaning and signification not merely by virtue of their tangibility, but as a consequence of the actions and relationships that occur within them and the meanings ascribed to them. Spatiality captures our understanding of physical environments as ‘horizon[s] of intelligibility’ that not merely orient actors’ immediate senses of the here and now, but also represent possibilities of unfolding.Footnote 32 Spatiality thus packages together individualised and collective ascriptions of meaning and significance to places, and relational processes that, by virtue of ‘network[s] of relationships’, constitute spaces.Footnote 33 Succinctly, spatiality denotes the cognitive reconfiguration of a space from being a physical environment to its apprehension as a horizon of intelligibility – that is, as a field of action and a realm of possibility. If we read world society spatially, then, its content obtains not from aggregating all transnational relations into one conceptual bundle, but from the specific constellations of relations that have emerged in conjunction with distinct conceptions of the geographies in which we reside and interact. Moreover, the term ‘world’ cannot be construed ‘as a holistic umbrella … to include everything’. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the whole is ‘composed of analytically distinct parts [for example, nature, cultural heritage, the world economy, regions and subregions, cyberspace] whose operation and interaction becomes the subject of study’.Footnote 34 This is world society’s spatial thesis.
Shared space does not of course imply uniformity in the ways spaces are experienced, understood, interpreted, developed, acted upon, and reimagined. Coward refers throughout his book to the shelling of the famed sixteenth-century Stari Most, or Old Bridge at Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, that was ‘destroyed by Bosnian Croat forces intent on the ethnic division of the city of Mostar’.Footnote 35 The bridge symbolised the long ‘tradition of plural co-existence that constituted the community’, and for this reason had been celebrated as signifying “‘the world” of Bosnia’s rich cultural heritage’ constructed in part on ethnic and religious heterogeneity. Bosnian Croats, however, construed this pluralistic symbolism as an affront to their vision of ethnic purity, which, as we now know, was cause for its targeting.Footnote 36 This extreme example illustrates the degree to which shared spaces may inform discrete logics and behaviours. It thus bears repeating that how we interpret, experience, or imagine the possibilities of shared space is hardly uniform – hence we can neither categorically attach to space (or to world society) normative homogeneity nor inclusivity (of all human beings or of all transnational social relations). While spatiality foregrounds interest coalescence, the tragedy of Stari Most demands that we be attuned to the very plurality of the relationships that occur within space, and the associations attributed to them. Often, such interest and normative differentiation stems from positionality within structured space; the possibilities associated with space as a horizon and a possibility are necessarily shaped by such disjunctures. Space then becomes a site for contestation, characterised by sometimes competing frames (or, to import a language from museum studies, curatorial narratives), which function epistemically and performatively: the former, by aiming to shape how we think about a particular space, the latter by suggesting ways to conserve, preserve, safeguard, care for, and manage space. While the aim of curation is to inculcate cognitive awareness of the existence of a space, advance a narrative – a history, a knowledge – of it, and hence to generate solidaristic commitment to shared space, actors must be able and willing to accept the premise of the existence of space in the first place. Put more starkly, Stari Most’s 427-year-old history owed to recognition and acceptance not merely of its physical existence (after all, any type of bridge could have served the purpose of facilitating movement across the river), but of its symbolic valuation. It is this dynamic push and pull between social forces and cognitive and normative commitments that scholarship must acknowledge and study; world society is not something to be found, but something discursively and actively constructed. In other words, world society scholarship must be attuned to contestation and disunity, just as much as solidarity. I call this world society’s pluralist thesis.
Buzan echoes the point, and denotes this inherent pluralismFootnote 37 partly in his disaggregation of the world society concept into transnational and interhuman societies. Transnational societies encompass the range of non-state, rule and norm-governed clubs, firms, lobbies, associations, and coalitions that increasingly act across borders. Interhuman societies refer to ‘social structures based on interactions amongst individual human beings … mainly manifested as large-scale patterns of shared identity’.Footnote 38 They range from the basic family unit/clan as the primordial, minimum form of interhuman society; ‘“imagined communities” such as nations, religions and various kinds of functional networks’, which constitute middle range interhuman societies; and maximal ones defined in terms of ‘universally shared identities which could vary from the minimum recognition by all humans of each other as like-units … to the advent of a world civilization linking all humankind together in a complex web of shared values and elaborated identities.’Footnote 39 Since most of these ‘globalisms tend to be separate rather than coordinated’,Footnote 40 they suggest that world society may be less cohesive and solidarist, and more pluralist and perhaps more dissonant that originally thought.Footnote 41
The interhuman reformulation, translated most basically as ‘individual-to-individual interaction’,Footnote 42 attempts to respond to contemporary (globalising) transformations in ways that draw upon strengths of International Relations theory to push theoretical thinking to consider ‘sub-global international social structures and the way in which they interact with the global level’.Footnote 43 Since his concerns were structural, oriented towards ‘how humankind is, or should be, organized’,Footnote 44 Buzan does not wrestle with the dynamics of interpersonal interaction. Yet organisation has a predicate – identity – that highlights the role that recognition practices play in determining membership in world society. Put differently, if we subject the broad vision of world society as human community to an organisational schematic that does not hinge on a singular, cohesive logic, but that admits multiplicity, then we expose the potentialities of, and the fractures impeding, world society’s conceptual and practical development.
While Buzan may not have fully considered the matter, Gerritt Gong and Martin Wight earlier considered the contingency of membership in ‘humanity’ and revealed that, as ethically appealing (let alone scientifically true) as the thesis that all Homo sapiens are human may be, varying conceptualizations of what it means to be human have been the source of world (dis)order constructed upon and informed by illiberal and inhumane practices. Wight responded to the matter by constructing his thoughts around the problem of the barbarian, while Gong identified a nineteenth-century ‘standard of “civilization”’ that effectively blocked non-white European and non-Christian people from being considered fully human; both revealed that, historically, fragmented visions of world society cohabit the same analytical space as unitary framings of humankind.Footnote 45 For them, world society was not a settled, but a contested, contestable, and constructed concept.Footnote 46 Anti-colonial mentality, fuelled in part by a ‘psychology of resentment…new to the twentieth century’,Footnote 47 signaled that resistance to systems and practices of non- and mis-recognition is integral to, if not entirely constitutive of, world society, thereby forcing us to acknowledge the core insight of the pluralist thesis: that imperialism – a network, in Bull’s language – linked all parts of humanity, but in distinctly unequal ways that effectively limited normative and cognitive homogeneity to the most powerful actors in the system who aimed to civilise and socialise, at best, subhumans, and subdue, at worst, those construed as non-human/barbarian.
Consequently, theoretical treatments of world society as humanity need to consider both the aggregative and dissociative functions of identity and the allocation of recognition, which was the subject of my 2015 book, Making Human.Footnote 48 In the course of examining how the dehumanised could be (re)cognised and (re)incorporated into humanity – that is, ‘made human’ – I maintained that both humanising and dehumanising practices constitute fundamental practices of world society as humanity because they mediate what Kimberly Hutchings called the ‘gap between “essence” and “existence”’ that defines the human being. Unlike a table or a tree, Hutchings observes, ‘the being of any particular human does not coincide with any given list of attributes’.Footnote 49 But in countless historical contexts, people have acted as if there were an essence or a set of attributes, which I recasted as a distinction between human being and being human. By the former, I mean context-specific ‘intersubjective understandings and standards’ that determine who is recognised as fully human. ‘These, in turn, are both informed by and limit being human, meaning all those activities, affiliations, identities, memberships, programs, and projects that give our particular lives meaning. Stated differently, being human refers to the various modes of becoming individual selves in ways that accord with the social yardstick of the human being.’Footnote 50 The point here is that recognition practices regulate membership in humanity and hence, in their performative capacity, define the scope of humanity and with it the parameters of world society as a social space. Stated differently, recognition functions as a subspecies of a broader practice regarding maintenance or management, which brings me to the fourth and final thesis regarding stewardship.
The point appears fleetingly in Hedley Bull’s 1983 Hagey lectures in which he ruminated on planetary dangers including nuclear war, ‘the global balance or equilibrium between population and resources’, and persistent ecological problems.Footnote 51 Bull averred that ‘measures to avoid such dangers, to advance the world common good, take us beyond the sense of solidarity or common interests among governments … . The world common good to which I refer is the common interest not of states, but of human species in maintaining itself’ – even at the expense of individual interests.Footnote 52 Not only does the whole precede its parts under certain conditions, but the whole(s) themselves – for example, humanity and the planet – are interpretively reconfigured or, more to the point, conceived of and hence constituted as ontologically distinct entities that impose demands on the present generation for the benefit of future generations. Common interests and intergenerational justice depend on for their effective operationalisation agents’ cognitive restructuring away from purely instrumental conceptions of self-interest to inculcating an ethic and conception of globality. This includes understanding the value and significance of our shared spaces; apprehending and acting on behalf of a world, and subsequently crafting appropriate activities, policies, programmes, and practices, if not also institutions, to maintain these various worlds or spaces. Maintenance or stewardship practices convey a long-term orientation hinged on caring for extant spaces and extending the present, and with it the residue of the past, into the future.
This overview has extracted four principal theses from the ES literature that are useful for this article’s conceptual reconstruction of world society. The teleological or purposive thesis posits that normative commitments and objectives, not necessarily structural differentiation from international society, define world society. The pluralist thesis acknowledges the multiplicity of normative commitments, while the spatial thesis maintains that our physical environments orient, (re)produce, and (re)configure social relations. These three theses presage a fourth, since our spatial environments presuppose certain cognitive commitments to, and engender certain practices that make it possible to speak of them as relatively stable features of the world. The stewardship thesis foregrounds activity oriented towards a specific consciousness of a totality that exists beyond the present, and apprehension of an obligation to transmit to future generations the object or space being maintained. Read from that perspective, stewardship or maintenance activities aim not to treat worldly spaces or domains as resources only, but to preserve them for future generations precisely because they attach value to the object being conserved. The world, in short, is comprised of distinct worldly domains; maintenance of these domains makes the world fit for human habitation, and ensures its inheritability. There can be no higher order practice.
World society as cultural (heritage)
In the Bosnian Croat Army’s vision of an ethnically homogenous Herceg-Bosna, the Stari Most – ‘the last structure bearing witness to a unified (and, therefore, “ethnically mixed”) Mostar’Footnote 53 – confronted it as opposition, and thus had to be destroyed. The case, as with countless other instances of the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, reveals that there is an art to inhumanity that encompasses more than torturing, maiming, and killing bodies. Inhumanity feeds on, and springs from, the irascible instinct to denigrate and vilify the cultural identities, practices, mannerisms, and ideas of others.Footnote 54 Art, books, buildings, dance, drawings, festive traditions, forms and objects of worship, languages, monuments, music, sculptures, shrines, and temples – the whole ensemble of artifacts and practices that have been inscribed with and acknowledged as generative and symbolic of specific cultural identity claims, and thus cared for, cultivated, and passed down generationally – embody in the iconoclastic mindset degenerate, depraved, primitive, and subhuman modes of being that must be contained, looted, and sold in the service of self-advancement, or even eradicated. For these reasons, Raphael Lemkin, architect of the concept of genocide, maintained that targeting the culture of a people – what he dubbed the murder of a people’s soulFootnote 55 – constituted a central tactic in the destructive project.Footnote 56
Noted anthropologist and cultural heritage scholar Lynn Meskell, however, urges caution. ‘The loss of heritage can easily be decried as a crime that affects multiple generations, erasing cultural memory and severing links with the past that are integral to forging and maintaining modern identities. Yet it is dangerous to place commensurate value on people and things and to couch these acts in a language reserved for genocide, since they do not inhabit the same order of existence.’Footnote 57 She has a point. It would be callous indeed to privilege saving ‘things’ as opposed to people; not all instances of the destruction of cultural heritage constitute or are equable with genocide or other large-scale atrocities. But in certain cases, that is precisely the point. Cultural objects, artifacts, and spaces, along with ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledges, [and] skills’, constitute individual, community, and group ‘identity and continuity’Footnote 58 and, moreover, ‘civilization and national culture’.Footnote 59 Severing links between peoples and their cultural histories, identities, and repositories of memory remakes societies in singular, exclusivist images. We therefore must not permit our obsession with the mutilation and killing of bodies to obscure equally sinister intents to destroy humanity and to narrow the parameters of being human in the service of regressive gazes into a mythologised past, progressive imaginations of a dystopian future, or recessive conjurings of nationalist insularity.
On 27 September 2016, the International Criminal Court (ICC) vindicated this line of reasoning by sentencing Mr. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi to nine years in prison for war crimes committed during the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012. During his five months as head of Hesbah, or the morality brigade,Footnote 60 which was charged with eliminating apostasy and imposing/enforcing a radical, jihadist brand of Islam, al-Mahdi identified and destroyed nine historic and sacred mausoleums and one mosque in the ancient city of Timbuktu.Footnote 61
Though assaults on cultural property are classified as war crimes in Article 8 of the Rome Statute, trial chamber judges nevertheless acknowledged Meskell’s concerns: ‘not all crimes … are necessarily of equivalent gravity’;Footnote 62 crimes against people eclipse crimes against property. Yet, as the teleological or purposive thesis described above suggests, the gravity of the crimes must be weighed against the ‘symbolic and emotional value’ of the targets, which led judges, in a Lemkinian vein, to characterise al-Mahdi’s war activity as ‘aimed at breaking the soul of the people of Timbuktu’.Footnote 63 By making this argument, the ICC adopted a position long advocated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): ‘deliberate attacks on culture’ are ‘weapons of war in a global strategy of cultural cleansing’ that seek ‘to destroy people as well as the monuments bearing their identities, institutions of knowledge and free thought’.Footnote 64 On this understanding, the effects were not limited to Timbuktu and its denizens.
These mausoleums and mosques all qualify as both religious buildings and historic monuments, as evidenced by their role in the cultural life in Timbuktu and the status of nine of these buildings as UNESCO World Heritage sites. UNESCO’s designation of these buildings reflects their special importance to international cultural heritage, noting that ‘the wide diffusion of culture, and the education of humanity for justice and liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity of man and constitute a sacred duty to which all nations must fulfil in a spirit of mutual assistance and concern’. Attacking these mausoleums and mosques was clearly an affront to these values.Footnote 65
Framing local forms of cultural heritage in the internationalist terms of duty and responsibility, and in the universal terms of human values and identity underscores the importance the international community and UNESCO have ascribed to cultural heritage, of which criminal prosecutions are but one programmatic manifestation. UNESCO’s six cultural heritage conventionsFootnote 66 outline additional ones related to the stewardship (or preservation, conservation, safeguarding, and promotion) of cultural heritage in ways that produce, reproduce and deepen an understanding of the world as partly a shared socio-cultural space that transcends national patrimonies.
The remainder of this section outlines the discursive construction of cultural heritage as constituting a worldly space and presents three points of evidence to sustain the thesis. First, 1954 marked a distinctive justificatory shift in the protective regime away from national or statist terms in favour of international responsibilities. Second, the conceptual birth of the ‘common heritage of humankind’ cognitively oriented the way UNESCO and its many partner organisations have worked to actualise the concept, as evidenced in part by the world cultural and natural heritage, intangible cultural heritage, and ‘memory of the world’ registries and programmes.Footnote 67 Third, though these lists capture important achievements and emblematic practices and sites rooted within specific cultures, they are rhetorically couched in the universal terms of representativeness and outstanding value – and are framed, curatorially,Footnote 68 as a human collection chronicling human creativity and cultural achievement across time and space. Finally, while the cultural heritage concept has engendered a range of conservation, preservation, protection, and safeguarding – or stewardship – activities, for reasons of space, I only reference them throughout the section.Footnote 69
Framing cultural heritage as a worldly space
In 1967, Maltese Ambassador to the United Nations Arvid Pardo, proposed that the seabed beyond national jurisdictions be treated as ‘the common heritage of [hu]mankind’.Footnote 70 Later applied to Antarctica, the moon, celestial bodies, outer space, and the geostationary orbit,Footnote 71 the concept, informed by principles of intergenerational justice, equity, inheritability, and mutual enjoyment, entailed the development of regimes predicated on ensuring peaceful use, non-appropriation, and the equitable sharing of any benefits or resources obtained through use of them.Footnote 72 In short, recognition of their non-proprietary status constituted these geographies as worldly spaces.Footnote 73
While Pardo made familiar the concept of the common heritage of humankind, it first appeared in conjunction with cultural property in the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The link between ecological and cultural applications of common heritage coalesce around acknowledgement that the ecological and the cultural sustain human life – the former biologically, the latter ontologically. Grounded in the logic that ‘cultural heritage is of great importance for the peoples of the world’ (Preamble) such that it required national and international protection,Footnote 74 the 1954 convention drew upon protective and anti-looting measures inscribed in the 1863 Lieber Code, which applied to Union forces in the American Civil War, and the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions on the laws and customs of war. However, if the earlier conventions framed the prohibition of the seizure and destruction of, or willful damage to, cultural, religious, and educational institutions, historic monuments, and works of art and science in terms of the specific responsibilities of occupying powers in foreign lands, then the two World Wars provoked acceptance of a general global responsibility for the protection of cultural heritage. The 1954 Hague Convention embodied this cognitive, justificatory shift by defining ‘damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever’ as ‘damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world’. Such cultural universalism, or cultural internationalism as John Merryman has called it,Footnote 75 was in turn replicated in UNESCO’s cultural heritage conventions.
By identifying a special class of cultural goods from the human artifice, international humanitarian regulations and UNESCO peacetime cultural conventions constituted a worldly space defined by its cultural content. While countries were, naturally, interested in reconstructing their individual patrimonies in the wake of the Second World War, their arguments for constructing a protective regime evinced less a concern with monetary valuation and a need to restitute and reclaim the priceless. Justificatory frames emphasised that aesthetic valuation rested upon more primordial assertions that culturally-defined peoples have inscribed and acknowledged deep political, historical, ethical, theological, and ontological significances upon specific objects, buildings, sites, and monuments. The world on this reading is not merely material – a vast collection of things which Hannah Arendt called the human artifice.Footnote 76 It is, importantly, an intersubjective one pertaining to the ‘affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together’.Footnote 77 Cultural heritage represents the intersection of these two dimensions for it is a class of material goods ‘which are strictly without any utility whatsoever and … are not exchangeable and therefore defy equalization through a common denominator such as money’.Footnote 78 Their standing in society, their longevity, their meaning, and their value stem precisely from their apprehension and appreciation as ‘thought things’Footnote 79 that encapsulate historical or theological significance; epitomise technical, creative, or artistic brilliance or innovation; or convey a mood or aesthetic that is uniquely representative of a cultural Weltanschauung. Materiality obtains meaning by virtue of the web of intersubjective understandings, stories, values, norms, and principles that guide and constitute social relations that also serve to bestow meaning upon the human artifice.Footnote 80 Valuation stems from identity inscription; cultural heritage thus conveys how we have been, and are, human.
Technically the production of things – which Arendt categorises as work – is not political activity. Homo politicus speaks, deliberates, acts, negotiates, and decides, while homo faber ‘fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice’.Footnote 81 Yet homo politicus and homo faber occupy the space we call the world, and each contributes elements used by, referred to, and relied upon by the other.Footnote 82 Indeed, their products may be mutually implicative as in the case of cultural heritage. The cultural object, whether tangible or intangible, serves as an exemplar – and is sometimes reduced to a cliché – of nationalist and political pride, style, aesthetic, and spectacle, which enshrines its representational and symbolic significances in the political world. Perversely, the reverence displayed toward, and the social valuation of, the object, practice, or knowledge often contributes to their targeting precisely because they evidence the depravity or idolatry of despised others. The assault, to extend an Arendtian-based argument, cuts at the heart of human plurality and narrows the parameters of our world – a logic that grounded the twentieth-century criminalisation of deliberate attacks on cultural heritage.Footnote 83 Conceptually, criminalisation signifies that the landscape inhabited and culturally shaped by a people comprises a shared social or worldly space. Deliberate assaults reveal that what is at stake in the destruction of cultural heritage is not (merely) the disappearance of (presumably) beautiful things or long-held traditions. What is at stake is the loss of a common, diverse, pluralistic humane and human world. There can be no politics without a public; that was precisely Arendt’s observation in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The world is the essential ontological precondition of political life, thus requiring stewardship activities to ensure its reproduction and inheritability.
Against the particularity of iconoclastic attempts to remake the world in singular and narrow images, UNESCO’s conventions and registries aim to curate a (humane) universalist narrative and collection of heritage sites, practices, and memories embodied in the vast range of documentary histories that highlights the range of human experience, creativity, ingenuity, history, and, importantly diversity. The referents of UNESCO’s conventions are couched in terms of ‘the heritage of all the nations of the world’ (1972 convention), ‘knowledge of the civilization of [hu]mankind’ (1970 convention), and ‘humanity’ (2003 and 2005 conventions). Read geographically, UNESCO registries compile illustrative sites, objects, and practices across time and space: from the Pyramids at Giza to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, from the Sufi mausoleums and libraries of Timbuktu to the architectural landscape along the banks of the Seine in Paris, and on to the modernist White City of Tel Aviv, to draw upon examples from the World Heritage List. But these conceptual frames suggest a more philosophical reading that reconfigures locality or geography in relational or spatial terms.
To be inscribed onto a UNESCO list, nominations must cohere with criteria that, generally, pertain to exemplarity, irreplaceability, uniqueness, representativeness, and even endangerment,Footnote 84 which establish presumably objective points by which committees of experts and member states evaluate submissions. In terms of tangible cultural heritage, the criteria convert our subjective aesthetic (that is, our sensory and affective) responses into intersubjective ones rooted not in culturally-specific conceptions of beauty but in the breadth of human experience. This is significant. Encounters with tangible cultural heritage invariably involve value-based judgments of beauty, harmony (as an architectural attribute or as a relationship with nature), and other non-objective considerations. Agreement on what is ‘beautiful’ or ‘harmonious’ may be notoriously difficult to achieve. For instance, the Drogmakerij de Beemster (Beemster Polder) north of Amsterdam, Netherlands, may appear to be ordinary, flat farmland to an observer. Even if the visitor may aesthetically appreciate the canals and traditional Dutch-style houses and the occasional windmill that punctuate the landscape, the observer may not be convinced that the site is worthy of world heritage designation. Yet it is: as land reclaimed from the sea dating from the early seventeenth century, the site is noted for the exemplarity of its classical and Renaissance design and for its unique expression of the human relationship with the natural world.Footnote 85 Similarly with the Island of Gorée (Senegal), Auschwitz, and Hiroshima: their inscription as prototypical sites of human suffering and trauma onto the world heritage list (in 1978, 1979, and 1996, respectively) move beyond aesthetics defined narrowly as beauty and signal a shift towards a more comprehensive accounting of exemplarity and a concerted effort to capture and understand the depth and complexity of the human experience. Ongoing conversations about cultural heritage, and the addition of sites to various (national and UNESCO) registers to include sites of trauma – for example, internment and concentration centers, slave-holding and transfer points, gulags and labour camps – harbour the potential to reframe conventional knowledges about our specific ethnic, racial, and cultural selves, but also ourselves as human. Put differently, cultural heritage ought not to merely include that which is exceptional in aesthetically desirable or pleasurable terms. In the end, the importance of, and the need to identify, protect, conserve, safeguard – to maintain – and bequeath cultural heritage are closely aligned with the plurality of ways of being in the world. Inscription on the world heritage list translates locality globally; the local is transposed or read onto a universal horizon that theoretically functions to connect us with distant, present, and future others. On this reading, cultural heritage of all types – the beautiful and the traumatic, the harmonious and the terrible – aesthetically, affectively, and normatively completes the landscape of human rights and, more importantly, the world itself.
Development of a world cultural understanding signals cognitive commitment to apprehending and constituting the world as partly a shared sociocultural space, but the process of cultivating such an understanding (a globality of cultural consciousness) faces a significant obstacle: the 1899, 1907, and 1954 Hague Conventions ‘adopted a definitional structure that consisted largely of an authorization to each state to designate the things it considered important’,Footnote 86 which the 1970, 1972, and 2003 UNESCO conventions replicated. Essentially, cultural heritage is, by virtue of sovereign prerogative, what states say it is. Federico Lenzerini impugns the 2003 intangible cultural heritage convention for dropping the term protection in favour of ‘safeguarding’, which many construe as ‘meaning that international action should “simply” provide a favourable environment within which intangible cultural heritage is allowed to flow freely according to the expectations and needs of its creators and bearers’Footnote 87 –a criticism echoed by Lucas Lixinski’s indictment of the convention for lacking ‘legal bite’.Footnote 88 Many scholars and human rights activists fear that this structure permits states to ignore the cultural heritage of indigenous and minority peoples.
But that view advances only one logic. Jeff Todd Titon reminds us that cultural heritage is not singularly an institutionally-driven, top-down process or phenomenon. The creation of ‘heritage-spaces’ for performance, exhibition, discussion, and education, and the cultivation of ‘local, grass-roots, participatory, often amateur, [activities] … inside [local] communities help to revitalize … traditions and thus to ensure their continuation’.Footnote 89 Cultural heritage captures human endeavours rooted in consciousness of who we have been, who we are, and who we hope future others might be or might learn from the past and present. The articulation of normative commitments in the service of protecting cultural diversity encourages the reinvention or reinvigoration of specific cultural identities and practices.Footnote 90 But they likewise aid in the constitution of a broader international and transnational consciousness of the value and importance of cultural heritage in ways that have contributed to a growing density of international and transnational linkages and programmes.
Despite the sovereigntist thread running through UNESCO cultural heritage programmes, the cognitive space of apprehending and accepting the world as a cultural space was enlarged in the wake of the Taliban’s obliteration of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in March 2001, which elicited outrage from every corner of the world,Footnote 91 and again after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. In November 2001, UNESCO member states unanimously adopted a declaration in celebration and defence of cultural diversity, proclaiming that it is ‘as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature’ (Article 1). In October 2003, UNESCO’s Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage further detached it from statist moorings and humanised it: ‘cultural heritage is an important component of the cultural identity of communities, groups and individuals, and of social cohesion, so that its intentional destruction may have adverse consequences on human dignity and human rights’ – an argument that featured prominently in the ICC al-Mahdi case.
While the al-Mahdi case may be the ICC’s first case concerning the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime, it is not the first prosecution for such crimes. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg convicted four individuals – Hans Frank, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Alfred Rosenberg, and Joachim von Ribbentrop – for, among other acts, cultural crimes including plunder and destruction.Footnote 92 The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (in addition to the Bosnia Herzegovina War Crimes Chamber) proved a vanguard of ‘cementing the legal foundation for accountability for the destruction of cultural heritage’Footnote 93 by making two important contributions: first, by interpreting ‘the destruction or damaging of the institutions of a particular political, racial, or religious group … as … persecution’, and therefore as a crime against humanity,Footnote 94 and second, by determining that the deliberate destruction of Muslim libraries and mosques evidenced Serbian genocidal intent.
Recent assaults on sites of cultural repute, including the so-called Islamic State’s rampage across ancient Mesopotamian lands, have catapulted cultural heritage into world media (and diplomatic) spotlight.Footnote 95 Following the lead of the UN Security Council, which over the last 16 years had passed a handful of resolutions condemning the destruction of cultural heritage and demanding the restitution of looted artifacts from Iraq, Syria, and Mali, the UN General Assembly, on 28 May 2015, unanimously approved a landmark resolution expressing ‘outrage that attacks on cultural heritage are used as a tactic of war in order to spread terror and hatred, fan conflict, and impose violent extremist ideologies’, and resolving to ‘stand up against attacks on the cultural heritage of any country as attacks on the common heritage of humanity as a whole’.Footnote 96 The resolution further affirmed ‘that the destruction of cultural heritage, which is representative of the diversity of human culture, erases the collective memories of a nation, destabilizes communities and threatens their cultural identity, and emphasiz[ed] the importance of cultural diversity and pluralism as well as freedom of religion and belief for achieving peace, stability, reconciliation and social cohesion.’ The ethical and hopefully pragmatic significance of the resolution, in short, rests with the international community’s acknowledgement that some objects of cultural heritage are less the specific property of individual states than they are the legacy of human ingenuity and history to which all peoples, present and future, have a stake in their survival.
Far from being rhetorical flourishes, the emphases on identity, plurality, history, human civilisation, and human creativity and ingenuity evince a consciousness of the unique (anthropic) significance of cultural heritage and its worldly connotations. That cultural heritage reflects and evidences the human condition of plurality – which both constitutes cultural heritage’s symbolic value and, perversely, contributes to its susceptibility to attack –underscores its ‘defense [as] an ethical imperative indissociable from respect for the dignity of the individual’.Footnote 97 In the end, the discursive formulation of cultural heritage in worldly terms underscores the understanding that, as Derek Gillman has argued, ‘heritages (or cultures) are ways of thinking and talking about communities of people in space and time, related by shared practices, conventions and norms’;Footnote 98 heritage is a product of an ongoing narrative ‘associated with the stories we tell about ourselves’.Footnote 99 Moreover, these narratives and stories are not merely curatorial; they are deeply political and ontological. The ongoing dispute between Greece and the United Kingdom regarding the return of the Parthenon Marbles, or the now-resolved dispute between Cambodia and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over ancient Angkor statues – let alone ISIS’s path of destruction across Iraq and Syria that deems idolatrous all statuary, relics, monuments, and sites not representative of its own narrow rendering of Islam – highlight the political sensitivities and national identities at stake, and thus the tensions and fissures between the particularities associated with sovereignty on the one hand, and the universality of world cultural heritage on the other. While states identify, nominate, protect, conserve, present, and transmit ‘to future generations … the cultural and natural heritage found within their territory’,Footnote 100 thus ensuring that their idiosyncratic self-narratives are memorialised, UNESCO simultaneously curates this collection of things in terms of humanity. The two processes are neither necessarily mutually exclusive nor conflicting, but can be and often are mutually implicative. Even if cultural heritage proves an unlikely and unfortunate battleground in which competing self-perceptions and worldviews are fought, the (potential) losses of our cultural worlds force us to reflect on the meaning and importance of culture and cultural heritage, and acknowledge our desire and need to protect and conserve their various forms for future generations. For Arendt, ‘respect for human dignity implies the recognition of [our fellow human beings] or fellow-nationals as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world’.Footnote 101 Destruction of their cultural achievements, then, strongly implies their un- or non-recognition, and their virtual marginalisation in or exclusion from ‘the world’.
Conclusion
Hedley Bull presciently observed in 1983 that world society implies something ‘beyond the sense of solidarity or common interests among governments’ towards recognition of a common human interest ‘in maintaining itself’ even at the expense of narrowly-framed individual self-interests.Footnote 102 In its pursuit of finding solidarity, the ES world society literature, it seems, fell into a trap – in part, I think, by attempting to replicate the success of international society-oriented scholarship based on the systematic examination of the very dimensions (norms, rules, institutions, practices) that transformed the international realm into an anarchical society. Yet by concentrating on the social element, world society scholarship obtained opposite results: far from clarifying, the inordinate focus on unmoored social relations resulted in a diffuse and amorphous concept by including presumably all transnational social activity, identifying it with all humanity, and closely aligning it to domestic policy homogenisation or the institutional framework of solidarist international society.
Qualifying social relations by attaching them to the world or our shared social spaces grounds the concept and permits scholarship to move beyond world society’s limitations. In doing so, reading world society as a spatial concept hinged on the consciousness of shared geographies situates the world society concept in direct conversation with globalisation literature, enabling it to reach deeper into American-dominated International Relations theoretical discourse. By doing so, this underscores fundamentally transformative processes at play as diverse actors, with their sometimes conflicting, though not always incommensurable interests that navigate and make sense of shared global social spaces. Concentrating on shared worldly spaces and the social relations produced by, and productive of, such spaces reveals how our multidimensional world has become an actionable, political concept that we come to intuit as imposing demands on the actors within them. If we are to take seriously the notions that globalisation compresses time and space, aided in part by revolutions in communications technology that have engendered a distinct sense of globality, or a ‘growing awareness or consciousness of the world as a shared social space’;Footnote 103 that genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity assault not merely the individuals against whom such crimes are levied, but undermine the very notion of humanity itself; that climate change and other environmental ruptures and degradations impinge on all human beings – some, by virtue of geographic location or economic status, more detrimentally than others; that persistent and systematic inequalities undermine global order; and that attacks on cultural heritage erase from historical memory the contributions of diverse peoples to both the built environment and the natural human condition of plurality, among so many other problems and processes, then we need concepts that can adequately capture precisely what is at stake: the narrowing and endangerment of our common worlds, and the orientation of activities geared toward preservation of our common worlds.
Reading world society spatially underlines the kind of work that we might expect globality – a cognition of a world beyond the self – to do, and thus invites theoretical engagement with the transformative potential of our enlarged consciousness in international society, inter-human engagement, and transnational activities. Scholars might trace the rudiments of imagining worldly spaces; the processes whereby discourse and action constitute and are constituted by space; and how new social and institutional configurations endemic to shared geographies re-form the structures, practices, and institutions of international society, invite their own sets of practices and institutional mechanisms, and shape human consciousness. Doing so enhances our insights into how human behaviour, awareness, normative commitments, and interaction affect global political life; the world is not only the domain of global political elites, but is increasingly a realm into which ordinary people play critical roles. While the critic may retort that disaggregating world society in multiple spaces disrupts the fundament of the English School’s world society concept as aggregating peoples across borders based on some interest and value commonalities, I would argue that such commonalities are rarely pitched in such holistic terms and more often in terms of issue-specific normative commitments. Responsibilities to cultural heritage, environmental initiatives, animal rights and conservation, fairer trade, or human rights are at root world society appeals even if they occur in discrete issue areas or with respect to delimited spaces. If anything, reformulating world society in terms of the purposive or teleological justifications of activity within specific spaces, the tensions and animations produced by dialogue between plural interpretations of and commitments to our shared social spaces, and stewardship activities designed to conserve and cultivate spaces for future generations clarifies what we need to look for when we look for world society.
Finally, the reconfiguration proposed in this article offers the added value of suggesting that scholars do for world society what has already been done for international society: identify its primary and secondary institutions. Stewardship of our physical worlds – our cyber systems and planetary environment, biodiversity and humanity, cultural heritage and world economy, to name a few – might be construed as a primary institution of world society. By directing activity toward the preservation, cultivation, and maintenance for the benefit of future generations – activity that emphasises our caretaker, not ownership, functionsFootnote 104 – stewardship defines ‘both the basic character and purpose’ of world societyFootnote 105 in ways that foreground our shared geographies constitutive of our world. While the reasons for inter-generationally-based acknowledgements of responsibility and conservation vary within and across issue areas, the purpose of maintaining and caring for our worlds pivots on valuation of our common worlds. This does not suggest stewardship assumes singular form; on the contrary, the multidimensionality of stewardship practices relate to the issues to which they are attached, as well as the limits of understanding and knowledge at any given point in time. It is to suggest, though, that stewardship reflects prior cognition of, and normative and programmatic commitment to shared social spaces that assign and organise activities, shape institutional development, and constrain behaviours to ensure the endurance of our worlds. In this way, our worlds themselves constitute the very essence of world society.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Review’s anonymous referees, and Cornelia Navari and Peter Wilson for helpful discussions about the idea.
