ABSTRACT

For cosmopolitans everywhere, making heritage genuinely cosmopolitan should be a crucial part of a genuine recognition of difference and dignity. This chapter looks at how UNESCO's World Heritage List has tried to expand the idea of there being a 'world heritage' that is imagined to belong to the idealised citizens of the world. It considers one form of heritage-making seemingly in direct contrast to the cosmopolitan ideals of UNESCO: the 'heritage citizen' is constructed both in opposition to iconoclasts, but also through development-led heritage-making. The chapter explores how violence, or the memory and silencing of violence, helps constitute iconoclasts as the alter of the heritage citizen. It covers the rise of 'heritage rights' as a new emphasis in policy that revives some of UNESCO's foundational ethos, and that may offer some hope for genuinely cosmopolitan heritage-making processes.