Reframing International Cooperation

This book applies rational choice, human security and constructivist analytical frames to explore how the international community has responded to threats to cultural heritage. The author draws lessons for reframing the nature of international cooperation, and argues that the familiar conceptual and theoretical lenses are themselves transformed in the process. The book further outlines new possibilities for a fruitful cross-disciplinary exchange between International Relations and International Law, broadening our understanding of how legalisation, regulation and criminalisation operate in the international system.

Studying heritage allows us to uniquely access the relative strengths and weaknesses of nationalist and internationalist/cosmopolitan discourses and reveal the influence of interests and identities at play within regimes of cooperation. The potential of heritage as a site for a clash of hegemonic, western-centric science and other ways of knowing is harnessed to sidestep the privileging of high politics in theorising the international realm, while still allowing us to have discussions about the causes and impact of war and conflict and the structures of global interdependence and inequality.