Confirming, suturing and transforming international recognition: the case of world heritage

Abstract

Speaking after the addition of The Forth Bridge on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (WHL), a Scottish minister described it as an ‘honour that shows this is a great industrial treasure not just to the city, to Scotland or the United Kingdom, but the entire world.’ A few years later, the delegation of Indonesia took the floor after the inscription of Ombilin Coal mines. Dubbed Indonesia’s first industrial world heritage site, the mines had been owned by the Dutch East Indies government. Thus, the delegation had to describe the industrial heritage as a colonial imposition before noting that the area became ‘modern and integrated.’ If both Scotland and Indonesia received international recognition as modern, industrial subjects, they got there differently. In apprehending that difference, this article extends social-structural theories of international recognition. Approaching these structures as providing uneven recognition possibilities, I develop three modes of recognition pursuits that mediate the challenges of such uneven terrain. I probe the traction of these modes by analyzing speeches state delegations deliver after placing their sites on the WHL. This framework and analysis extend our understanding of international recognition pursuits by pointing to the hold of symbolic structures, and their transformation under creative state engagements.

Introduction

Taking the floor after the inscription ¹ of The Forth Bridge on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (‘WHL’), a minister of the Scottish government described it as an ‘honour that shows this is a great industrial treasure not just to the city, to Scotland or the United Kingdom, but the entire world.’ ² The speech forged an intimate relation between Forth Bridge and Scotland: ‘Scotland did not just build great works of engineering, our works of engineering built us, and are part of how we see ourselves.’ ³ Scotland, then, received worldwide recognition for its self-narrative as a subject with industrial acumen. A few years later, the delegation of Indonesia took the floor after the inscription of Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of Sawahlunto. The speech described Ombilin as the country’s ‘first industrial [world heritage] site.’ ⁴ However, the mines had been owned and operated by the imperial Dutch East Indies government. Thus, the speech described the industrial heritage as a colonial imposition of ‘profound changes in social relations,’ from which the area emerged as ‘modern,’ with ‘urban mining patterns.’ ⁵ If both Scotland and Indonesia received international recognition as modern, industrial subjects, they got there through different modes of recognition pursuit. This article focuses on those different modes to extend our understanding of international recognition politics.

One influential approach theorizes international recognition as starting with states constructing self-narratives, for which they seek peer recognition. ⁶ This approach can apprehend Scotland’s pursuit. But why would Indonesia seek industrial recognition despite a significant biographical tension? Others contend that the symbolic order of available and valorized meanings structures recognition pursuits. ⁷ This approach provides further traction into Indonesia’s fraught pursuit. World heritage offers international recognition for industrial acumen, attached to attributes of modernity and mastery. Crucially, taken together, the two examples illustrate the differential possibilities that international recognition structures present to recognition-seekers. These differential possibilities have been noted by historical-political approaches to recognition, however, the modes of recognition pursuits that emerge in relation to these social structures have not received sustained theoretical attention. ⁸

This article develops three modes of recognition pursuit, which further analytical traction into global recognition politics, and specifically, into how states pursue recognition through and against social structures, reproducing and transforming them in the process. Building on existing work, I apprehend international recognition pursuits as facilitated and frustrated by symbolic universes, that is, sets of meanings that dis/allow international recognition. Symbolic universes generate valuable subjectivities, render them objects of recognitive pursuits, and present subjects with differential recognition possibilities. Pressing further, I centre the meaning chains elemental to symbolic universes and, thus, to pursuits of international recognition. This focus moves beyond the scholarly emphasis on the categorical acceptance or rejection of existing recognition structures. ⁹ In doing so, it illuminates states’ creative recognition pursuits and attendant political stakes.

I propose that three modes of recognition pursuit emerge at the intersection of international recognition structures with state biographies and/or alternative symbolic universes. These are ‘confirming,’ ‘suturing,’ and ‘transforming’ pursuits. Confirming pursuits unfold in the absence of a conflictual relation between the symbolic universe and the recognition-seeking subject. These pursuits operate within and reproduce the symbolic universe, and entail smooth confirmations of a claimed subjectivity. Suturing pursuits reveal and seek to smooth over tensions between the subject and the symbolic universe. The subject is attached to the desired recognition but the stitching required for the attachment is visible. Suturing operates within but can unsettle the symbolic universe by revealing its limits. Transforming pursuits similarly emerge from tensions between the subject and the symbolic universe. This time, however, the recognition-seeking subject mediates the tension by transforming the terms of recognition. Here, attending to meaning chains elucidates how transformative pursuits produce piecemeal changes that reinflect the meaning of valorized subjectivities, such as multiculturalism, in the process of seeking recognition.

I illustrate the analytical purchase of these modes via UNESCO’s world heritage regime. International institutions and regimes have played important roles in structuring recognition pursuits in postwar global politics. Their broad membership means that multiple subjects, with various biographies and symbolic entanglements, pursue recognition through these social structures. As the interdisciplinary literature notes and states themselves express, world heritage is an avenue for international cultural recognition, and with the World Heritage Convention boasting 194 signatories, it has systemic reach. This means that subjects such as Scotland and Indonesia, which pursue recognition via world heritage, can have different relations to its terms. To analyze how those relations generate divergent but patterned recognition pursuits, I turn to acceptance speeches states give after their sites have been added to the WHL. Delivered by a range of states, these speeches are public enunciations where states seek to draw recognition as inheritors, contributors, or custodians of recently inscribed sites’ universal value.

My analysis elucidates, first, the hold of the symbolic universe in structuring recognition pursuits. I illustrate this hold by analyzing industrial and multicultural recognition pursuits that unfold despite challenging state biographies and conflicting symbolic universes. Second, I zero in on the meaning chains through which states pursue these subjectivities. I illustrate how the three modes I develop further our understanding of the narrative strategies through which states seek recognition and mediate the vulnerabilities that emerge along the way. Crucially, these creative engagements involve piecemeal transformations, which are not wholesale rejections of normative packages, but generate politically meaningful changes in the meaning of the desired subjectivities, and potentially, the social structures of recognition.

The article’s main contribution is the conceptualization of three modes of recognition pursuit. These modes illuminate and make analytical sense of a richer field of state engagements, with implications for the durability and transformation of symbolic universes of international recognition. Working at the level of an international institution, I depart from the broad brushstrokes of systemic analyses and from analyses that focus on a single actor or a subset of actors. ¹⁰ This meso-level captures patterned pursuits but retains (some of) the substantive granularity of smaller-scale analyses. This level also allows me to point to possible interaction effects between suturing and transformative pursuits, namely that subjects, who once sought recognition from challenging symbolic structures, might take up the openings forged by transformative pursuits.

The article proceeds as follows. First, I review the IR literature on recognition. I present my theoretical framework in the second and third sections. The fourth section outlines my analytical approach. The rest of the article analyzes recognition pursuits that unfold through, and in friction with the symbolic universe of UNESCO’s world heritage regime. I conclude with analytical and normative implications.

Sociality of recognition

Early IR engagement with recognition focused on sovereignty, marked by the debate between declarative and constitutive approaches. ¹¹ Declarative approaches contend that sovereign subjecthood requires meeting the Montevideo criteria. Recognition from other states acts as a declaration that the criteria have been met. Conversely, constitutive approaches point to instances of incompatibility between Montevideo compliance and sovereign subjecthood, and foreground recognition by others as that which makes sovereign states. Others, such as Mikulas Fabry, have pushed this debate further by illustrating the social and historical construction of sovereign recognition criteria. ¹² Fabry’s work notwithstanding, recognition scholarship takes up the sociality of global politics primarily to examine how recognition pursuits extend beyond sovereign subjecthood. These more extensive pursuits include quests to become a particular kind of subject – great power, civilized, and so on. ¹³ They are often dubbed ‘thick recognition,’ and juxtaposed to ‘thin recognition,’ that is, legal recognition as a sovereign state. ¹⁴

Thick recognition quests suggest that international political subjecthood is not the end of the story and raise anew the question of why states pursue recognition. The scholarship gives three answers to this question. For some, including the growing ontological security literature, recognition of a state’s self-narrative is elemental to the security of its being and its ability to act in the world. ¹⁵ Others, including work grounded on psychoanalytical micro-foundations, connect enduring recognition quests to the impossible desire for potent, whole subjectivities. ¹⁶ And finally, for some, the sociality of global politics generates recognition pursuits, as states seek to identify who they are and where they stand in relation to others. ¹⁷ In what follows, I similarly comprehend the sociality of global politics as integral to international recognition pursuits. Centring this sociality allows for the possibility that recognition quests can be generated, facilitated, and frustrated by international institutional structures, such as world heritage. Not all recognition endeavours stake the entirety of state-selves or risk inabilities to act in the world. Subjects nevertheless undertake these other endeavours, which attach them to valorized global political subjectivities.

These answers also bring up a key tension that marks recognition pursuits. In its fundamental sociality, recognition-seeking incurs insecurity in the pursuit of security. It risks revealing that one is not (yet) the kind of subject one claims to be. ¹⁸ For example, aspiring great powers seek recognition from established great powers, who might withhold it. ¹⁹ The quests for potent subjectivities or sovereign agency are beset by the tension that these claims need others for their recognition. In other words, subjects seek an impossible autonomy via recognition, evidenced in the very need for others to extend it. ²⁰ Crucially, these insights suggest that recognition-seeking needs to pursue desired subjectivities and to navigate the vulnerabilities that emerge in that quest.

Possibilities of recognition: the self, the other, and the structure

While there is agreement that recognition is a fundamentally social endeavor, which opens it up to vulnerabilities, the scholarship diverges on the sociality relevant to international recognition pursuits. ²¹ This divergence informs different theorizations of international recognition with regard to its possibility, vulnerability, and ultimately, modalities. It also informs my engagement with the literature.

Some theories adopt an inside-out model. This model begins with states ‘putting together’ their identities. To do that, states rely on domestic resources such as religious references, historical experiences, cultural achievements, and state ideology. ²² These resources are woven into a self-understanding, which needs to be externally recognized to become a ‘stable identity.’ ²³ When there is a ‘rough equivalence’ between a state’s self-understanding and the engagement of others with the state, the outcome is satisfactory recognition, stabilized identities, and peaceful relations. ²⁴ Misrecognition, defined as others withholding recognition of the state’s self-understanding, ²⁵ opens up to other, mostly conflictual outcomes, rooted in humiliation and anger. ²⁶ In response, the recognition-seeking state can ‘re-brand’ and pursue a different identity, undertake domestic transformations that make its identity claims more compelling, or dig its heels and aggressively pursue its claimed identity. ²⁷ This model, then, apprehends states as seeking recognition for internally constructed selves. The social enters the picture in the second stage, in the form of Others that grant or withhold recognition. With the exception of Michelle Murray’s observation that, to mediate risks of misrecognition, states stage the identities for which they seek recognition in rhetorics of fait accompli, ²⁸ states seemingly do not consider vulnerabilities of the recognitive process in putting together their self-understanding and only respond post-facto to misrecognition. ²⁹

If recognitive processes start with states putting together their narrative identities, why would Indonesia seek recognition for industrial acumen, which sits uneasily with its endogenous resources? This pursuit, I suggest, is generated by international social structures, namely, the matrices of cultural valorization institutionalized within world heritage. If so, then the social enters the recognitive fray earlier, and not only relationally, but also substantively. Following that thread, we can ask: What makes peer recognition more or less likely? How does a misrecognized state gauge which domestic reforms might lead to recognition? These questions, which point to the role of social structures, become thornier considering that some scholars adopt this inside-out model to analyze recognitive pursuits of role identities. For example, Murray contends that states endogenously put together self-narratives for which they seek recognition but also notes that great power recognition involves a role identity that ‘draw[s] meaning from a shared social order.’ ³⁰ If so, would we not expect that states that vie for great power recognition build the elements of this social order into their self-narrative, or actively negotiate the gaps between it and their self-narrative? Murray notes that recognition is possible when self-understandings are acknowledged as corresponding to existing positions in the social structure. Thus, self-understandings can be ‘framed and articulated’ in terms of international social structures. ³¹ However, Murray does not elaborate on how these framing negotiations unfold or fit with her emphasis on the primacy of endogenous resources to the recognitive process.

Other scholars have centered social structures in apprehending international recognition pursuits. Some of these works are launched on psychoanalytical, and primarily Lacanian, grounds whereas others take historico-political tacks. In the Lacanian cut, the symbolic order – the world of discourse and signification all subjects enter as they leave behind a pre-verbal world – is key: it makes subjects and structures their desires. ³² Desire for recognition, which is part of the quest to become a potent subject, attaches to the symbolic order’s terms. ³³ The symbolic order guides subjects’ desires towards certain objects, based on what they signify – craving an apple a day for the good health it promises or seeking recognition as a modern subject via industrial heritage. Conversely, desires that do not fit the symbolic order’s terms cannot find expression and are repressed. Finally, the symbolic order can only incompletely represent desires. ³⁴ This is because it precedes and exceeds the subject – its terms came before the subject, and they are never her own. Alienation is the subject’s basic condition, as the symbolic order makes the pursuit of recognition possible and its fulfilment impossible. ³⁵

These insights further analytical traction into dynamics germane to international recognition. Centring the symbolic order helps make sense of why Indonesia might seek industrial recognition. The pursuit sits uneasily with Indonesia’s biography, but it allows for claiming a potent and valorized subjectivity. Similarly, states such as Turkey, which run on antimulticultural domestic scripts, seek recognition as cultural mosaics and open-air museums, subjectivities valorized and recognized via world heritage. And yet, this framework and the generic gap it posits between subjects and the symbolic order raises the question of whether recognition is equally impossible for all. Take, for example, the agenda-setting special issue on (mis)recognition. ³⁶ Multiple contributions to the special issue answer this question in the affirmative. ³⁷ This answer is partly rooted in the fundamental tension of seeking recognition for sovereign agency, which is the special issue’s focus. But the affirmative answer is also grounded in the proposition that alienation is the shared condition of subjects, making satisfactory recognition universally impossible.

In contrast, the opening examples suggest that the pursuit of international industrial recognition does not present the same kind of problem for Scotland and Indonesia. Both states are entangled with the available signs of pursuing world heritage recognition. However, this entanglement is smoother for Scotland than it is for Indonesia. The vulnerability that emerges for Indonesia is associated with the specific terms of the recognitive pursuit. In other words, it is in the pursuit of recognition as a subject with industrial acumen that Indonesia has to reveal and negotiate its biography as a (formerly) colonized subject.

Some uptakes of the psychoanalytical tack gesture to this unevenness. While noting ‘generic alienation,’ Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson remark that the symbolic order is imbued with political asymmetries, ³⁸ whereas Charlotte Epstein notes that personal biographies bear upon states’ pursuits of sovereign recognition – for example, Russia’s desire fixes on Crimea. ³⁹ Whereas for Epstein state biographies enter into view as idiosyncratic elements, Kinnvall and Svensson’s layering of political structures onto generic alienation makes it possible to comprehend the vulnerabilities of recognition, and their mediations, in patterned ways. Relatedly, some psychoanalytical approaches to recognition, as well as key work by Jennifer Mitzen, have emphasized the importance of flexible rather than rigid self-narratives in contending with perils of (mis)recognition, a point to which I return in the conclusion. ⁴⁰

Finally, cautioning against the flattening effect of generic alienation, some scholars have taken historical-political tacks to theorizing international recognition. Ayşe Zarakol has drawn out from Patchen Markell’s engagement with Hegel the critical insight that, while sovereign agency might be an impossibility, durable recognition hierarchies accommodate this constitutive contradiction by granting the master a semblance of sovereign agency compared to the servant. ⁴¹ Similarly, Minda Holm and Ole Jacob Sending define social structures of recognition as ‘system[s] of super and subordination, where some states define the criteria against which other states are compelled to seek recognition.’ ⁴² Further, they identify institutionalized normative structures as generative of these uneven recognition possibilities. In the case of sovereign agency, social structures of thick recognition such as good governance norms stand alongside one-off thin recognition, generating ‘good’ sovereigns and enduring recognition quests. Scholars have also identified 19th century standards of civilization, human rights, and the normative fabric of liberal internationalism as past and present social structures of international recognition. ⁴³

This historical-political casting travels further yet in comprehending the uneven terrain of global recognition pursuits. It does so by locating recognitive challenges neither in generic alienation nor solely in the interdependence integral to the process, but with the social substance that structures recognition pursuits. However, and surprisingly, while Adler-Nissen and Zarakol briefly identify ‘embracing misrecognition’ or ‘self-correction without internalization’ as two possible responses to this vulnerability, and Holm and Sending point to the ‘promotion of counter-norms,’ this opening has not led to sustained theoretical and analytical attentiveness to patterned modes of recognition-seeking that emerge in response to these social structures. ⁴⁴

I propose that there is room to further our conceptions of how states pursue international recognition through and against established social structures. I develop three modes of recognition pursuit, which extend our understanding of the hold of international recognition structures and of how states engage with, reproduce, and transform them.

Symbolic universes, meaning chains, international recognition

Building on historical-political approaches, I apprehend international social structures as shaping recognition pursuits. In that, international institutions and their global governance regimes generate and stabilize the social structures that facilitate and frustrate international recognition as valorized subjects – democratic, multicultural, a healthy economy, and so on. I understand these structures as institutionalized symbolic universes. The verbiage of the symbolic universe indicates both an affinity to and a departure from ‘symbolic order.’ The affinity consists in the proposition that recognition pursuits are structured by these sets of meanings. In turn, the slight shift in verbiage indicates the article’s departure from generic alienation associated with the phrase symbolic order, and its foregrounding of the differential possibilities of recognition that particular symbolic universes engender.

Institutionalized symbolic universes generate, structure, and frustrate international recognition desires. They generate desires and avenues for international recognition by presenting certain subjectivities as valuable, prestigious, or as indexing good members of international society. The substance and grammar of institutionalized symbolic universes, that is, the terms on which they grant recognition, structure recognition pursuits by directing states’ quests towards some subjectivities and accolades, and away from others. At the same time, the substance of the symbolic universe renders recognition easier for some states and harder for others. Take the case of UNESCO’s world heritage regime. The regime generates desires for recognition as a subject associated with cultural productions or world historical events deemed to have universal value. The regime’s symbolic universe structures this desire in civilizational, multicultural, and technological-developmental terms. This structuring frustrates the pursuit of cultural recognition for subjects that might have difficult relations to elements of this symbolic universe. The question, then, becomes how subjects negotiate these facilitating and frustrating dynamics.

Before we get to that question, it is important to further explicate the construction of symbolic universes. Symbolic universes of recognition emerge through the ‘filling in’ of empty signifiers. This task involves clarifying and narrowing down the meaning of relevant signifiers by inserting them into meaning chains. ⁴⁵ Let me illustrate. The World Heritage Convention’s preamble proposes that certain sites constitute humanity’s shared heritage because they possess ‘outstanding universal value’ (‘OUV’). ⁴⁶ At this level, the symbolic universe is vague and capacious. Article 1 begins to bound this universe by enumerating qualifying forms of heritage as monuments, groups of buildings, and sites. Linking OUV to this typological trio also clarifies what cannot count as world heritage, that is, moveable artefacts. The OUV criteria further insert this key signifier into meaning chains that include human creative genius, technological development, and cultural interchange. These lengthening meaning chains specify and narrow down what can receive world heritage recognition – for example, monumental constructions that reflect exceptional human creative genius. With these steps, OUV moves from an empty signifier that can be filled in numerous ways to one that is substantiated through particular meaning chains. Successfully seeking international cultural recognition requires attaching cultural productions to these chains. Conversely, resources that are not part of the symbolic universe, such as vernacular heritage, do not lead to international recognition.

Let me situate this framework in relation to the previously reviewed literature. If the first model begins with states putting together their identities, my framework proposes that international recognition structures play generative roles by constructing internationally potent, desirable, and meaningful subjectivities, and opening up recognition avenues. At the same time, I centre the substance of these symbolic universes and focus on the unevenness of the recognitive terrain. I foreground meaning chains, which are integral to how symbolic universes facilitate and foreclose recognitive possibilities. This approach is crucial for moving beyond categorical analyses where states either adopt or reject particular recognition categories, such as ‘multicultural.’ In contrast, attending to meaning chains alerts us to how multicultural recognition is put together via further elements such as ‘interchange’ or ‘fusion.’ As I elaborate next, these elements are sites of creative engagement for recognition-seeking states. Attending to meaning chains thus elucidates other recognition seeking modalities.

This framework also generates analytical insights that are beyond the scope of this article but that raise questions for existing scholarship. These concern, importantly, the relation between systemic, institutionalized recognition, and peer-recognition. Multiple state speeches cast world heritage recognition as global and identify the international community as the recognizing agent. ⁴⁷ Recognition is posited as joining the international (cultural) community and gaining visibility on the world stage. ⁴⁸ In some cases, this international institutional recognition is folded back into claims of regional primacy. ⁴⁹ It is worthwhile, then, to consider how international institutional recognition interacts with peer-recognition dynamics.

Seeking recognition: confirming, suturing, transforming

We can now turn to modalities of recognition seeking. In this section, I develop three modes: confirming, suturing and transforming. I ground each mode in the relation between the institutionalized symbolic universe and the recognition-seeking subject. In that relation, I focus on subject biographies and entanglements with different symbolic universes. Subject biographies can raise historically grounded challenges to recognition seeking. And insofar as resources that are excluded from international recognition structures do not cease to be meaningful for subjects, the endurance of multiple symbolic universes constitute political challenges of recognition seeking.

Confirming pursuits ⁵⁰ unfold in the absence of a conflictual relation between the symbolic universe and the recognition-seeking subject. The phrase ‘absence of a conflictual relation’ follows from the proposal that symbolic universes are generative of recognition pursuits. It sets a lower bar than correspondence. The Scottish representative’s Forth Bridge speech suggests that the terms of the symbolic universe corresponded to the recognition-seeking subject’s self-understanding. Another example is Iran’s pursuit of industrial recognition via world heritage. The country’s international cultural self-representation often takes civilizational terms, evidenced in high-profile efforts such as the Dialogue of Civilizations. However, Iran has pursued industrial recognition through the regime. These are confirming pursuits because, even if industrial acumen might not be integral to Iran’s internationalized self-representation, the subject does not have a tense relation to this part of the symbolic universe and can smoothly pursue the valorized subjectivity.

The second mode is ‘suturing.’ To develop this mode, I borrow a concept fleetingly mentioned in Lacan’s lectures. In these lectures, suture refers to instances when the subject struggles to attach itself to a signifier or a chain of signifiers. The suture establishes the subject in the chain of identification. ⁵¹ Lacan himself borrowed the term from the medical field and noted that suturing is the site of a permanent scar. In other words, the subject’s relation to the terms of the symbolic universe is not smooth and this lack of smoothness is evident at the site of attachment. ⁵² Suturing recognition pursuits, then, reveal and seek to mediate biographical or normative tensions between the subject and the symbolic universe. These pursuits attach the subject to the symbolic universe but leave visible the stitching that the attachment requires. Indonesia’s quest for industrial recognition is a suturing pursuit. It reveals the tension between the symbolic universe and the subject’s (colonial) biography. The recognition-seeker sutures this gap by narrating the coal mines as having, ultimately, produced a modern subject. While the desired subjectivity can be claimed, it is a claim that leaves visible the seams: Indonesia is not only a possessor of industrial acumen but was also subjected to it. Thus, suturing can mediate the vulnerability of non-recognition but it cannot fully conceal the risk incurred in the recognitive process, namely, revealing the lack of, or complications in relation to, the desired subjectivity.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alexander Tsinovoi have proposed ‘gap-stitching’ to capture state efforts to close the gap between its self-understanding and its perception by the international Other. ⁵³ Through public diplomacy, gap-stitching seeks to reinforce self-narratives and change international perception. My conceptualization of suturing also indexes a recognition gap, but I cash out its dynamics differently. Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi operate with an inside-out model where self-narratives are challenged by international perceptions. I propose that institutionalized symbolic universes can also generate gaps between subjects and forms of international recognition. Further, that gap can be related not only to self-narratives but also to subject biographies, such as colonial subjugation, that challenge the pursuit of potent subjectivities. Finally, I understand suturing not as insistence on a self-narrative, but as creative narrative strategies that link the subject to the relevant signs. ⁵⁴

The third mode is ‘transforming.’ As the name indicates, these pursuits seek to transform existing recognition structures. They also emerge at the tense juxtaposition of recognition structures with plural symbolic universes or the state’s biography. However, unlike suturing when subjects seek recognition through available terms, in this mode, recognition-seeking subjects also seek to amend these terms. The literature captures some of these transformative pursuits, such as states proposing new normative packages of international recognition. ⁵⁵ The world heritage regime’s 1994 partial paradigm shift, which expanded its symbolic universe to new elements such as vernacular heritage, is an example of such transformation. Beyond this possibility, attentiveness to meaning chains illuminates transformative pursuits that operate in narrower, piecemeal ways, and as part of recognitive pursuits. These transformative pursuits introduce new elements into the relevant meaning chains in the process of inserting the subject into the symbolic universe. My analysis illustrates this mode at work in pursuits of multicultural recognition that insert ‘unity’ into a meaning chain that otherwise centers ‘exchange’ and ‘interchange.’

Each mode has implications for the social structures of international recognition. Confirming pursuits operate within and reproduce the institutionalized symbolic universe as legitimate. Suturing also operates within and reproduces the institutionalized symbolic universe. But these pursuits can unsettle the smoothness of this universe by pointing to its limits, contradictions, or silences – for example, by revealing the violent histories of industrialization. Transforming pursuits begin to change parts of the symbolic universe by altering the meaning chains of international recognition. And finally, insofar as these pursuits unfold in the same space, they can interact with one another. One possible consequential interaction concerns transformative and suturing pursuits. Specifically, subjects that previously sought to suture themselves to a challenging symbolic universe might prefer the new grammar opened up by transformative pursuits.

These three modes of recognition pursuit extend existing literature and provide analytical traction into political dynamics that otherwise evade capture. The attentiveness to meaning chains rather than singular resources illuminates the wider repertoire of creative engagements, which unfold as subjects seek to suture themselves to existing recognition structures or push for piecemeal transformations with political implications.

The analysis: materials and approach

The article’s analysis rests on speeches delivered by states after the inscription of their sites on the WHL. Interdisciplinary scholarship notes that world heritage has become an important site for pursuits of international cultural prestige and recognition. ⁵⁶ It also observes that international cultural recognition is not the only good states seek from the regime. For example, once a site is designated as world heritage, it can enter circuits of international political economy, with tourism and development investments that capitalize on the prestigious brand. In contrast, acceptance speeches are moments when states seek recognition in front of an audience of peers by connecting themselves to valorized subjectivities via recently inscribed sites.

The speeches are pre-prepared, mostly last around the allocated 2 minutes, and are delivered by state delegations to an audience of peers during heavily attended annual Committee Meetings. ⁵⁷ In basing my analysis on these speeches, I follow others who have identified state discourses as key sites for the construction and circulation of meanings, identity, and identification. ⁵⁸ Further, Paul Beaumont’s recent work makes the key point that states discursively and intersubjectively (re)produce international status regimes. In other words, and transposed to the case at hand, states discursively construct intersubjectively understood sites of international recognition seeking. ⁵⁹ As the next section illustrates, acceptance speeches evidence this discursive (re)construction of world heritage.

Moreover, these speeches are a good medium to capture divergent and patterned pursuits. To date, 194 states have acceded to the World Heritage Convention. Acceptance speeches are delivered by a wide range of countries, with (possible) different relations to the symbolic universe. Finally, the speeches are given when the site has already been placed on the WHL. Thus, the narrative frames cannot be reduced to pragmatic desires for inscriptions – states can, theoretically, take up this opportunity to say what they want about the sites and to claim cultural-historical acumen. And yet, the speeches continue to invoke institutionalized meanings and attach subjects to these valorized subjectivities.

To put together this textual corpus, I combed the annual reports of World Heritage Committee Meetings. There is some record of a speech for 370 cultural sites. Two-hundred and sixteen of these records are verbatim. ⁶⁰ Fifty-five sites qualify as ‘industrial,’ according to how industrial heritage is defined in the regime’s implementing documents, thematic studies by ICOMOS – the Advisory Body to the regime on cultural heritage – and TICCIH, consultant to ICOMOS on industrial heritage. ⁶¹ Based on these documents industrial heritage includes factories, bridges, water-management systems, industrial settlements, mining landscapes, stone quarries, canals, railways, and textile industry. ⁶² Since my analysis follows subjects’ engagements with the symbolic universe, I also combed the speeches for claims of industrial acumen that might be attached to other (types of) sites. There were no such instances. Sites related to multiculturalism are harder to wrangle. Unlike industrial acumen, intercultural relations are not attached to particular types of sites. Here, I have relied on state invocations of cultural exchange, interchange, or interaction to cast a broad net, which caught 75 sites, ranging from rock art sites to coal mines. ⁶³ Given the high number of sites and space constraints, I limit myself to illustrating suturing and transformative pursuits in relation to this part of the symbolic universe.

My analytical approach is interpretive-inductive and follows from the conceptual strategy of ideal-typification, which isolates certain salient elements. ⁶⁴ Thus, to conceptualize the three modes of recognition, I isolated, on the one hand, the regime’s symbolic universe, and on the other, recognition-seeking subjects’ biographies and symbolic entanglements. As Jackson defines it, this is a configurational approach that expects certain results, practices, or discourses to emerge at the configuration, that is, the intersection of the isolated elements. ⁶⁵ The key question for this approach is whether it can generate interesting and useful analytical insights by organizing empirical observations. ⁶⁶ For example, how do states with various biographical and normative entanglements seek recognition through a set of social structures? The ideal-typified modes allow me to illustrate the different discursive patterns of recognition seeking that emerge at those configurations. In proceeding inductively, I begin by identifying the articulations of industrial or multicultural recognition. Within each group of articulation, I identify discursive patterns, such as smooth and tense site-subject-sign attachments. Once these patterns emerge, the question is whether they correspond to the elements that my modes isolate. In multiple cases, troubling biographical elements, such as colonial histories, are part of the speeches. In other cases, such as China’s pursuit of multicultural recognition, I bring in secondary sources to indicate conflicting normative universes. The strength of the analysis, or the analytical wager, ultimately rests on the sense that the article makes of otherwise unaccounted for or unattended dynamics – for example, subjects’ fraught recognition pursuits and piecemeal transformations of recognition structures.

The symbolic universe of world heritage

If symbolic universes structure recognition pursuits, what is the world heritage regime’s symbolic universe? The regime rests on the premise that certain cultural and natural heritage sites are of such extraordinary value – dubbed outstanding universal value (‘OUV’) – that they constitute humanity’s shared heritage. ⁶⁷ Article 1 of the World Heritage Convention specifies the relevant cultural heritage categories as monuments, sites, and groups of buildings. ⁶⁸ It also lists history, art, science, ethnology, and anthropology as possible sources of OUV. However, the Convention does not further define OUV, which is elemental to the symbolic universe. That elaboration has unfolded through criteria set out in the regime’s Operational Guidelines.

The original OUV criteria drew heavily from art history and archaeology. The criteria attached universal value to aesthetic masterpieces that manifest creative genius, antiquity, disappeared cultures, and the exertion of ‘influence over a span of time or within a cultural area.’ ⁶⁹ These meaning chains, connected to the three-fold typology, resulted in an early WHL with an over-representation of monumental and European sites. ⁷⁰ Experts evaluated vernacular sites such as Plovdiv (Bulgaria) or historic ones with more modest architectural feats like Zanzibar (Tanzania) as unfit for the List. ⁷¹ Impacted states met the exclusions of the early List with critique and unhappiness. However, it was epistemic changes within and beyond the regime that resulted in the partial transformation of this symbolic universe, opening up new avenues of cultural recognition through it. ⁷²

Two elements of this partial paradigm shift, called the ‘Global Strategy for a Representative, Credible and Balanced World Heritage List’ (‘Global Strategy’), are significant for my analysis. The first is the increased attention to industrial heritage. The initial OUV criteria, formulated in 1978, included ‘structures that illustrate industrial development’ but a 1980 revision subsumed this element under the broader statement ‘a significant stage in history.’ ⁷³ Henry Cleere, a British industrial archaeologist, who became ICOMOS’s world heritage coordinator in 1992, was instrumental to the valorization of industrial heritage as part of this paradigm shift. ⁷⁴ The Global Strategy noted industrial technology as a new theme, and OUV criteria were revised to include ‘technological ensemble.’ ⁷⁵ ICOMOS undertook thematic studies and contracted with TICCIH, which has been producing studies on how bridges, railways, water management systems, quarries, and textile industries can be recognized as universally valuable world heritage sites. Second, the experts spearheading the shift criticized the verbiage of ‘cultural influence’ as a unidirectional approach that valorized hierarchical intercultural relations. ⁷⁶ The relevant OUV criterion was revised, replacing ‘influence’ with ‘interchange of human values’ as a source of universal value, opening the symbolic universe up to valorizing multicultural/cosmopolitan intercultural relations. Illustrative of the impact of these changes on recognition possibilities, initially devalued for its modest remains, Zanzibar was praised as an ‘outstanding fusion of cultures’ in 2000 and inscribed. ⁷⁷

Articulating international recognition

As I previously noted, that world heritage is a site for international cultural recognition pursuits is not only a scholarly observation but also a notion that is articulated by states. This articulation of international recognition concerns both the recognition-granter and the scale of the recognition. Multiple speeches point to the international community as the recognition-granter. Illustratively, France spoke on behalf of Albigenisians who ‘thank the international community for the recognition and the inscription,’ whereas Fiji noted that as a world heritage site, Levuka was ‘recognized by the world community.’ ⁷⁸ In scalar terms, the recognition is articulated as unfolding at the international level, with Namibia celebrating ‘joining the global world heritage family,’ and other speeches invoking ‘becoming visible to the world,’ and ‘joining the international cultural community. ⁷⁹ In line with the observations of the interdisciplinary scholarship, then, states regularly construct and communicate their engagement with world heritage as including the pursuit of international recognition.

Confirming and suturing industrial recognition

If thick recognition pursuits are aspirations to become (recognized as) particular kinds of subjects, what subjectivities are indexed and sought via industrial heritage? The regime’s symbolic universe connects industrial recognition to universally valuable stages of historical development. TICCIH reports attach industrial acumen to the creative genius of technological innovation, modernity, social, economic and political evolution, diffusion of technology, and human advancement. ⁸⁰ Illustrating recognition-seeking subjects’ awareness of these stakes, speeches describe the inscribed sites as testaments to: technological development, acumen and mastery, ⁸¹ inspirational ideas of progress and social order, ⁸² skill and know-how, ⁸³ international stages of industrialization, ⁸⁴ and the resilience and hard work of past generations. ⁸⁵ Multiple speeches also identify international as the level at which these valorized attributes are recognized. For example, delegations marked the inscriptions of the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales, Forth Bridge, and the Ancient Ferrous Metallurgy Site as ‘acknowledge[ing] our global significance through the export of product, people, values and technology,’ a ‘great industrial treasure not just to the city, to Scotland, or the United Kingdom but the entire world,’ and as the celebration of ‘Africa participating in global industry, creativity and technology.’ ⁸⁶ What is sought via industrial heritage is recognition as globally significant, modern subjects with long-standing technological and material mastery.

At this point, both inside-out and psychoanalytical approaches to recognition have analytical traction. It might be the case that the desired global recognition corresponds to the subject’s self-understanding. Alternatively, recurrent articulations of valuable subjectivities and the emphasis on global recognition can be testaments to systemic resources that structure recognition pursuits and direct subjects towards similar attributes. And yet, taken together and analyzed in their granularity, the relevant speeches comprise different narrative pursuits grounded in subjects’ varied relations to the symbolic universe.

Multiple speeches, primarily by Western European states, constitute confirming recognition pursuits. Forth Bridge’s inscription speech is a poignant illustration of the recognition-seeking subject’s smooth and proximate relation to the symbolic universe: ‘Scotland did not just build great works of engineering, our works of engineering built us, and are part of how we see ourselves.’ ⁸⁷ Other speeches similarly emphasize the significant and positive place that the industrial site holds in the subject’s biography: France marked Nord-Pas de Calais’s inscription by calling the site ‘not a minor detail in our history, it is our history,’ ⁸⁸ and Norway described Rjukan-Notodden as an ‘industrial miracle’ and ‘the start of modern industrial revolution’ in the country, adding: ‘we are proud of our industrial history.’ ⁸⁹ Further, some speeches underlined how these sites mark the identities of miners and inhabitants, if not the whole ‘territory, landscapes, cities and hearts.’ ⁹⁰ In these cases, the regime’s symbolic universe (industrial acumen) does not present a challenge to the subject’s self-narrative (how we see ourselves) or its biography (our history). The absence of these tensions means that the site (a coal mine) as well as the recognition-seeking subject (France) can be attached with ease to the relevant signifiers of valorization and recognition.

In another set of cases, biographical tensions necessitate suturing to attach recognition-seeking subjects to industrial acumen. Take, for example, the inscriptions of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) Station and the Kalka Shimla Railway, both located in India. In its evaluation, ICOMOS had proposed that the first site be inscribed under the name Victoria Terminus because it is ‘still commonly used,’ and ‘in memory of the fact that the Terminus had been built to commemorate the Jubilee of Queen Victoria.’ ⁹¹ ICOMOS’s proposal laid bare the gap between the site and the subject, namely, post-colonial India, and thus, between the subject and the terms of recognition. The delegation of India, which had nominated the site as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, rejected ICOMOS’s suggestion but accepted a double-name. This sutured double-name allows the subject to be attached to the site, but not without revealing the tensions of India’s recognition as a subject with industrial acumen. Evidencing similar dynamics, 4 years later, the delegation celebrated Kalka Shimla Railway’s inscription by underlining that the site was ‘unique not only because of the amazing century-old technology that created the railway, but also [on account of] the technology that today keeps it active and running.’ ⁹² Thus, the delegate continued, ‘what was a part of the British Indian past has been embraced by modern India and made its own.’ Once again, the recognition pursuit revealed a gap, between the subject and the ‘amazing century-old technology,’ lodged in the subject’s colonial biography. In turn, the suturing linked the subject to the site via the railway’s current functioning. That link became the means of claiming ownership (made its own), custodianship via preservation (keeps it active and running), ⁹³ and ultimately the possession of valorized technological skills for recognition as a subject (modern India) with industrial acumen.

Ombilin Coal Mines is another suturing pursuit of industrial recognition. If the Indian delegation’s speech culminated in the ownership claim, the Indonesian delegation began there, calling Ombilin ‘Indonesia’s first industrial heritage [on the List].’ While Ombilin might be Indonesia’s insofar as it is within the state’s territorial boundaries, the remainder of the speech illustrated the complications of this relation when it comes to industrial recognition. In a move that revealed and sought to smooth over the tensions between the subject and the relevant signs, the delegation described Ombilin as a testament to ‘impositions by colonial powers to their colonies’ producing ‘profound changes in social relations,’ ⁹⁴ and ‘transform[ing] the remote area into a much more dynamic urban’ one. ⁹⁵ If at the end of that suturing narrative, the recognition-seeking subject claimed the dynamic and urban subjectivity associated with industrialization, it was only after revealing this subjectivity to have emerged from an imposition.

Further, in mediating the vulnerabilities of this pursuit, like the case of Kalka Shimla, Indonesia’s speech sought to link the recognition-seeking subject to the site as an active contributor. The delegation described the mines as a ‘fusion of European engineering knowledge and local environmental wisdom.’ ⁹⁶ At first brush, this move seems less successful in claiming industrial acumen, since it aligns engineering knowledge with Europe. However, the invocation of ‘environmental wisdom’ reflects broader and at least partially institutionalized shifts in the regime’s symbolic universe, related to the valorization of industrial acumen in the context of climate change. ⁹⁷ These changes are reflected in other speeches that link industrial sites to clean energy, green economy, and climate change, invoking sustainable development. ⁹⁸ What is at stake then, is a transforming grammar of industrial recognition, which continues to valorize industrial acumen while inserting sustainability into its meaning chains. ⁹⁹ This transforming grammar facilitates the easier attachment of Indonesia to industrial acumen, not as a subject that lacks the desired potency, but as one that brings to the table newly valorized attributes of sustainable development and environmental care.

The foregoing points to endogenous mobilization versus external imposition as the key fracture line that informs confirming or suturing pursuits of industrial recognition. The Trans-Iranian railway, constructed between 1927 and 1938, helps sharpen this analysis. The site’s official world heritage description notes that the railway was funded by the Iranian government to avoid foreign control and contracted to 43 construction companies. ¹⁰⁰ In its speech, the Iranian delegation described the railway as an industrial heritage that ‘narrates the story of international know-how and experience, and its interaction with Iranian architectural and industrial knowledge.’ ¹⁰¹ Like the Ombilin example, this speech notes the local-international interaction. However, in this case, what the recognition-seeking subject contributes to that encounter (industrial knowledge) is crucial to the recognition that is sought. ¹⁰² Put another way, if the site is ‘an outstanding manifestation of the industrial heritage of humanity,’ Iran emerges as a subject that contributed to that heritage via industrial knowledge. It is, then, the ease with which subjects can claim an active contribution to the valorized attribute, and not the presence or absence of other influences, which marks the biographically grounded divergence between confirming and suturing pursuits of recognition.

If endogenous resources determined recognition pursuits, we would not expect to see fraught pursuits in which states seek to suture, and in the process reveal, gaps between the desired recognition and their biographies. It is when we attend to the symbolic universes of international recognition that we can make sense of these fraught cases. Conversely, while the symbolic universe might structure the recognition desires of a range of subjects, that structuring does not result in similar challenges for all. Different patterns of recognition pursuits, such as suturing by postcolonial subjects, emerge to negotiate these challenges, in these cases located in subject biographies. Finally, Indonesia’s speech illustrates how suturing can reveal tensions internal to the symbolic universe. Unlike confirming pursuits, which unfold through positive and prideful narratives, the Indonesian delegation’s speech brings up industrialization as a process that upended social life by, for example, making miners out of peasants. It points, in other words, to the underbellies of an otherwise smooth valorization of innovation and advancement, a point that I return to in the conclusion.

Multicultural desires: from suturing to transforming

In this section, I extend my analysis to multicultural recognition pursuits. This extension shows that the above patterns are not unique to industrial heritage and brings in transformative pursuits. Multiculturalism, as a mode of valorizing intercultural relations, emerged onto the regime’s scene in the mid-1990s, evidenced in the revision of the relevant OUV criterion from ‘cultural influence’ to ‘exchange.’ ¹⁰³ In contrast to industrial heritage, multicultural recognition is not sought through particular types of sites. That openness, taken to its extreme, can mean, as the Republic of Korea’s delegation put it, that all world heritage sites are ‘beautiful symbol(s) of cultural exchange and communication.’ ¹⁰⁴ Cultural exchange and communication were attached to acceptance speeches for 75 sites including industrial landscapes, old cities, archaeological sites, caves, and fortresses. Given this range, I sketch the dominant grammar of pursuing multicultural recognition but focus on suturing and transformative pursuits. This extension allows me to distinguish as well as point to links between suturing and transformative pursuits.

Post-inscription speeches reveal three grammars of pursuing multicultural recognition: cosmopolitan exchange, domestic diversity, and custodianship. Cosmopolitan exchanges position recognition-seeking subjects as long-standing sites of positive civilizational encounters, attached to dialogue, trade, and prosperity. ¹⁰⁵ Domestic multiculturalism is claimed through a grammar of coexistence and tolerance. ¹⁰⁶ Both grammars correspond to the regime’s emphasis on interchange to mark and valorize horizontal and mutual, rather than vertical and unidirectional, cultural relations. Custodianship builds on these grammars to emphasize the importance that the state gives to preserving (the heritage of) diversity. For example, through the protection of minority heritage sites, Jordan positioned the country as ‘direct descendants of the prophet protecting a holy site of Christianity.’ ¹⁰⁷ I focus on domestic multiculturalism to tease out biographical challenges, conflicting symbolic universes, and resulting recognition pursuits.

While this article focuses on narrative modes of recognition pursuit, it is important to note that states that pursue multicultural recognition also seek to circumvent biographical stumbling blocks via material mediations. These mediations involve attaching claims of multiculturalism to ‘easier’ sites. For example, Israel has sought multicultural recognition through Greek, Aramaic, and classical Roman influences and the tolerance of ancient Judaism, whereas Serbia presented a fourth-century Roman palace as ‘proof of pluralism of Serbian culture.’ ¹⁰⁸ In these cases, the claims of openness to cultural diversity and tolerance are made through sites that allow for the circumvention of challenges to those claims – namely, Palestinians as the key question of coexistence for Israel, and for Serbia, the populations caught up in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

What about cases when material sites generate the need for suturing pursuits? Turkey’s speech after the inscription of the Archaeological Site of Ani illustrates these dynamics. Nominated during a softening of Turkey-Armenia relations, ¹⁰⁹ the site bears the enduring historical tension of Turkey’s official denial of the Armenian genocide. Revealing this tension, taking the floor after the site’s inscription, the delegation exclaimed: ‘Anatolia is not a cemetery of cultures and civilizations. Anatolia is a museum of cultures and civilizations.’ ¹¹⁰ In this moment of suturing, the delegation reveals and seeks to mediate a key stumbling block for claims of multiculturality. The cemetery, en masse of Armenians, who were once a significant part of Anatolia’s population, has to be actively disavowed to describe Anatolia as a museum of cultures. That description leaves visible the sutured seams, also because the language of the museum invokes a past, rather than, present multiculturality. Testament to the elisions that facilitate this description of a multicultural Anatolia, ICOMOS’s evaluation recommended that the nominating state ‘present an accurate and balanced representation of the complex history and development of the nominated property.’ ¹¹¹ That recommendation, as I return to the conclusion, points to another possibility of suturing.

If the foregoing illustrates fraught recognition pursuits that unfold within the institutionalized grammar of domestic multiculturalism (exchange and tolerance), and result in material or narrative mediations, others undertake transformative pursuits. To recall, these pursuits involve changing the terms of recognition in the very quest for it. At the level of meaning chains, they involve the insertion of new signifiers that reinflect the symbolic structures of recognition. Take the Indian delegation’s speech following the 2017 inscription of Ahmedabad, which began by noting that the file was ‘professed to UNESCO by President Narendra Modi’ and emphasized that the city has ‘stood for unity with its elegant carvings and its Hindi-Jain temples.’ ¹¹² Two years earlier, the delegation of the People’s Republic of China had also invoked unity in its inscription speech for Tusi Sites. Tusi Sites are the physical remains of the system with the same name, which organized governance relations between the imperial centre and ethnic minorities in southwest China during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. ¹¹³ The speech described the site as a testament to ‘exchanges’ between ‘local ethnic cultures and national identity,’ but only after mentioning the ancient Chinese wisdom in ‘governing a unitary multinational country.’ ¹¹⁴ In this speech, unitary is a qualifier of multinationalism, the relation of the recognition-seeking subject to cultural diversity is one of governance, and the phrase ‘local ethnic cultures and national identity’ opens up to a possibly hierarchical relation.

I do not wish to suggest that the regime’s institutionalization of intercultural relations is ideal, ¹¹⁵ or that replacing influence with exchange resolves intercultural hierarchies. ¹¹⁶ Nevertheless, there is a qualitative difference between the valorization of intercultural relations via the regime’s symbolic universe and the meaning chains put forth in the transformative engagements of the delegations of India and China. These transformative pursuits insert ‘national cohesion’ and ‘unity’ into the meaning chain of multiculturalism and begin to shift a grammar that otherwise unfolds through ‘coexistence’ and ‘tolerance.’ These new signs raise questions about the space for difference and autonomy in domestic intercultural relations. At the same time, they expand the universe of states’ desirable and valorized relations to cultural diversity from protection and preservation to ‘wise governance.’ What emerges, then, is a meaning chain of multiculturalism that is extended between unity, cohesion, governance, and diversity. Given the mention of Modi and the timing of the Tusi Sites’ nomination, we can link these transformative engagements to the changing domestic organizations of cultural diversity in both countries, resulting in shrinking spaces of cultural autonomy. ¹¹⁷ Unlike suturing attempts that seek recognition from the existing symbolic universe despite normative or biographical gaps, in these cases, recognition-seeking subjects opt to mediate the (growing) gap by reconfiguring the discursive structures of recognition.

At this point, we can move to possible interaction effects between transformative and suturing pursuits of multicultural recognition. During the Tusi Sites’ inscription discussion, the delegations of the Philippines and Vietnam praised the site for illustrating how ‘traditional ethnic minority groups would continue to contribute to national cohesion and nation building,’ and for demonstrating ‘a way of running a big country with different cultural backgrounds’ while ‘maintaining national unity.’ ¹¹⁸ These articulations suggest that the transforming meaning chains are recognized and positively appraised by others. If so, we might imagine future pursuits, where subjects that previously chose to forego this part of the symbolic universe or sought to suture themselves to it, take up this newly opened path, and seek multicultural recognition by bringing in elements of unity and national cohesion, and thus contribute to the transformation of this social structure of recognition.

Once again, if international recognition pursuits were grounded solely on endogenously generated self-narratives, we would not expect these fraught engagements. But symbolic universes of recognition valorize and stabilize certain subjectivities as desirable. Given continued criticism and autonomy demands by multiple minority populations, we might apprehend this form of recognition seeking to always involve some gap-stitching. However, the foregoing illustrates that historical denials of mass crimes, ongoing and violent challenges to coexistence, or moves towards ethnocentrism generate more formidable biographical or normative challenges. And yet, even in these cases, we do not necessarily see wholesale rejections of normative packages, but suturing mediations and transformative pursuits that continue to pursue, if in the process amend, internationally valorized subjectivities.

Conclusion

The foregoing has illustrated that the three modes this article conceptualizes can further analytical traction into states’ recognition pursuits by making sense of unexpected and previously unattended dynamics. These dynamics are, namely, pursuits of recognition that unfold amidst challenging state biographies and conflicting normative entanglements, as well as the transformative impact of these pursuits on social structures of recognition. I have parsed these dynamics as emerging at the intersection of institutionalized social structures of recognition with state biographies and multiple symbolic universes. In turn, the analysis suggests that suturing pursuits can be generated by biographical or normative tensions, whereas transformative pursuits seem to be attached to the multiplicity of symbolic universes. This makes sense insofar as transformative pursuits require the mobilization of other symbolic resources.

There is, however, further room to explore the conditions under which normative conflicts generate suturing versus transformative quests. Similarly, further work can adjudicate whether these modes elucidate recognition pursuits beyond institutionalized symbolic universes, to query, for example, how states might engage in suturing narrative pursuits in relation to peer-recognition. The analysis also suggests that it is worthwhile to attend to piecemeal changes generated by global recognition pursuits. The normative instinct might be to dub China’s pursuit of multiculturalism as hypocritical. However, there are further political stakes to it, namely, the transforming meaning of an international social structure. These piecemeal changes and their reception by others are important to apprehending changing international terrains of recognition.

Finally, if international mechanisms generate recognition desires, which are pursued by states despite normative-political and biographical tensions, then there is a need to think further about the design and substantiation of these recognition mechanisms. One part of such thinking involves the construction of capacious symbolic universes that can accommodate multiple cultural histories. But we can also return at this point to the insight that flexible narratives can make for healthier subjects and subjectivities. If so, how might institutions facilitate those subjectivities? Take, for example, Indonesia’s suturing pursuit. The social upending that the delegation invokes reveals a difficult biography, but it also challenges the smooth valorization of industrial acumen. Or take ICOMOS’s request that Turkey’s nomination of the Archeological Site of Ani attend to the site’s complex history. If expanding symbolic universes can allow subjects to undertake smooth recognition pursuits, these two examples suggest that it might also be worthwhile to facilitate recognition pursuits that unfold through complex self-narratives. In the case at hand, these narratives would comprehend cultural productions alongside the historical hierarchies and underbellies that mark them. What would facilitate such narratives, in turn, is a rethinking of institutional adjudicative mechanisms, and how they might valorize not only particular subjectivities but more reflexive versions of them.