Best known for its World Heritage program committed to "the
identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural
heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to
humanity," the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 as an intergovernmental
agency aimed at fostering peace, humanitarianism, and intercultural
understanding. Its mission was inspired by leading European
intellectuals such as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein,
Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, and Aldous and Julian Huxley. Often
critiqued for its inherent Eurocentrism, UNESCO and its World
Heritage program today remain embedded within modernist principles
of "progress" and "development" and subscribe to the liberal
principles of diplomacy and mutual tolerance. However, its mission
to prevent conflict, destruction, and intolerance, while noble and
much needed, increasingly falls short, as recent battles over the
World Heritage sites of Preah Vihear, Chersonesos, Jerusalem,
Palmyra, Aleppo, and Sana'a, among others, have underlined. A
Future in Ruins is the story of UNESCO's efforts to save the
world's heritage and, in doing so, forge an international community
dedicated to peaceful co-existence and conservation. It traces how
archaeology and internationalism were united in Western initiatives
after the political upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.
This formed the backdrop for the emergent hopes of a better world
that were to captivate the "minds of men." UNESCO's leaders were
also confronted with challenges and conflicts about their own
mission. Would the organization aspire to intellectual pursuits
that contributed to the dream of peace or instead be relegated to
an advisory and technical agency? An eye-opening and long overdue
account of a celebrated yet poorly understood agency, A Future in
Ruins calls on us all to understand how and why the past comes to
matter in the present, who shapes it, and who wins or loses as a
consequence.
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