Beyond Unesco Cachet: Heritage, Commodification, and Contested Landscapes in Southeastern Turkey

This paper examines the relationship between the commodification of nature and heritage-making in conflict-ridden southeastern Turkey, specifically focusing on two World Heritage applications during the reconciliation period between the PKK and the Turkish state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2007 and 2014, it argues that heritage-making is a socially, politically, and institutionally mediated process subject to the commodification of nature and its objectification as an ecological commodity.

Since the 1970s, nature has emerged as an accumulation strategy and acquired an exchange value under new conditions of created scarcity, bringing changes in its production and consumption (Katz, 1998, Smith 2006). Specific natural sites are turned into "new ecological commodities" and put under protection regimes through enclavisation. The heritage industry and its "cultural landscape" category, introduced in 1992 to alleviate the uneven distribution of UNESCO funds, are at the center of this intensified enclavisation via the concept of authenticity. Yet, it has served to expand the UNESCO flagship and the hegemonic ideal that heritage brings economic development through tourism and tourism-related activities.

Through a comparison of the two WH applications, I argue that heritage-making in Turkey's war-ridden Kurdish region has become not only an economic resource to animate impoverished local economies but also a powerful political resource and a medium of communication for various counter-hegemonic discourses on class, ecology, and ethnic identity. The discursive vortex of right to nature and right to the city has allowed local actors to turn heritage sites into translocal ecological commodities, articulating their demands to broader discourses and political agendas. However, the case studies also reveal the limits of the World Heritage cachet and discussions that take heritage as a political resource implying a universal right. The asymmetrical urban warfare that started months after the WH nomination shows that WH cachet is a locally bounded political resource.