Navigating Dialogue and Diplomacy

Abstract

This edited volume brings together a highly qualified and diverse team of international scholars to examine how cultural heritage operates as a field of global engagement at the intersection of diplomacy, dialogue, and mediated cultural practice. It advances a conceptual shift from heritage as a state instrument of soft power to heritage as a relational and mobile process that travels across borders and is continually reworked through institutions, publics, and platforms. Within this framework, dialogue is approached not as a normative outcome but as a contingent and situationally produced mode of engagement shaped by power, mediation, and context. Taking China’s evolving heritage practices as a particularly revealing vantage point, the volume explores how heritage is mobilized, interpreted, and contested amid intensifying geopolitical tensions and resurgent cultural nationalism, while also speaking to dynamics that extend beyond the Chinese case. Contributors from heritage studies, international relations, media and communication, cultural studies, and China studies bring interdisciplinary perspectives and draw on qualitative methods including ethnography, critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, and comparative case studies. This methodological breadth enables the volume to move across scales, from international governance and diplomatic initiatives to urban spaces, digital platforms, and everyday intercultural encounters. Collectively, the chapters reposition heritage as a dynamic site of negotiation, mediation, and meaning-making, offering critical insights into the role of heritage in shaping global narratives, cultural identities, and the possibilities and limits of international dialogue in a changing world.