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During the past few years, the European Union (EU) has strengthened its cultural diplomacy policies to respond to diverse global challenges and crises within, at, and beyond its borders. The European Commission has identified heritage as one of the focus areas of EU cultural diplomacy. Heritage is a challenging political tool because it can be used for strengthening unity and inclusion, but it may also simultaneously and unintentionally cause exclusion and feelings of non-belonging and create boundaries and hierarchical power relations between people.

To understand the uses of heritage in EU cultural diplomacy and the implications this heritage diplomacy may have, HERIDI will scrutinize EU foreign policy and initiatives for external cultural relations that deal with cultural heritage and that are developed and implemented by various actors both in EU member states and external countries.

HERIDI takes a novel perspective on the roles of heritage in cultural diplomacy. We hypothesize that cultural diplomacy is an arena to not only use but proactively construct heritage: It names and promotes certain cultural expressions, sites, or objects as heritage and produces discourses, narratives, values, agencies, and competencies related to them. The project explores and develops the concept and practice of inter-heritage dialogue.

Our core research questions are:

-How does EU heritage diplomacy construct the ideas of heritage, the EU, and Europe (and Europe's ‘others’), and with what effects?

-How does EU heritage diplomacy deal with power relations between and among diverse actors in the discourses, processes, and practices of heritage diplomacy and with what effects?

-How to practice inter-heritage dialogue?

HERIDI utilizes an interdisciplinary perspective including heritage and cultural studies, political science, EU and European studies, and geography. Our theoretical framework intersects critical heritage studies, postcolonial theory, and critical geopolitics. It emphasizes the idea of heritage as a social process and explores the dialogic potential of heritage in cultural diplomacy.

Scientific aims:

-To develop a novel approach for the research of heritage diplomacy

-To develop a new concept and practice of ‘inter-heritage dialogue’

-To provide critical analysis and results that benefit scholarship as well as policymakers, educators, and practitioners of cultural diplomacy at various levels

Expected societal impacts:

-To increase the transparency of cultural diplomacy and heritage diplomacy policies and practices

-To suggest how to improve cultural and heritage diplomatic initiatives

-To increase multidirectional exchange, respect, and balanced dialogue between diverse people and communities

-Respond to diverse global challenges, such as racism

-To advance a critical understanding of heritage(s), inter-heritage dialogue, cultural diplomacy, Europe, and the EU