Lucy alumna, Dr Irena Caquet, tells us about her research and career in politics and international relations.
I am Ukrainian, born and raised in Lviv in Western Ukraine. I have always wanted to live and work in an international environment, and my main interest academically has been politics and international relations.
After I left Ukraine at the age of 23, I lived in Prague, Czechia, where I worked at an international radio station “Radio Free Europe”, before moving to Paris four years later.
UNESCO, where I have been working for 20 years, is a perfect place for me. After joining it, I first worked in the Sector for External Relations, and since September 2021, I have been working for the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, where I am responsible for the state of conservation of World Heritage sites in Central and Eastern Europe and in France.
I have two Masters’ degrees - in Philology, from the Lviv State Franko University (Ukraine), and in Diplomatic Studies, from the University of Westminster (UK).
At Cambridge and Lucy, I did a PhD in International Relations (2008-2013). My research focused on the role of UNESCO in sustaining cultural diversity, which I published shortly after as an academic book titled The Diplomacy of Culture: The Role of UNESCO in Sustaining Cultural Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The research helped me to gain a deeper understanding of UNESCO’s functioning not only as an organisation, but also as an organising entity as well as how UNESCO’s international legal instruments in the field of culture are negotiated and applied. Ultimately, my Cambridge degree led me to join the Culture Sector of UNESCO and more specifically its most successful (and interesting) World Heritage programme.
My interest in politics and international relations brought me to pursue a career in an international organisation. UNESCO has a brilliant mandate, for it strives to make the world a better place for everyone by promoting education, culture, sciences and the freedom of expression. All of them are crucial for the societies we want to live in. I feel it for myself and my children, I know it from being a Cambridge alumna, and I witness it when I travel to different World Heritage sites that UNESCO tries to safeguard as a common heritage of humanity. At the heart of the concept of World Heritage is the “outstanding universal value” of the sites, but all of UNESCO’s work is about values – the values we need to defend for the future we want to create.
My key motivation and goal is to make my contribution, however modest, to this important collective endeavour – creating a more peaceful, more environmentally sustainable, better educated and freer world for future generations.
The best thing about being part of the Lucy community was meeting students and academic staff from different backgrounds and horizons, but all sharing the same intellectual curiosity about everything. At Lucy and at Cambridge more generally, one can bring up any subject and your interlocutor will have interesting and insightful things to say about it. I am glad to be able to continue enjoying thought-provoking exchanges when meeting with Lucy and Cambridge alumni at various Paris events.