The dark side of cultural heritage protection

Rosén, Frederik

doi:10.1017/s0940739121000023

Cited by 12 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 14 publications

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“…WHL classification is transformative for sites and their surrounding communities. Among other things, it can bring enormous political, cultural and economic benefit, but these changes also carry certain risks (Buckley 2018; di Giovine 2009; Rosén 2021). For the Marquesas, the WHL project represents particular local, national and international agendas.…”

Section: Piercing the Layers: The Unesco Whl Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quilting Power:Mana,UNESCOand Spiritual Sovereignty in the Marquesas Islands

Donaldson

2022

Oceania

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The Marquesas Islands were added to UNESCO's Tentative World Heritage List (WHL) in 1996. Twenty‐five years later, the project to join the coveted WHL continues, plagued by volatile politics and, more subtly, an underlying discomfort with the colonial past. This world heritage initiative highlights key cultural and political tensions between the Marquesas and the two much larger partners involved in the project: Tahiti and France. As a colonial territory of France and an outlying archipelago of French Polynesia, the Marquesas see WHL status as a step toward greater global recognition and power. Yet UNESCO's specific requirements for how heritage is defined, perceived, and promoted threaten to suppress more local, embodied, and relational understandings of Marquesan heritage, echoing long‐standing colonial patterns of social and religious oppression. In particular, the troubled relationship between Islanders and their past trivializes questions about whether to recognize colonial or Indigenous ruins, illustrating the lasting entanglement of these histories and the insidious workings of power across local, state and territorial scales. While the WHL initiative expresses both Indigenous and colonial ambitions, different parties are using the term ‘heritage’ as a political tool that either voices or, in some cases, silences, Indigenous interpretations. The underlying link between Marquesan heritage and agency points to the critical role of spiritual sovereignty in the tense and dynamic interplay of power in contemporary French Polynesia.

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Section: Piercing the Layers: The Unesco Whl Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quilting Power:Mana,UNESCOand Spiritual Sovereignty in the Marquesas Islands

Donaldson

2022

Oceania

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Heritage Conflict and the Council: The UNSC, UNESCO, and the View from Iraq and Syria

Meskell,

Isakhan

2024

Int J Cult Prop

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Cultural heritage preservation and protection are increasingly tethered to an international security agenda constituted across multilateral agencies. UNESCO and other organizations have securitized heritage, engaging in military training and peacekeeping, international law and prosecution, and cultural property protection. Following the events in Iraq and Syria, UN Security Council resolutions have instantiated norms of heritage violence, risk, and threat, while the Global War on Terror also interpolated looting, trafficking, and terror financing into a heritage-protection agenda. We compare these developments with our large-scale public opinion survey of Mosul and Aleppo residents’ experiences of heritage violence and the implications for security and reconstruction. While our results display potential overlaps with UNSC concerns, we suggest that site destruction and broader security concerns are understood differently on the ground, shaped by political and economic factors. We argue for a more humanitarian focus if any relationship between heritage, security, and, indeed, peacebuilding is to be forged.

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Deploying destruction: Islamic State, international actors, and public opinion in Mosul

Meskell,

Isakhan

2023

International Journal of Cultural Policy

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The dark side of cultural heritage protection

Cited by 12 publications

References 14 publications

Quilting Power:Mana,UNESCOand Spiritual Sovereignty in the Marquesas Islands

Quilting Power:Mana,UNESCOand Spiritual Sovereignty in the Marquesas Islands

Heritage Conflict and the Council: The UNSC, UNESCO, and the View from Iraq and Syria

Deploying destruction: Islamic State, international actors, and public opinion in Mosul

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