A new humanitarian Agenda for UNESCO: protecting cultural heritage through local communities – HUMANITIES

Between 2012 and 2015, a slew of historical sites registered on the World Heritage List were systematically targeted by terrorist groups in Mali, Iraq, and Syria. In response to this crisis, UNESCO adopted a strategy aiming at ‘incorporat[ing] the protection of culture into humanitarian action, security strategies and peace-building processes by engaging with relevant stakeholders outside the culture domain’. Since then, this UN agency has reaffirmed the significant importance of cultural heritage protection by referring to it as a protection of ‘cultural diversity’ against ‘cultural cleansing’, the strategy of terrorist groups to attack local communities through their cultural heritage. Now, the use of the term ‘cultural diversity’ provides a privileged entry point into three fields of international law and its actors (international human rights law, international criminal law and international humanitarian law). By doing so, UNESCO appears to distance itself from a top-down perspective of cultural heritage managed by the States to adopt a bottom-up perspective, focused on the local communities’ participation. In this context, HUMANITIES raises the following question: Is this change in terminology indicative or even provocative of a much deeper shift from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach of cultural heritage in emergencies, closer to the needs of local populations? Using mixed methods, we will first analyse how UNESCO built its ‘humanitarian agenda’ in 2015 around the notion of ‘cultural diversity’, thus extending the range of protected heritage (both tangible and intangible) in contemporary conflicts (e.g. in Ukraine and Nagorny Karabakh). Secondly, it will examine how the term 'cultural diversity', when used as a common denominator between international organisations dealing with the protection of cultural heritage in emergency situations, produces a new way of thinking about collective responsibility in this field.