Heritage and dialogue : using heritage conservation to strengthen the defences of peace

The Preamble to UNESCO's 1945 Constitution asserted that wars are created in the minds of men and that it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be built. Exploring this proposition was vital in the post World-War II years, but it is equally critical in the 21st century when world efforts towards peace continue to be undermined by intense forms of nationalism and ethnic rivalries that commonly use cultural differences as a justification for conflict.

However, while strengthening intercultural dialogue underlies the creation of UNESCO, its flagship World Heritage program under the 1972 World Heritage Convention seems to be losing touch with this motivating principle. In this paper I explore the politicization of the program and argue that a re-focus is needed if the program is to serve in improving intercultural dialogue, understanding and tolerance, and ultimately peace.

To this end it is suggested that ways in which the World Heritage program might provide a stronger focus on dialogue-creation should be prioritized. These include giving priority to new transnational inscriptions and developing new stratagies for interpreting sites in more cross-culturally sensitive ways.

The age of ‘depoliticisation’ and ‘dejuridification’ and its ‘logic of assembling’: an essay against the instrumentalist use of comparative law’s geopolitics

While comparative law has become a key discipline, its instrumentalist use has turned out to be a powerful weapon: it is the ‘pen’ by which the identity of and differences in law’s geopolitics are continually written and rewritten. Given its attractive functionalist essence, comparative law is gaining increasing international credit as a way of developing newer theories of sovereignty and governance in a framework in which law is conceived of less as a set of rules and more as a symbolic vestimentum of global soft power. The present contribution critically investigates the relationship between distortive views of comparative law’s geopolitics and the intimate essence of the doctrine aimed at creating the ‘aspatial’, unbounded, illimitable (and hence intangible) liberal global order whose governance appears to transcend the idea and form(s) of law through which the ‘politicization’ and ‘juridification’ of modernity have been achieved in the last century. In doing so, it also addresses why such an alliance has made it easier to ‘discover’ and ‘sell’ the smooth and rectilinear land of the figuratively unspoken and unwritten as the terra incognita that lies over what is created by the constructivist political intervention(s) of the modern nation-state