I had the pleasure of visiting the Law and Development Research Group at Antwerp in mid-May. Our discussions gave me the opportunity to revisit in greater depth some of the themes I had explored in my doctoral dissertation[1] and I was happy to be given the opportunity to contribute to the blog. In this text, I examine some of the key historical developments that shaped the development of international heritage legislation and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICHC), exploring the ways in which they have caused dichotomies, even paradoxes, in the concept of cultural heritage.
Through this historical examination, I discuss the ways in which the growing popularity of heritage globally, human rights thinking, and different models of protection have influenced who has the authority to manage and benefit from heritage. I argue that although the introduction of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) into the heritage paradigm has significantly changed the concept to be more inclusive, fluid, and relevant to the communities engaged with it, and despite the ICHC being a political victory for Global South countries which drove its development despite Western opposition, the reliance of its safeguarding framework on a nationally controlled listing process has also commercialized and retained an objectifying lens over it.
How we conceptualize heritage matters because it directly affects how it is safeguarded and, consequently, how communities are able to express their cultural identity. Heritage forms part of cultural human rights, and communities should have the freedom to manage their own cultural traditions. Yet as heritage increasingly becomes a matter of state policy and commercial interest, it also risks becoming commodified, leaving the communities themselves with less control over it. Cultural heritage is a key factor in identity-building (and identity politics) making control over it a powerful tool for a variety of political and social purposes.
The Birth of Heritage Legislation
While cultural heritage itself has evolved naturally alongside human societies, I would argue that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) largely defined the concept as we understand it today. Although the term ‘cultural heritage’ had been used already in the 19th century, the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict seems to have been its first use in its specific contemporary sense: cultural objects and traditions passed down between generations as expressions of cultural identity.
In 1954, despite an already growing number of new Member States from beyond the Global North countries, UNESCO remained ideologically a predominantly Western organization.[2] Therefore, its conception of cultural heritage reflected a traditionally European understanding: historical property of great value, most of all art treasures and monuments. Despite a drastic shift in member state demographics in the coming decades, these first years of heritage legislation set the tone for much of the latter half of the century.
By the 1970s, newly independent states had come to join and reshape UNESCO’s agenda. Most of these Member States were former colonies which could now, through their sheer numbers, advance priorities that often differed from those of the former Western majority. It was through the efforts of the Global South that the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property had been adopted despite significant opposition from several European ‘market’ states – countries with established international art markets and where demand for cultural objects is high.[3] The Convention set up for the first time an international system for attempting to quell the illegal heritage trade which generally drained objects from former colonies into wealthy Global North markets.
However, for the first decades of its existence, the 1970 Convention was widely regarded as a failure because of a lack of ratifications especially from Global North states.[4] It only began to have a significant impact on the heritage trade in the 21st century as many of its former opponents adopted it. Arguably this reflects broader changes in heritage policy and priorities and the growing influence of human rights on international norms, as heritage legislation increasingly came to focus on cultural identity and the rights of peoples and communities. Cultural rights, growing awareness of the effects of illicit trafficking, and post-colonial politics increasingly outweighed earlier priorities centred on the international art market and the free circulation of cultural objects. Nevertheless, the Convention did not escape the highly Western-centric ideals of what heritage means and why it is to be protected: despite widening its categories towards more everyday expressions of cultural life and identity, it continued to understand heritage primarily through expert notions of cultural value.
Only two years later, UNESCO adopted the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (WHC), which would prove to be arguably its most impactful instrument to date. Born out of an uneasy mashup of three separate projects (by UNESCO, the IUCN and the US),[5] the Convention reinforced conventional ideas of heritage as monuments and sites of ‘outstanding universal value’. Especially in the first decades of WHC the properties inscribed on the World Heritage List were heavily skewed towards Western examples – also directing its financial benefits there. Much of WHC – especially in the public eye – boils down to the World Heritage List where these examples of World Heritage are enshrined. While it acts as an important tool for bringing recognition and popularity for heritage, it also has the significant effect of turning heritage into a competition for prestige and visibility, while also encouraging its commercialization.
Popularization of Heritage
By the 1970s, UNESCO’s agenda for heritage legislation had largely taken shape: cultural heritage – or, more accurately, cultural property – was to be protected from destruction in war, from disappearing through smuggling, and in most exceptional cases, in general from any human interference. Heritage was understood as something static: to be observed for its historical value and preserved in an ‘authentic’ original state. The aim of heritage protection was to document and preserve heritage for future generations and scholarly study. Heritage also began gaining global renown, resulting in the so-called ‘heritage boom’ where both governments and the public started paying attention to and utilizing heritage on all levels of society.[6] At the same time, the success of the WHC solidified a specific kind of monumental image of heritage into the public consciousness.
But even during the creation of the WHC, there had been Global South countries calling for ‘oral heritage’ to be included. While this did not lead to any results at the time, the popularity and Eurocentrism of the first years of the WHC increased these demands further. Initially at the request of Bolivia (in response to outcries over Western appropriation of Global South traditional knowledge and culture), UNESCO began exploring the protection of folklore as an intellectual property issue, working with WIPO for over a decade trying to create a system of IP protection for folklore. This emphasizes the view of heritage prevalent at the time: even when heritage was intangible, it was approached as a question of property and ownership, attempting to fit a phenomenon that is fundamentally shared, dynamic, and fluid into a framework of static ownership. This understanding left little room for heritage that existed primarily as practice, performance, or social relationships rather than through physical objects.
Challenges to Traditional Heritage
The first clear sign that heritage was beginning to be understood in new ways was the World Conference on Cultural Policies (Mondiacult) in 1982. Its recommendations emphasized the importance of understanding culture broadly, not simply in terms of traditional forms of western ‘high art’ but as diverse forms of expression, beliefs and meanings in all aspects of life. For the first time, intangible heritage was included in the definition of cultural heritage,[7] and the declaration emphasized how significant culture and cultural heritage was for peoples’ identity and purpose. It notably also underlined how it is not only the physical threats towards heritage that need to be protected from: on at least an equal footing were the effects of colonialism and other processes that disrupted the relationship between communities and their cultural heritage.[8]
However, these ideas took many years to take effect in UNESCO’s legal development. In the same year, a Committee of Governmental Experts on the Safeguarding of Folklore produced a recommendation which reveals the limited conception of folklore that still dominated official thinking. Most significantly, folklore was to be studied, catalogued and recorded by experts. Concern was given to the non-commercialization and continuity of traditions, but even this seemed mostly in the interest of preserving their ‘authenticity’ for academic study.[9]
The former director of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit Noriko Aikawa notes how the Mondiacult Conference gave a momentary boost to UNESCO’s living heritage efforts but within a few years organizational restructuring had buried the initiatives both in terms of funding and attention. She deems this intentional sabotage, noting that the staff at UNESCO had a European or Western-educated background and were mainly trained for and interested in physical heritage.[10]
The Rise of Intangible Heritage
The ideas of the Mondiacult conference finally began taking hold in UNESCO’s approach to heritage in the 1990s. This shift coincided with the growing influence of human rights discourse in international politics, which increasingly emphasized the rights and needs of peoples and communities alongside those of states. This also included a new emphasis on Indigenous rights, which would play a significant role in the development (although not necessarily the implementation) of ICH and the ICHC.
Certain Asian countries were particularly active in pushing for this new line of action in UNESCO. South Korea played an important role in the first ICH projects (Living Human Treasures (1993); Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (1998)) which both popularized the concept and paved the way for a full-blown convention on the subject. Japan’s contributions, however, became unparalleled. Japan had pursued cultural diplomacy as a central element of its foreign policy,[11] and beyond its own heritage policy goals saw UNESCO and its ICH programmes as a way of spreading its influence especially in the Global South. In these countries, the ICHC offered an opportunity to rebalance UNESCO’s Western-oriented heritage framework. Japan became the single largest funder of UNESCO and through a Funds-in-Trust arrangement doubled the funding for ICH.
Japan also secured key positions within UNESCO’s leadership, including in 1999 the Director-General Kōichirō Matsuura, helping ensure that ICH remained a priority. Political manoeuvring also kicked in: while for example the French saw the upcoming and in-development Cultural Diversity Convention (adopted in 2005) as much more important and wanted to quickly get the ICHC out of the way, ‘the Japanese withheld support for the convention on cultural diversity […] until the Europeans first supported the ICH Convention‘.[12]
The Paradox of Living Heritage
In many ways, the ICHC realized the hopes for the new Convention: it shifted the focus of heritage protection towards sustaining practices because of the meaning they hold for the communities that maintain them, rather than treating them as curiosities for scholarly study. Heritage policy is much more focused on the rights and well-being of the people practicing heritage than it is on the insights to be gained by studying them. However, the ICHC also relied on the model of the WHC in creating a Representative List where particularly meaningful practices would be inscribed. This incentivizes countries to protect and celebrate heritage practices but also reinforces the notion that states can claim responsibility – and therefore also authority – over these practices. In turn, this enables states to use heritage for purposes that do not necessarily align with community interests, for example harnessing it for economic interests such as promoting tourism, for national branding, and assimilating communal heritage into national identity projects.
This has left heritage at a curious conundrum: it is both the most ‘alive’ and fluid it has ever been, focusing on the role heritage plays in the identities and cultural lives of communities, while at the same time being more commercialized than ever. Inscriptions on the Representative List and their resulting (real or perceived) national prestige are competed for. Membership of the Intergovernmental Committee has itself become highly contested, as states compete for influence over future inscriptions.
I could witness these developments firsthand at the General Assembly of the ICHC in June 2026: many delegations spent much of their limited time addressing the number of inscribed items they have, rather than discussing broader policy questions. Of course, this tendency is hardly unique to heritage governance. While the purpose of the ICHC is to create a system for preserving the diversity and sustainability of heritage practices, for many states it becomes rather a tool for national branding and financial opportunities.
The ICHC has become an immensely popular convention, almost rivalling the ratifications of the WHC. As of writing, there are 185 States Parties to the convention. Conceptually the great achievement of the ICHC is that it recognizes heritage as something alive that is practiced and created by communities themselves. Yet its framework also gives states opportunities to define, commercialize, and sometimes even appropriate that heritage. Heritage legislation therefore has the capacity both to empower communities and to marginalize them. The challenge is to ensure that the people who create and sustain heritage stay in control over how it is managed and safeguarded.
[1] Pauno Soirila, Monumental Tradition: UNESCO and the Making of Cultural Heritage in International Law, 1954–2003 (LL.D. thesis, University of Helsinki 2025).
[2] Patrick J. O’Keefe and Lyndel V. Prott, Cultural Heritage Conventions and Other
Instruments: A Compendium with Commentaries (Institute of Art and Law 2011) 2.
[3] In heritage crime research, countries are often broadly divided into “source countries” and “market countries”. Source countries are those from which trafficked cultural objects typically originate, often because they possess abundant archaeological or cultural heritage but have limited resources to combat illicit trafficking. Market countries are those where demand for such objects is concentrated and where trafficked objects are typically acquired. The distinction is only approximate: several countries occupy both roles, while others function primarily as transit countries through which objects are moved to obscure their provenance.
[4] Lyndel V. Prott, Strengths and Weaknesses of the 1970 Convention: An Evaluation 40 years after its adoption (background paper, 2nd edn, for participants in the Second Meeting of States Parties to the 1970 Convention Paris, UNESCO Headquarters, 20-21 June 2012) 5. < https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245258.locale=en> accessed 2 July 2026
[5] Christina Cameron and Mechtild Rössler, Many Voices, One Vision: The Early Years of the World Heritage Convention (Routledge 2013); Michel Batisse and Gerard Bolla, The Invention of “World Heritage” (History Papers, Association of Former Unesco Staff Members 2005).
[6] See, e.g., Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (Routledge 2013).
[7] See William Logan, Michele Langfield and Máiréad Nic Craith, “Intersecting Concepts and Practices” In Michele Langfield, William Logan, and Máiréad Nic Craith (eds), Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights: Intersections in Theory and Practice (Routledge 2010) 6.
[8] Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies para. 25. < https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000054668.locale=en> accessed 2 July 2026
[9] UNESCO CPY/TPC/I/4: Committee of Governmental Experts on the Safeguarding of Folklore: Report. < https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000049393.locale=en> accessed 2 July 2026
[10] Noriko Aikawa, “The Conceptual Development of UNESCO’s Programme on Intangible Cultural Heritage” in Janet Blake (ed), Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage: Challenges and Approaches (Institute of Art and Law 2007).
[11] Natsuko Akagawa, Heritage Conservation and Japan’s Cultural Diplomacy: Heritage, National Identity and National Interest (Routledge 2014).
[12] Richard Kurin, ’U.S. Consideration of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention’ [2014] 36 Ethnologies 1–2, 342.