The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed as a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’ and rests on the claim that persons are ‘endowed with reason and conscience’. The drafters were thus aligned with the claims of the natural law tradition that there are timeless principles of morality – true for all people in all places – and that these principles serve as a guide for lawmakers and a standard to evaluate positive law. Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain argued that the drafters did not need to agree on the philosophical or metaphysical foundations of morality in order to agree on formulations of practical principles in the language of universal rights. This key insight helped to overcome obstacles to the UDHR and to guide key drafters including Charles Malik. Maritain’s account of natural law in The Rights of Man and Natural Law highlights the notion of jus gentium: commonly agreed principles that are intermediate between the first principles of natural law and positive law. The UDHR can be understood as a successful attempt to formulate jus gentium principles in the aftermath of a war that had seen them disregarded and violated.

The pragmatic partnership among West European nations that has emerged since 1945 exemplifies how “win-win” strategies can bring powerfully beneficial results over time. Yet the EU model cannot be straightforwardly applied at the global level, for five reasons. First, the cultural and political differences among the world’s nations are much greater than they are within Europe. Second, the obscene divide between “haves” and “have-nots” is much starker and more intractable at the global level than it is within Europe. Third, rapid globalization has caused a political backlash in many nations, bringing to power leaders who seek a defensive retrenchment behind national walls. Fourth, global institutions of cultural integration, such as UNESCO, remain relatively weak. And fifth, racist prejudice and nativist xenophobia are on the rise in many nations. Nevertheless, the historical precedent set by the EU demonstrates that national sovereignty can be incrementally dismantled, yielding new forms of institutionalized cooperation among formerly separate and mutually hostile peoples.

The chapter centres on the notion of repetition and takes it as the key concept of practice theory. It explores the translocal character of practice with regard to transnational diplomatic negotiations in the UNESCO World Heritage Programme. First, the chapter addresses a widespread bias towards stability and reproduction of the social in practice theory, points towards the need to take account of the dynamics of the social, and develops a poststructuralist understanding of repetition. The second part outlines three related dimensions of repetition and spells out their methodological implications for practice theory. By thinking of practices in terms of repetitions that link different sites and instances, the methodology of practice theory is to follow the fragile relations which make up the (in)stability of the social, enabling it to grasp the specific contributions of bodies and material artefacts. Drawing on data from a long-term participant observation, the final part of the chapter puts this methodology to work by analysing continuity and change in international diplomacy, looking at the interwoven diplomatic practices of negotiating, drafting, and decision-making.

This chapter argues that the notion of human dignity provides an overarching normative framework for assessing the ethical and legal acceptability of emerging life sciences technologies. After depicting the increasing duality that characterizes modern technologies, this chapter examines two different meanings of human dignity: the classical meaning that refers to the inherent worth of every individual, and the more recent understanding of this notion that refers to the integrity and identity of humankind, including future generations. The close connection between human dignity and human rights is outlined, as well as the key-role of dignity in international human rights law, and very especially in the human rights instruments relating to bioethics. The chapter concludes by briefly presenting the challenges to human dignity and human rights posed by neurotechnologies and germline gene editing technologies.

The House of Slaves at Gorée Island was listed as a World Heritage site in 1978, one year before Auschwitz concentration camp. This chapter examines the process of heritagization of the House of Slaves as one of the African sites for the commemoration of the slave trade. Adopting Michael Rothberg’s perspective on multidirectional memory, it demonstrates how the project of the House of Slaves was indebted to the recognition of the Holocaust as a global trauma: the commemoration of the slave trade is in several ways entangled with the commemoration of the Holocaust. But from Senegal’s independence onwards, the House of Slaves was also inflected by a vision of Negritude. The first curator of the House of Slaves, Joseph Ndiaye, gave it a global significance through his performances as ‘witness’ to the slave trade. By giving testimony, Joseph Ndiaye claimed an epistemic space for the articulation of Blackness. He simultaneously introduced the figure of the witness to the genre of the memorial museum and reclaimed the African legacy of orality against the Occidental epistemology of history. As embodiment of a legacy of the project for human rights, Joseph Ndiaye also claimed this museum as an African project of emancipation.

The Introduction situates the book’s themes in three different debates. First, it situates the question of Senegal’s decolonization in a debate about non-national futures as they were imagined by Negritude and Pan-African thinkers at the time of decolonization. Although these non-national futures have now become unthinkable, this book demonstrates that they are remembered as futures past in Senegal’s colonial heritage sites. Second, it situates the interpretation of Senegal’s cultural heritage in a debate about the legacy of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude. Senegal’s politics of heritagization are indebted to the Negritude philosophy of Senegal’s first president, whose politics of heritage were aimed at the reclamation of African dignity and respect, promising liberation through recuperation. Hence, this book situates the reclamation of African heritage in a temporality of return and frames cultural heritage as a technique of repair. Third, it situates the reclamation of African heritage in debates about world heritage, arguing that Senghor’s archiving project and support for UNESCO’s World Heritage List constituted parallel heritage projects pointing towards the decolonization of world heritage. The book posits that decolonization as envisioned by UNESCO and Senghor is a project to repair the traumas of modernity.

In 1947 and 1948, UNESCO undertook an innovative survey on human rights that was intended to shape the philosophical content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This short period is interesting for several reasons. First, because the end of the Second World War created liminal conditions in which new institutions, political alignments and moral visions could be forged. Second, because, despite the end of the war, a series of profound conflicts and global challenges remained, including colonialism and global economic inequality. This chapter examines how participants in the UNESCO survey analysed the question of social and economic rights as a response to the challenges of reshaping the post-war world. It focuses on contributions influenced by leftist social and political thought. As will be seen, leftist thinkers were not hostile to the idea of a new declaration of human rights, but the way in which rights were conceptualised in relation to social and economic problems was radically different from the form that socio-economic rights eventually took in the UDHR and in subsequent decades.

Chapter 5 examines the rebuilding of the global environmental movement after the Second World War. Environmental protection did not become one of the core objectives of the newly created United Nations. It was not until the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s, which transformed environmentalism from an elite concern into a mass movement with wider electoral consequences for governments, that international society began to accept environmental stewardship as a new primary institution. Within a short space of time, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, leading industrialised economies established environmental protection first as a comprehensive domestic duty of the state and then as a general responsibility for international society. The 1972 Stockholm conference, the first UN conference on the environment, became the equivalent of a ‘constitutional moment’ in the greening of the international normative order. This chapter traces the process through which world society actors successfully transmitted environmentalism into international society, with leading powers such as the United States providing critical leadership along the way.

The chapter summarizes the book’s main findings, underscoring the reverberations of the research on the fields of transitional justice and cultural heritage law, and set out questions for future research in other contexts. It ties together the multiple strings of truth, accountability, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition (the four key transitional justice mechanisms), and their relationship to heritage, as well as the influence of human rights on both transitional justice and cultural heritage law. Bringing together the fields of transitional justice and cultural heritage law creates powerful opportunities for pragmatically rebuilding societies, and cultural heritage is a part of reshaping identity for the future.

This chapter returns to the main normative claims of the book, by re-engaging, in more depth, the debates around anti-impunity in the law around transitional justice. The chapter offers cultural heritage law as a space where more pragmatic engagement with transitional justice mechanisms is possible and necessary in the law. In doing so, it also engages with the need for pragmatism around cultural heritage, beyond the conservation paradigm, given the malleable nature of the narratives of history, nation, and identity that are made through cultural heritage. It uses the development of memory laws in countries like Poland as a case study of the far-reaching consequences of neglecting the connection between law and memory and cultural identity.

The introduction outlines the key objectives of the book. It argues that there are different strands in the transitional justice literature that largely miss each other. On the one hand, there is a rich body of literature on memorialization processes and the role of memory and heritage in transition. This body of knowledge does not engage with the law, due to a perception that the law’s main focus is on accountability and prosecutions. On the other hand, the bulk of legal literature on transitional justice indeed tends to focus on accountability, neglecting its role in promoting reparations and guarantees of non-repetition, which are central to the success of transitional justice efforts. The chapter shows that, as a result of these two bodies not engaging one another, the law around culture, and cultural heritage in particular, is left at the mercy of other political forces in the transitional process, forces which tend to align with the pre-transition status quo, and therefore cultural heritage law unwittingly becomes a point of resistance to transitional efforts.

Iguazú and Iguaçu National Parks, 2020. In the 1980s, UNESCO listed Iguazú and Iguaçu National Parks, separately, as World Heritage Site. This epilogue argues that ideas about national sovereignty and transboundary antagonism continued guiding the way park officials in the two countries framed the parks. That explains why Brazilians and Argentines ignored calls for co-management and greater integration by UNESCO officials. All in all, the two Iguazu parks were never “peace parks” as integrated adjacent transboundary parks are called.

The post-war era began with optimism and the hope of liberty for all but it did not last. Between 1945 and 1947, the atrocities of the Nazi death camps received significant public attention in the United States. Very quickly, however, the horror was assimilated into a narrative of a particular Nazi identity, rooted in flawed domestic politics. This chapter charts the ways that black intellectuals, caught at the crossroads of race and republican values which enmeshed in the Cold War clash between communism and capitalism, fought against “an American brand” of fascism to realize the democratic potential of the French Union and the United States. Thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes – all of whom had compared Nazism with US Jim Crowism and European colonization during the war - were quick to point to the hollowness of a victory rhetoric while there were no universally guaranteed rights. As far as they were concerned, the end of World War II, far from vanquishing fascism once and for all, had merely shifted the battle lines. These men and women aired their views through a variety of mediums, from speeches on the Senate floor through to poetry and political petitions. This chapter brings these diverse sources together, often for the first time, to illustrate their visions for a post-war order.

This chapter explores how anxieties about ‘loss’ influenced cultural heritage dynamics in post-colonial Indonesia. Following the perspective of various interested parties inside and outside Indonesia, it reveals how and why these parties, at different locations, developed different attitudes to the difficult pasts they all have been part of in various ways. Returning to Borobudur, the chapter revisits Dutch, Indonesian, Indian, Japanese, and international heritage engagements and appropriations of sites located in Indonesia in the period from the late 1920s well into the 1980s. It scrutinises the impact of post-war UNESCO politics and the Save Borobudur campaign in President Soeharto’s New Order Indonesia of the 1970s and 1980s on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at location. Numerous dynamic processes reveal the fragility of ownership of sites transforming into heritage across war and regime changes. Decolonisation stimulated strong emotional and moral passions for restoration, but Dutch post-colonial, inter-Asian, and international interests inflect Borobudur’s national Indonesian character.

UNESCO’s world heritage regime was founded in 1972 to identify and protect cultural and natural sites of 'outstanding universal value,' which constitute humanity’s common heritage. The identification and proper valuation of these sites, it was hoped, would interpellate a common humanity and foster identification with this humanity, thereby contributing to peaceful global relations. This chapter argues that the world heritage regime is a diversity regime that curates the world’s cultural diversity as part of world order-making. In turn, the changes in the world order since the regime’s establishment have resulted in challenges to the regime’s governance of culture based on a universal value and through scientific-technical evaluation by international experts. These challenges have resulted in increased resistance to international experts, the demand for the inclusion of local experts, and in two (competing) conceptions of credibility as scientific-technical adjudication and as representativity.

In a verse reflecting the (colonial) attitudes of his time, Kipling once wrote, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West; and never the twain shall meet’.Although written in 1889, the underlying sentiment might equally describe the bipolar geopolitics prevalent at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, by the time of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to suppress intended liberal reforms, to many, the ideological chasm between the Eastern and Western blocs appeared insurmountable. Notwithstanding these divisions, key political leaders (particularly in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union) sought strategies to promote greater stability and predictability in international affairs. To this end, they pursued more cooperative East–West relations, recognising that collaboration on environmental issues might help to defuse Cold War tensions. The apparently non-political nature, and seeming objectivity, of environmental issues contributed to their becoming, by 1975, a central pillar of détente between the East and the West.