3 - Conservation and Reinvention

Summary

This chapter focuses on better-known examples of transitional justice’s interaction with cultural heritage law, as well as the literature on dissonant heritage. The chapter engages with the recognizable framework of the World Heritage Convention, examining it through the World Heritage Sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland), Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Japan), and the Cape Region Floral Area and Robben Island (both in South Africa). The chapter analyses law’s role in shaping the narratives around these sites, and their role in promoting transitional efforts. The chapter also engages with the uses of intangible cultural heritage (colloquially known as folklore) as a living culture in transitional societies, focusing particularly on the efforts to revitalize, through international listing, intangible cultural heritage in North Macedonia (Glasoechko, male two-part singing in Dolni Polog), which is under threat of disappearing because of the dispersal of the community of heritage practitioners during and in the aftermath of the wars that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. An example of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding arising from the Colombian conflict is also discussed.