UNESCO World Heritage regions are historically constructed categories that do not easily map onto global geographies, yet they still continue to have important political and ethical implications in the international arena. Since their inception, regional categories have been at the heart of debates over global representation and equity in the World Heritage Committee. We include the recent controversy over uneven regional representation in elections to the Committee and the measures adopted to remedy this for the future. Specifically, the “Europe and North America” regional group has historically been the most dominant region and, as we demonstrate, continues to be so despite measures such as the Global Strategy. In the last decade, however, the “Asia and the Pacific” regional group has exhibited a growing presence in many aspects of World Heritage. We go on to examine overall trends from annual sessions of the World Heritage Committee from its start in 1977 to 2014 in terms of site inscription on the World Heritage List, membership on the Committee and size of national delegations in order to look in greater detail at the rising profile of Asia. This leads to a discussion of the different forms and understandings of regionalism, whether for Europe or Asia, and how some Asian delegations see their increased role and visibility in World Heritage.

The convergence of Yoruba nationals and the intensification of nationalism in southwestern Nigeria for self-assertion, political brokerage, and power relations in colonial and post-colonial eras were reinforced by the projection of Yoruba cultural heritage and patrimony expressed both in person and literary productions. Using textual analysis and observation, this paper examines some aspects of cultural heritage and Yoruba nationalism and how cultural heritage created patrimony, the sense of a nation, established civic virtue, and formed local (re)publics in southwestern Nigeria. The present discourse further examines how cultural patrimony is used to echo Yoruba sense of marginalization and political superiority in Nigeria. The paper further argues that most of this cultural heritage addresses a fairly well-defined audience, most especially those sympathetic to Yoruba nationalism and politics. Thus, cultural heritage and patrimony are active agents of nationalism and political identity in southwestern Nigeria.

It is notoriously difficult to design and attach suitable legal rights to intangible cultural heritage (ICH), due to its nature as an evolving, living heritage. This article investigates the effects of government intervention relating to Scottish tartan in order to trace the relationship between formal proprietary rights, commodification, and cultural branding. The article proceeds in three steps: from (1) the historical context of the Jacobite rebellion and the subsequent Victorian assignment of the tartan to clans; to (2) the formation and function of the subsequent self-regulating community tartan registers; and (3) the 2009 governmental intervention with the establishment of a governmental tartan register, subsuming the community groups’ role in self-regulating tartan. While past ICH protection efforts have focused primarily on developing countries, the example of tartan raises wider concerns about the social and economic impact of the subtle erosion or, conversely, the ossification of living heritages. Finally, some alternatives are considered within the IP regime, such as sui generis protection, while highlighting the challenges of reconciling the domestic regulation of diverse ICH.

In 1940, the British Admiralty detained a British passenger ship sailing from Lisbon to New York at the port of Hamilton, Bermuda, for a contraband search. Customs authorities seized four crates containing hundreds of artworks by leading European artists. Suspected of being sent to New York for sale by the French art dealer Martin Fabiani for the economic benefit of German-occupied France, the captured collection—originally the property of art dealer Ambroise Vollard—was confiscated as a prize of war and sent to Ottawa, Canada, for wartime safekeeping. The National Gallery of Canada stored the collection from 1940 to 1949, when British courts instructed the collection’s Canadian custodian to release it to its rightful owners, Fabiani and the Vollard heirs. This essay reframes the wartime journey of the Vollard-Fabiani collection and challenges the long-held notion that it belongs to the narrative of Nazi-looted cultural property. This essay also highlights an important role played by the National Gallery of Canada during World War II.

In June 2015, a United States district court in California found that the Madrid-based Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation had acquired ownership of a Camille Pissarro painting under Spanish adverse possession law. Unless overturned on appeal, the decision will end the long-running efforts by the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer to recover the painting, which was wrongfully taken by the Nazis. The decision to apply Spanish law determined the outcome of the case, and the court’s discussion of choice-of-law issues is notable given the decisive effect that the applicable law often has in art and cultural property ownership disputes. After describing the background and reasoning of the case, this case note comments on two interesting aspects of the decision: its discussion of choice of law in the context of suits against foreign government entities and its treatment of a recent amendment to California law intended to make it easier to recover stolen art.