Rescue has long been a defense for the removal of cultural property. Since the explosion of iconoclasm in West Asia, North Africa, and West Africa, there has been a growing demand for cultural property in danger zones to be “rescued” by being purchased and given “asylum” in “safe zones” (typically, in the market countries of Western Europe and North America). This article reviews evidence from natural experiments with the “rescue” of looted antiquities and stolen artifacts from across Asia and Europe. Unsurprisingly, the evidence reaffirms that “rescue” incentivizes looting, smuggling, and corruption, as well as forgery, and the accompanying destruction of knowledge. More significantly, “rescue” facilitates the laundering of “ordinary” illicit assets and may contribute to revenue streams of criminal organizations and violent political organizations; it may even weaken international support for insecure democracies. Ultimately, “rescue” by purchase appears incoherent, counter-productive, and dangerous for the victimized communities that it purports to support.

This article examines the trajectory and fate of Delhi’s Imperial Capital Cities nomination, submitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2015 for inscription on the World Heritage List. I employ the dossier and events surrounding its withdrawal to reveal the political imbrications of urban conservation, international institutions, neoliberal governance, and colonial histories. First, I underscore the prominence of India as a member of the World Heritage Committee and its efforts to secure an increasing number of UNESCO properties. Second, I situate the dossier within the ambit of neoliberal governance that recalibrates and promotes urban heritage preservation, while similarly encouraging development and economic growth. Building upon this point, I consider how sustained government efforts to reframe Delhi as a “global city,” coupled with the identification of Delhi’s imperial capitals with Mughal and British rule, resulted in the dossier’s withdrawal. Third, the episode reveals tensions in this specific political moment over contemporary perceptions of imperial occupation and “foreign” empires, which plagued the dossier from the outset and continue to reverberate today. Finally, there are lessons to be learned for urban heritage in India and Asian heritage in general, outside the narrow purview of European cities, so many of which are already listed as World Heritage.

Since the publication of the “restitution report” by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in November 2018, the debate around the restitution of African artifacts inherited from German colonialism in German museums has become increasingly intense. While the restitution debate in Germany is generally focused on “material cultural heritage” and human remains, this reflection attempts to contextualize the “immaterial heritage” (museum collections inventory data, photographs, movies, sound recordings, and digital archive documents) from German colonialism and plead for its consideration in this debate. It claims that the first step of restitution consists of German ethnological museums being transparent about their possessions of artifacts from colonial contexts, which means providing all available information about museum collections from colonial contexts and making them easily accessible to the people from the former German colonies.

This article considers the recent and vigorous critique of the Dutch restitution policy on Nazi-looted art in connection with the inclusion of what has been termed the “public interest” in the applicable substantive assessment framework. This assessment framework is entirely based on morally induced policy rules, and it allows the Dutch Restitutions Committee to advise on requests for restitution based on a weighing of interests, including the significance of the work to a museum or public art collection. Although one might question the appropriateness of such interests in a framework designed to remedy historic injustices, it remains to be seen whether this critique is entirely justified. Recent recommendations issued by the Dutch Restitutions Committee indicate that it takes a generous, rather than strict, approach when dealing with requests for restitution. All in all, it seems that both institutional and substantive vulnerability are inevitable if one embarks on a morally induced framework based on mere policy rules rather than legal rules.

A number of recent works have explored the value of scholarly efforts to “unpack” museum collections and examine the constitutive networks and histories of objects. The interrogations of collections through methods such as object biographies and itineraries imparts important knowledge about the institutions, disciplines, and individuals who made museum collections, contribute to deeper understandings of the roles of objects in creating meaning in and of the world, and suggest implications for future practice and policies. This article examines the object itinerary of a cultural property item of negative heritage: a three-dimensional painted plaster work of craft-art originally designed to symbolize the scientific practice of anthropology in early twentieth-century Germany and later associated with wartime collecting during World War II, the history of American archaeology, and the modern repatriation movement in museums.

This article examines the extent to which a recent law reform initiative in New South Wales (NSW), Australia—the draft Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill 2018 (NSW)—advances the general principles outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The examination reveals some improvements on the current legal framework and some concerning proposals that distance the NSW government from the UNDRIP principles. Key concerns include a proposed transfer of administrative responsibility to Aboriginal bodies with no corresponding guarantee of funding; the continued vesting of key decision-making powers in government; inept provisions for the protection of secret knowledge; and lower penalties for harming cultural heritage than for related offences in existing environmental and planning legislation. Given the bill’s weaknesses, the article explores pragmatic alternatives to better advance the UNDRIP principles.

Perhaps the most difficult assignments in architecture are those requiring that tradition be brought into the design. This wish might be included in the assignment by the client or it may be a goal set by the designers themselves. This article takes up the topic of cultural borrowings as well as the relationship between the designer and the features of the local culture – specifically, the Sámi lavvu theme. In this article, some attempts will be presented to make Sámi culture visible in architecture at different times. Architecture follows the same kinds of stereotypical representations that are now criticized in museums when presenting Indigenous peoples. The Sámi are often presented in national museums as a separate theme, and, in architecture, certain themes are highlighted as “Sámi” features. Architecture has remained a discipline that celebrates the mixing of elements and motifs, while many art practices are tightening the boundaries around cultural license. However, this article does not focus on cultural appropriation in architecture or on the imbalance of power in planning; rather, it presents a contribution of how architects have interpreted the lavvu theme in their design between the 1940s and the 1990s. It also highlights the process of change that has taken place over a few decades; strengthening respect for Indigenous cultures and criticizing cultural exploitation have also had an influence on planning.

In this article, we aim to focus on how the Iberian past (sixth century to the first century BC) has been used both to shape identities and to produce values in the marketplace and how the triad of the past, authenticity, and tradition is key in the commodification of the Iberian world. To do so, we will examine developments in the village of Moixent (Valencia, Spain). In this town, the Iberians and their archaeological remains are presented as the protagonists of the area, accompanied by several “heritage stratifications.” Through case studies of family-run wineries, we analyze the process of symbolic appropriation of the Iberians in the local wine sector and its confluence with cultural tourism as well as how it has led to the development of territorial branding based on the past.

The case of the illicit export of a Picasso painting by its owner and its confiscation and recovery by French and Spanish authorities provides an interesting example of the complexities of the transnational criminal, civil, and administrative law protection of national cultural heritage and of the ongoing efforts to achieve useful legal instruments at the European level, which foster and harmonize the current and often informal mechanisms of cooperation and judicial assistance among the different domestic enforcing agencies. It also attempts to show how Spanish authorities have made a legitimate, but possibly overreaching, use of existing European Union law in order to recover and appropriate a valuable work of art.