Last week, I attended a UNESCO Blue Shield (Denmark) event at the Moesgård Museum (Aarhus). Entitled War in Ukraine! Protection and Preservation of Cultural Heritage, it focused on Blue Shield Denmark’s ongoing efforts to support cultural heritage protection in Ukraine, and provided an opportunity to reflect on the Moesgård Museum’s recent exhibition on the Vikings in the East (RUS – Vikinger i øst). Moesgård Museum Director, Mads Kähler Holst presented some really interesting, candid and honest reflections about how the Moesgård Museum developed the RUS exhibition, charting the difficulties of negotiation, and complexities of how a leading museum managed to navigate an increasingly politicised heritage arena, as well as its crucial role in supporting the protection of valuable artefacts following the February 2022 Russian invasion. Speaking more directly to the situation of heritage effort within Ukraine, Nataliia Popovych (of the Ukraine House in Denmark) outlined the critical importance of heritage sites, artefacts and practices within Ukraine for the country’s cultural resilience.
Two broader papers that worked very well together were that by Frederik Rosén (University of Copenhagen), who talked about the increasingly central place that heritage narratives take within Russian security policy, and the paper by Mattias Legnér (Uppsala University in Gotland), who provided a fascinating critical history of how ‘heritage’ has been engaged in post-conflict societies for the purpose of peacebuilding, over the last 30 years. Personally, I found it a little shocking that while it seems that Civil Society organisations (such as Cultural Heritage without Borders), have been fully engaged in drawing on heritage resources for peacebuilding work for many decades, NATO and other western powers seem to have largely ignored the field until very recently. Russia certainly hasn’t been ignoring heritage – but this isn’t a new situation. If western civil society organisations and academics all over the world have noticed that ‘heritage matters’, and have been arguing this (and shouting about it!) for decades, why has NATO and – seemingly – most western powers largely ignored heritage in formulating their security policies? It isn’t like they haven’t been warned! Maybe it is in my reflection of this situation, that made me think more critically about the ‘elephant in the room’ that afternoon …
The event was also honoured by the appearance of Mykhallo Vydolnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Denmark, who showed a video that the Ukrainian Government had released in April 2022, as part of a protest over UNESCO’s holding the 45th World Heritage Committee Session in Kazan, in the Russian Federation. Following a lot of pressure following the Russian invasion in February, globally, UNESCO finally postponed the Kazan Meeting on the 25th April. It took two months of hesitation, but they got there in the end! But for me, the elephant in the room, which no-one at the Moesgård Meeting referred to, was what was UNESCO ever doing/thinking by holding the 45th World Heritage Committee Session in Kazan in the first place!?
I did a quick Google Search for the locations of recent World Heritage Committee Sessions…. The 45th Meeting (intriguingly, just ‘postponed’, rather than cancelled) was due to be held in Russia; the 44th Meeting was held in China; the 43rd Meeting was held in Azerbaijan; the 42nd Meeting was held in Bahrain…. As a keen football follower, I checked to see whether it had ever been held in Qatar – of course, it had – in 2014. Interestingly, I found out that the Kazan Meeting would have been the second time that the UNESCO World Heritage Committee Session had been in Russia in the last 10 years (It was in St. Petersburg in 2012).
So, what do FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, and UNESCO have in common?
They all seem very happy to take part in what one might call ‘reputational laundering’ for authoritarian regimes.
I know that the decision to hold the 45th World Heritage Committee Session in Russia would have been taken before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. But even after the invasion, UNESCO seemed to stick with the idea of holding the meeting in Kazan for a couple of months (even under increasing international pressure). And in any case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually took place back in 2014 – at around the same time that UNESCO were holding their 38th Session in Qatar! Did people at UNESCO not notice? A situation where NATO, the US, UK and France (etc.) are burying their heads in the sand over how heritage can be used as a political resource is certainly bad, but we seem to have a situation where even UNESCO hasn’t noticed that ‘heritage’ can be used as a political resource!
Geographies of Heritage 