Rasa Davidaviciute
Published: 21 January 2019
How a human rights can incorporate the obligations of cultural heritage preservation
University of St Andrews
How a human rights can incorporate the obligations of cultural heritage preservation
In recent years, global institutions like UNESCO and the UN have increasingly appealed to the language of human rights to justify cultural heritage preservation. However, given the novelty of this approach, little work has been done to see how exactly this link between cultural heritage and human rights should be spelled out and justified. Not only do the foundations and nature of the proposed human rights to cultural heritage remain unclear; it is equally unclear what is meant by ‘cultural heritage’ in the first place.
In my thesis, I aim to address these issues by (i) providing a philosophically robust account of cultural heritage and its social value that could serve as a foundation for the human rights approach to cultural heritage, (ii) developing an account of how our obligations to preserve cultural heritage are grounded in human rights, and (iii) assessing the implications of this understanding of these obligations for global policy-making.
First published: 21 January 2019