Description
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the peace potential of cultural heritage safeguarding activities, particularly in contexts that have been impacted by protracted violence or social conflict. Most scholarship so far has focussed on the ways that interventions to protect or restore tangible cultural heritage in the wake of conflict might contribute to building sustainable peace. Far less consideration has been given to the role of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) protection in achieving this goal, perhaps because of existing biases towards tangible heritage protection, and the difficulty of measuring and reporting on ICH initiatives in a donor-driven context. Building on the experience of an initiative to protect conflict-affected heritage in the occupied Palestinian territory, we propose a model for integrating approaches to ICH safeguarding with peacebuilding. This model identifies three key actions in safeguarding ICH – recording, transmitting and building capacity – that contribute to four domains of peacebuilding (security, reconciliation and justice, socio-economic foundations and political). Our model, we argue, provides a framework through which the peace potential of activities to safeguard ICH can better be conceptualised and understood, thus enhancing the ability of peacebuilding interventions to take a more integrative view of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding, and vice versa.
