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Unesco’S World Heritage Program: Challenges And Ethics Of Community Participation, Michael A. Di Giovine

Anthropology & Sociology Faculty Publications

In the nearly fifty years since the 1972 World Heritage Convention was ratified, UNESCO’s flagship preservation program has transformed itself from an initiative valorizing primarily national parks and Western-style monuments to the keystone of a robust World Heritage Program that seeks to engage different communities with a common ethical narrative of “unity in diversity.” Yet UNESCO has been critiqued for its politicized and elitist nature; its inability to protect its World Heritage properties from militias such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Ansar Dini in Mali, or from adverse governmental policies in Germany, Syria and Oman; for a rather late …