Eat the rich : a rethinking of the heritage-crime-development nexus

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, criminal law solutions have come to play an increasingly important role in the international policy realms of both cultural heritage protection and sustainable development. At the same time, cultural heritage protection has become a key tool in the realisation of the goals of sustainable development, triggering a result wherein the criminalisation of various practices regarded as inimical to the protection of cultural heritage has come to be seen as serving not only the goals of cultural heritage protection per se, but also those of sustainable development more broadly. In this chapter, we argue that the push towards increasing carceralisation in the name of heritage protection and sustainable development is deeply concerning. In making this argument, we draw on two existing streams of scholarship: first, that of human rights scholars who argue that criminalisation often works to uphold existing social and political hegemonies, thus rendering societies more rather than less unjust, and second, that of critical heritage scholars who invite attention to the neo-colonial, Eurocentric, and exclusionary character of cultural heritage protection norms and interventions. We then set out a proposition for potential conceptual reorientations of the heritage-development-crime nexus. We propose that for sustainable development and cultural heritage policy to work to realize the lofty goals to which they aspire, the focus should be on the systemic factors of economic and epistemic injustice rather than the “immoral” crimes of individual actors.