Offering an overview of the phenomenon of illicit trafficking of cultural properties, this book serves as a reference point for governments, enforcement agencies, international organizations, stakeholders, and civil societies. The geographic focus is the Arab World: the countries in the Middle East, Gulf of Arabia, Horn of Africa and North Africa.

This edited volume offers an understanding of how the international community, as a collection of significant actors including major states and intergovernmental institutions, has responded to the important political and social development of the Arab Spring. Contributors analyze the response by international organizations (UN, EU, NATO), big powers (US, Russia, China, UK), regional powers (Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia) and small powers (Kuwait, Qatar). The book thus makes a sound contribution to the existing literature on the Arab Spring in form of foreign policy analysis and provides an overview of the current shape and outlook of global politics.

Established in the aftermath of World War II, UNESCO succinctly states its peace mission as well as its peaceful resolution to peace in its Constitution—constructing the “defenses of peace” in the minds of peoples on the “intellectual and moral” grounds. For more than seven decades, UNESCO has been consistently positioning peace as its unwavering core and ultimate goal through promoting international understanding and cooperation in and across its five major sectors of competence in education, natural sciences, culture, communication and information, and social and human sciences. Historical Dictionary of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on UNESCO’s initiatives, programs, projects, normative instruments, and partners over the past 76 years. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about UNESCO.

This book examines cultural heritage law in both its public and private modalities, focusing on the search for new solutions in national legislations. Both tangible and intangible cultural heritage pose challenges for national legislation regarding the legal histories of the respective countries, obligations deriving from international law, and the independence of respective national searches for a tailored protection model. Although the concept of cultural heritage transcends civil law regulation and property rights, it must be considered when attempting to establish any coherent cultural heritage protection system. In national legislation, we can now observe an increased interest in leveraging civil law or private law to strengthen cultural heritage protection systems. This book looks beyond public and private law on cultural heritage in order to address its complex status as a legal hybrid. Further, the book shows how current problems in the international debate are mirrored in national legislation. Poland is used as a practical example, while also referring to other countries’ solutions as well as EU and international law instruments. This approach enables the reader to examine the creation of national legislation at the operational level and provides a template for all national lawyers concerning current challenges and emerging trends. The book’s target audience includes researchers and practitioners in the field of cultural heritage law, as well as public and private law experts. The topics covered can also be helpful for law students, art market actors, and all those interested in the challenges of cultural heritage protection.

Human heritage is an endless mine of knowledge, skills, ethos and accomplishments, which visualize and examine the power of human creativity and innovation throughout the history. The contributions cast an insight into the human psyche to perceive its Weltanschauung, and its way of thinking and making artefacts associated with knowledge, existence and identity in the context of other existing systems in the world. They demonstrate the diversity of topics as well as the state-of-the art of interdisciplinary approaches that participants of the Humboldt-Kolleg use in their research on cultural heritage, and confirm, once again, that the strengths of the Alexander von Humboldt Network should be celebrated and honoured. The present volume invites us to seek more novel research approaches that aim towards an understanding of the complex nature of human inheritance.

Authored by leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, this Commentary is the first to offer an article-by-article commentary on the two leading multilateral treaties on movable cultural heritage in one volume: The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.

Collecting has a long tradition in the Middle East but the museum as a public institution is relatively new. Today there are national museums for antiquities in most Arab countries. While in some cases the political and social climate has hindered the foundation of museums, with existing collections even destroyed at times, the recent museum boom in the Gulf States is again changing the outlook. This unique book is the first to explore collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, featuring case studies of collecting practices in countries ranging from Egypt and Lebanon to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, and providing a theoretical and methodological basis for future research. The authors are also concerned with investigating the relationship between past and present, since collecting practices tell us a great deal not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and present conceptions of our identities. Collections can be textual as well, as in the stories, memories or events selected, recalled, and retold in the pages of a text. As interest in memory studies as well as popular and visual culture grows in the Arab World, so collecting practices are at the heart of any critical approach to the past and the present in that region. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of the modern Arab world but also to professionals in museums and collections in the region, as well as around the world.