Stener Ekern

Human rights and world heritage : preserving our common dignity through rights-based approaches to site management

Luang Prabang is a beautiful town in the mountains of northern Laos; once a royal capital, it is now a World Heritage site inscribed for its fusion of traditional Lao and colonial French buildings. As a result, it is now a leading tourism magnet in Southeast Asia. Some observers, however, have identified problems in the town in terms of the retention of its tangible and intangible cultural heritage. According to Berliner (2012) the site is being ‘UNESCO-ised’ and turned into a ‘nostalgia-land’. Clearly the traditional Lao elements are dwindling as the Lao population moves to suburban areas outside the site and the Buddhist monk communities are left stranded in their monastic compounds. Dearborn and Stallmeyer (2010) attribute much of this to tourism, the Lao houses being converted into tourist guest houses and the monks’ early morning ritual of alms collection into a tourist photo shoot. Winter (2010) sees this combination of heritage and entertainment continuing and indeed fast becoming a feature of World Heritage regions across Asia, and he notes that the tourist and the tourism development entrepreneur will not be white and Western, but domestic or regional. Of course, it might be argued, as does Bushell (2010) for instance, that the development restrictions that have followed World Heritage listing are an infringement of the local community’s right to live as it wants. Is this a human rights infringement? Are the heritage controls in Luang Prabang essentially different from other forms of urban planning that limits people’s rights to do as they want on their land? Or is it just an easy shot to fire? It is clear that World Heritage status provides a highly marketable brand and, in Luang Prabang’s case, the heritage assets are a major source of job creation for the townspeople and of foreign revenue for the Lao state. Human rights might be invoked to defend a right to development as well as a right to enjoy a cultural heritage. What might be more disturbing is that the World Heritage inscription and consequent tourism impacts have been imposed upon the local people without them having any say in it. If we believe a local community needs its heritage in order to reaffirm its worth as a community, its ways of going about things, its ‘culture’, then the World Heritage controls are not

The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

This article analyses selected cases of mass killings and genocide during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the way in which the truth commissions in both countries reframed locally grounded narratives to fit the state-centred language of human rights. Redefining wrongdoings as human rights violations produces stories that communicate poorly with local worldviews because the ‘truths’ that human rights language proposes disregard local realities and transform local conflicts into a type of ‘modern’, nationwide struggles. Thus, while the concept of genocide might capture well the horrendous nature of a mass killing, it will also ethnify the conflict. Comparisons between local readings and human rights-based reinterpretations reveal a ‘modernizing’ or ‘Westernizing’ bias of international law; the article argues for more awareness about such effects in analysis as well as in policy-making.

The Production of Autonomy: Leadership and Community in Mayan Guatemala

The Mayan Indians of Guatemala share the burdens of local government by taking on a set of public duties, thereby maintaining community cohesion as well as political autonomy. This article analyses recent changes in this cargo system in a context defined by development, new representations of ‘Mayanness’, and multicultural politics. It shows how sovereignty – grounded in a distinct philosophy of leadership that generates meaningful self-rule – is crucial in facilitating political transformation towards more democratic arrangements at the cost of rule by the elders.

Between relations and rights: writing constitutions in Mayan Guatemala

ABSTRACT This article discusses indigenous autonomy and legal pluralism in Guatemala. It explores how local governing practices are increasingly being based on written, constitution-like statutes with an emergent focus on “rights”, replacing oral traditions focussed on relations. It argues that notwithstanding this great change, communal authorities continue to function as a principal medium for articulating indigenous sovereignty by appropriating a vital piece of modern nation-state imagery: constitutional law. This transformation of local political practices also shows how a long tradition with legal pluralism in Guatemala is maintained thanks to the continuing ordering capacity of the communal authorities. Building a successful, multicultural Guatemala hinges as much on the ability of communal power to reinvent itself as on nation-state legal reform.