Make it official! World Heritage guidelines for sites of recent conflicts
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum © Bjørn Christian Tørrissen [Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
By Christina Cameron - On July 11, 2025, the World Heritage Committee at its 47th session will inscribe Cambodian Memorial Sites: from centres of repression to places of peace and reflection using criterion (vi). The Kingdom of Cambodia has chosen three sites to represent one of the most serious abuses of human rights in the 20th century. While exposing the repressive Khmer Rouge system of imprisonment, interrogation, torture and execution, Cambodia has chosen to use these sites to encourage peaceful coexistence among its people and to continue the process of justice and national reconciliation.
The Cambodian inscription is an exemplary embodiment of the 2023 landmark decision by the World Heritage Committee on the process to nominate sites of memory associated with recent conflicts. It is well known that memorialization initiatives are inherently political and risk creating dissonance and further conflict unless done inclusively through extensive community consultation. Places with unresolved dissonant values will not build the foundations of peace.
A 2024 International Seminar on Heritage Interpretation and Presentation for Future Generations, hosted by Seoul National University, King’s College London, ICOMOS-ICIP, and OurWorldHeritage, discussed this issue in a symposium entitled “Interpretation and Presentation of Contested Heritage: towards truth and peace building.” In a session on marginalized voices in presentations of historic places and museums, speakers gave different examples of excluded narratives in Egypt, Japan, West Africa, the Philippines and Palestine. They called for the involvement of diverse experts in the development of official narratives, visitor surveys to understand how interpretative exhibitions are understood, and the use of new media to enable public access to documentary and oral archives. In the same series, the 2025 seminar in Tokyo continued to explore the theme by focusing on “Conflicting Discourses in Interpreting Contested Heritage: The Role of Diverse Communities in Fostering Dialogue for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation.”
The purpose of the World Heritage Committee’s 2023 decision was to avoid ongoing conflicts and achieve sustainable peace. The decision sets out General Principles that require nomination texts to be accurate to avoid distortion of memories; proof that serious efforts have been made to ensure inclusive and effective participation of all potentially affected stakeholders; multi-dimensional interpretation strategies to ensure an accurate presentation of the full meaning of the place that shows its historical past and present-day meanings; documentation of the reconciliation process; and demonstration that the nomination is not interrupting the process of dialogue and reconciliation.
This is an excellent framework that needs to be institutionalized in the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. Why? Because new proposals of sites of recent conflicts continue to appear in various States Parties Tentative Lists. And because Committee decisions that are not made part of the operational guidelines risk being forgotten over time as Committee membership changes and memories fade. So far, there is no proposal to add the General Principles to the guidelines. As far as this writer can determine, the agenda of this year’s 47th session of the World Heritage Committee has no proposal to add the General Principles to its Operational Guidelines. This needs to change.
Further information:
Beazley, Olwen, and Christina Cameron. Sites associated with recent conflicts and other negative and divisive memories. Paris: UNESCO, 2020. https://whc.unesco.org/en/memoryreflection/
ICOMOS. Sites associated with memories of recent conflicts and the World Heritage Convention: Reflection on whether and how these might relate to the purpose and scope of the World Heritage Convention and its Operational Guidelines. Paris: ICOMOS, 2020.
UNESCO, Outcomes of the open-ended working group on sites of memory associated with recent conflicts, in the Report of the Decisions adopted during the eighteenth extraordinary session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris, 24-25 January 2023, WHC/23/8 EXT.COM 4. https://whc.unesco.org/en/documents/197996
Seoul National University and its partners, International Seminars on Heritage Interpretation and Presentation for Future Generations, 2022-2025. 2023 | 2024 | 2025
About the Author
Cameron Cameron held the Canada Research Chair in Built Heritage at the University of Montreal from 2005 to 2019 and previously served as a heritage executive with Parks Canada for more than thirty-five years.
