World Heritage Sites could and should play a more active role in promoting a vision of global peace, heritage experts at Newcastle University say.
A report published by the UNESCO Chair team in Cultural Property and Protection and Peace at Newcastle University highlights that World Heritage Sites could increase the range of activities they carry out that formally reference UNESCO’s founding objective of contributing to world peace through education, science, and culture, rather than focusing solely on their history or archaeology.
The research was carried out between 2019 and 2024 through a desk-top analysis of WHSs globally and then focusing on all 35 WHSs in the UK. It found that while a minority acknowledged UNESCO’s founding principle in their management policies and other official documents, this did not pull through into Site objectives, management plans, or on-Site interpretation.
This was then followed by interviews with representatives from 16 Sites. This revealed that while most were aware of UNESCO’s founding principle, few were making any public reference to it or carrying out activities in support of it. However, many did express interest in exploring examples of best practice from other WHSs.
Among the recommendations made in the report is that an international project be set up to improve awareness and understanding of how WHSs can act as ‘ambassadors for peace’. As part of this, resources developed to assist UK Sites would be tested in a wide variety of situations and, if necessary, modified for local audiences to help them understand what UNESCO is and does, what WHSs are, and issues such as how World Heritage relates to UNESCO’s primary objective of promoting peace.
Alongside this, a travelling exhibition could be used by WHSs within their own countries to improve understanding of WHSs as ‘ambassadors for peace’.
This would build on the work that many UK WHSs are now taking forward to improve the ways they reference the link to UNESCO’s raison d’être, as a result of the research being carried out. Peter Stone, lead researcher and UNESCO Chair, said “UNESCO was established in 1945 to build peace in the minds of men and women. While this concept still survives in UNESCO’s strategic thinking it rarely percolates down to concrete actions. There are currently 1,223 WHSs across the Globe. All could and should be ‘ambassadors for peace’”.
The UNESCO Chair Report ‘World Heritage Sites as Ambassadors for Peace’ is jointly published by the UNESCO Chair at Newcastle together with the UK National Commission for UNESCO and World Heritage UK.
Click here to download the report (for web use).
Click here to download the report (4.3Mb).
Click here to access the e-book version.