The world heritage committee and human rights: learning from event ethnography

How are human rights articulated in and shaped by inter-governmental heritage processes? This chapter complements the legal reviews and global policy dialogues that are described throughout this book with a qualitative assessment of how rights were articulated in an inter-governmental meeting, namely the yearly World Heritage Committee session. 1 Research exploring how and under what conditions human rights are addressed in the World Heritage system involved participant observation and targeted interviews with key actors in the World Heritage system as part of a collaborative event ethnography (Brosius and Campbell 2010; Brumann 2012) of the 2015 World Heritage Committee session held in Bonn, Germany.