Note: although this conference also covers dealing with Nazi looted treasures, most speakers will focus on contested colonial collections from three continents.
In their genocidal forms, such exploitations also manifest themselves in a systemic illegitimate taking of assets, including a taking of the cultural property of the persecuted, as cultural objects are both valuables and representations of the persecuted party’s identity that the aggressor seeks to extinguish, exercising its powers within the dependency relation (“cultural genozide”).
For example, during the Holocaust, the German and European Jews were systematically deprived of their assets, including their cultural property, as an integral part of the attempt to extinguish the Jewish people, identity and culture.
Later in time, post-Holocaust remedies specifically focused on the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art and cultural property, as well as more specific forms of reparations for harm such as slave labour.
In recent years, the restitution of cultural property taken in colonial contexts of injustice has become a distinct field of post-colonial reml remedies, although to date such efforts have not included more general reparation schemes.
Deadline 340 March 2026.
