Studies on antiquities trafficking have often been overshadowed by research looking at the trafficking of human beings, drugs, and weapons, a fact partly motivated by the arguably higher relevance and greater security implications involved in these other forms of illicit trade. However, the past decade of conflicts in the Middle East has revived an interest in the study of antiquities trafficking networks. 1 The association between the growing size of the illicit antiquities market and conflicts in the region did not go unnoticed by crime scientists and criminologists looking deeper at the relation between the trafficking of antiquities and transnational organized crime. 2

This article discusses the implications of recording and digitizing a variety of cultural and contemporary dance performance practices, core to a European project known as WhoLoDancE, which focused on issues of reuse, ownership, property, and responsibility. The recordings and subsequent processing of dance material into digital data raised questions about the responsibilities to the dancers who have contributed their material to the project, particularly when it is transformed into data visualizations that can be accessed and reused by others. The article not only focuses on how value accrues in these kinds of resources and sometimes in unexpected ways but also draws attention to how dance remains bound to the communities in which it is performed and tends to resist its abstraction from the body to be commodified as a form of cultural property. This then points to how dance, as intangible cultural heritage, is self-regulating in terms of principles of ownership and attribution.

Afghanistan’s cultural heritage has faced extreme challenges over recent decades, experiencing the simultaneous impacts of numerous disasters such as war, the looting of museums, illegal excavations, and deliberate destruction caused by extreme ideological beliefs – the last diminishing not only Afghanistan’s but also the world’s cultural heritage. However, these incidents and experiences have also provided lessons for the protection of cultural heritage. Despite progress since 2004, the return of the Taliban and their treatment of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage during their previous regime have raised growing concerns for the country’s cultural heritage and fears of that sad history repeating itself. In this article, we examine the progress made in protecting the rights related to cultural heritage in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, especially in relation to its protection and safeguarding age. To this end, it examines the basis of the current cultural heritage legislation, the identification and registration of heritage elements, the legal tools for regulating heritage, and how its protection is monitored and evaluated. Addressing the challenges that this process faced, it questions what responsibilities should be placed on the Taliban following their recent return to power.

Dance has rarely been accepted as the subject of copyright protection because works of dance and choreography have lacked commodified property-object status in intellectual property law. If dance is “haunted by its own ephemerality” and, thus, rarely embodied as property, then what of dance music? Music composed, performed, and recorded with a dance audience in mind has formed, on many occasions, the subject matter of intellectual property law claims, as the rancorous recent litigation over the nightclub (and online-streaming) hit “Blurred Lines” demonstrates. In this article, I utilize the case study of traditional Irish dance music to explore how traditional music occupies a space somewhat outside the formal legal system, defined by informal social norms such as reciprocity, sharing, and acknowledgment (attribution). I consider how Irish traditional music can be represented as heritage and as property, reflecting on the type of ownership at play in the Irish traditional music community. I observe that Irish traditional dance music provides an example of “heritage as resistance” – a mode of cultural and social practice that continues to thrive as a living tradition, even in the contemporary market-oriented world of the global North.

Many of the known Cycladic figures – the late prehistoric human-shaped sculptures from the Aegean archipelago – came from twentieth-century illicit excavations, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also known that figures were being faked at the time and perhaps also earlier: a few fakes have been identified, whilst other figures are under suspicion. Interviews with a man who faked Cycladic figures in the 1980s and 1990s give us a first insider’s autobiographical account of the forging business. This article offers, step-by-step, the method that two forgers developed to create fake figures, to treat them so that they appeared ancient, and to sell them on. The forger has identified a few of these forgeries from photographs of figures; his story is consistent with other information and seems to ring true. By verifying various elements in the forger’s testimony – from names of well-known figures in the modern antiquities market to small details and dates – we have been able to evaluate the validity of the narrative; to use it in order to uncover the true paths that fake objects followed into various collections; and to highlight valuable provenance information that no one involved in trading these objects was ever willing to provide.

This case note discusses the role of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the protection of cultural heritage. Of particular relevance in this vein is the cultural heritage dimension of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and its interpretation by the ICJ in its provisional measures order of 7 December 2021 in the proceedings on the Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (Armenia v. Azerbaijan). In this order, the ICJ indicated provisional measures to protect the cultural heritage of minorities and their right to equal participation in cultural activities. Looking ahead, the case note briefly elaborates on the potential implications of this order and the proceedings for the broader debate on the human right to cultural heritage.

Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling’s Riff (2007) directly addresses many of these issues, which inform the specific content of the piece as well as its conceptualization, development, and the copyright licenses that underpin it. Sperling’s performance is clearly conceived as a rite of passage, a dance through which a dancer becomes a choreographer, going from “riffing off” other choreographers’ work to developing dance movements and phrases that, while tied to those of his predecessors, he can claim as his own. As such, Riff makes explicit and rearticulates the rearrangement of professional relations and roles, the difference between reperforming and innovating, between learning from bodies or from media, as well as how the property status of the work intersects with community norms and expectations of attribution.

The conference report from the international conference “Decolonizing Heritage: The Return of Cultural Objects to Africa – An International Law Perspective,” which was held on 23–24 September 2021 at the Université de Genève.