Cultural Diversity, Global Change, and Social Justice: Contextualizing the 2005 Convention in a World in Flux

Abstract

The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is a landmark document in establishing the recognition of governments around the globe of the essential role of cultural diversity both for its own sake, and for its role in maintaining peace within and between nations, and in contributing to the now key notion of sustainability. It is also a document that, a decade after its introduction, requires contextualization in the light of the expanding power of globalization, the persistence in the world of violent conflicts (many of them sadly based on issues of culture and religion), and the intensification of forms of social change that were perhaps less visible in 2005 than they are today. This chapter is accordingly an attempt to place the 2005 Convention in this broader context and to assess its viability, not as a statement of entirely laudable aims, but as a potential basis for inspiring the kind of cultural work necessary to remake national and global civilization in a way congruent with other major declarations of the UN, including its founding Charter and, very significantly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the various sub-treaties and declarations to which it has given rise.