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Colonial heritage in Paramaribo, Suriname : legislation and sense of ownership, a dilemma in preservation?

In this article, the preservation of the monumental built environment from the colonial period is related to and discussed within the perspective of heritage ownership. It contributes to a debate in which heritage resource preservation is approached and connected to several heritage ownership issues. It argues that an effective built environmental preservation policy for colonial heritage is strongly related to and dependent on issues such as legal property ownership, legislation on listed buildings, enforcement of such legislation, and the willingness among different categories of potential owners to participate and support such preservation. Especially, when it comes to built colonial heritage as an imported alien resource from a colonial past, these issues are particularly interesting and sensitive. A good illustration of these issues is the case of Paramaribo, Suriname. The national government policy following the inscription of the historic inner city of Paramaribo on the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 2002 clearly demonstrates an area of tension and difficulty between and within the interested parties. It shows that monumental preservation and heritage management and interpretation are strongly affected and determined by concepts such as ownership, affinity, interest, economic priorities, and political will. By referring to the actual problems encountered in the preservation efforts relating to the built colonial heritage in Paramaribo and subsequently explaining these problems in relation to specific ownership issues, this article throws light on a number of dilemmas. Conclusions are drawn widening the argument and contributing to the ongoing debate on heritage ownership issues and monument preservation policies especially as it relates to the global issue of managing the relics of now defunct empires. In recent years an increasing interest can be detected in issues concerning the legal property ownership of heritage. This growth in interest focuses in particular on the legislation in relationship to property ownership issues. An important aim of national governments is to use legislation to safeguard their cultural property by embedding it in law, especially, when this cultural property has a high monetary or identity value (as stressed by Fechner, 1998). Additionally, the growing awareness and recognition of heritage as a valuable economic, sociopsychological and environmental asset is receiving increasing international attention. For example, the international acknowledgment that heritage resources are under pressure from all kinds of processes and impacts has encouraged the need for an extension of international legal measures. Consequently, this international interest, often expressed in conventions, charters, and treaties, encourages national and local initiatives (Techera, 2011). An interesting complication to this issue is the question that arises where it involves the monumental built environment from the colonial period that is being preserved and restored, as it may be viewed as a heritage based on alien resources. In particular the acceptance, recognition, and role of what may be viewed as an imported colonial built environment in a multicultural and multiethnic context, may impact effective legislation. Although the discussion about the roles of heritage within a plural cultural and ethnic society has already begun (recently emphasized by Van Maanen, 2011; Ashworth, Graham, & Tunbridge, 2007), it is still an underresearched topic when it comes to legal property ownership as part of a management strategy for preserving built colonial heritage resources. This article examines in particular the effectiveness of policies and laws pursued in Suriname as an instrument for the preservation of resources. It highlights the legal and administrative challenges facing the implementation, management, and enforcement of these strategies and measures. The first part of this article examines the debate about the approach and strategy in using law in conservation and preservation policies. Then the article proceeds to introduce Suriname as an instructive case study. It describes the existing multiethnic context of Suriname and the evolution of legislative policy for the historic inner city of the capital, Paramaribo, with its monumental built environment from the colonial period. By using field data, the article continues with an analysis of the effectiveness and impacts of this administrative and legal framework established in Suriname. It examines in detail the main problems encountered and the extent to which this strategy is supported by the key stakeholders.

The Science-Policy Nexus: Colonial Modernity Logics of Cultural Distance and Knowledge Production in European Integration Regimes

Scientific research from within and beyond academia continues to provide the justification and the knowledge for policy developments directed toward migration and integration governance. A proliferation of scholarship aims to study, pilot, and investigate the ‘best practices’ for facilitating integration, which is then taken up in advice to policy makers. Many authors have written about this science-policy nexus (Boswell 2009; Penninx, Garcés-Mascareñas, and Scholten 2005; Scholten et al. 2015; Verbeek, Entzinger, and Scholten 2015) These works have also engaged in critical reflection, problematizing this nexus and demonstrating how funding structures draw researchers not only into addressing short-term policy goals, but also into reproducing some of the essentialist worldviews that come with methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Yet, the colonial legacies and dis/continuities of these logics in integrationism have not received much attention so far.The paper takes a critical lens on the implications of the science-policy complicity in reproducing colonial logics of ‘cultural distance’, based on perspectives and empirical research from different national (Netherlands and Switzerland) and supra-national (EU) contexts. We analyse texts which shape the civic integration programme in the Netherlands, the genealogy of the integration requirement to respect the values of the constitution in Switzerland, and the EU framework on migrant integration. This combined analysis brings forth the role scientists and knowledge producers play in (re)producing the colonial logics within integrationism, and their contributions to the regime of truth within which integration discourse operates. Throughout this article, we draw on examples from these different contexts to display that integration and its migranticized (Dahinden 2016) subjects are constructed through practices deemed as scientific or objective expertise, building on important work by Schinkel (2018) on integration research as “neocolonial knowledge production” and Favell’s (2022) critical reflections on integration indicator frameworks. As we demonstrate, the “idea of integration as an issue of cultural distance is rendered imaginable in and through colonial legacies and scientific practices from which policy draws legitimacy. We show how cultural distance is produced in the scientification of migrants’ assimilability in a ‘Western work ethic’, in measurement of migrants’ adherence to liberal values, and through constructions of integration drawing on social imaginaries of national and European identity. Importantly, we argue that by presenting this cultural distance as a product of objective, scientific processes of empirical observation, the notion of cultural distance is normalised and depoliticized, which ultimately legitimizes integrationism as a mode of governance.The present study builds on important contributions (by Schinkel 2017; Favell 2022; Korteweg 2017; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2017, and others) in attempting to destabilize the normalization of integrationism as the widely accepted mode of governance of ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic’ populations and their inherent and problematic ‘distance’. The content and structure of this summer school in post-colonial Amsterdam would allow us to continue our critical reflexive discussions to better understand the colonial logics at play and how they operate in multiple contexts and at multiple levels of governance, in and beyond integration

Colonial heritage: a plural interpretation

The Peaceable Commons

A Manifesto The group of some 17 participants interrupted the UDHR text in real time, infusing it with inclusive terminology, queering its binary language and expanding its gaze to other lifebeings, making it a manifesto for a new world. The newly formulated Universal Declaration of Human and More-Than-Human Rights and Responsibility for a New World would be the manifesto for an alliance of those who insisted on an end to capitalist practices and their destructive effects on the planet.

English colonial architecture in the late 19th century

On paratactics, bots and cost-colonial finance

This online STS muhabbet, friendly but critically engaging conversation that took place between Yetiskin and Lovink will walk you through the stages of identifying the problems, threats, and possibilities that media technologies have brought to the table of not only users but also social science researchers who are mostly outside the current modes of technical knowledge production. It is a frank discussion on the biases of codes and algorithms upon which social media platforms have been built, the lack of technological awareness in academia, and the effect of this lack in terms of centralizing governance structures. Yetiskin and Lovink not only elaborate on the embeddedness of the political, economic and cultural in the technical but also the embeddedness of technical means in the way that we think and express ourselves. They also discuss the ways of politicizing the contemporary technologies, making them the matter of concern for both the users and the social scientists, and opening the black boxes of them i.e. making visible the invisible: media infrastructures, biased filters, the firewalls against the democratization of technologies. Enjoy your STS muhabbet!