This book explores the politics of heritage. Beyond its use in the construction of identity or the politics of representation, labeling something heritage is an intensely political act that legitimises certain processes over others. As a policy document the World Heritage Convention gives institutional authority to discourses of heritage and internationalism. At the core of the world heritage system is a tension between the need to protect the worlds heritage, and the sovereignty of State Parties. While there have been many recent changes to the world heritage system - provoked by...

The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. But African landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave of squatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon evicted as the new government asserted control over the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes. Amid fast-track land reform in the 2000s, the same people...