PD and Cultural Heritage Preservation

On January 12, 2010, a catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti near its capital city, Port-au-Prince. The earthquake affected an estimated 3 million people, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and triggered a massive public health crisis. It also caused extensive damage to the island nation’s infrastructure, historic buildings, and other cultural sites. Since then, natural disasters and other crises have taken major tolls on cultural heritage around the world, bringing to light not only the fragility of cultural heritage, but also its centrality to people’s lives.

In the context of disaster risk reduction and post-crisis recovery, U.S. support for the safeguarding of cultural heritage overseas may take on profoundly different dimensions. What are the public diplomacy implications of such support? Are certain cultural preservation support narratives more effective than others?

Martin Perschler, who directs the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation at the Department of State, a Public Diplomacy program that supports the safeguarding of cultural heritage in more than 125 countries around the world, discussed the challenges of cultural heritage preservation and its public diplomacy implications. The discussion was moderated by Professor Nicholas Cull, Professor and Director of the Master of Public Diplomacy program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.