Research area

The current debate on the restitution of cultural property from colonial contexts is placing increasing international pressure on Western museums. Yet, the negotiation of colonial collecting histories is not a phenomenon of the present alone. As early as the 1960s, successor states of formerly colonized regions began advocating for binding restitution frameworks at the level of the United Nations.

This dissertation builds on these early demands and investigates how, in the 1970s and 1980s, specific strategies emerged within museums in response to growing calls for decolonization. The study focuses on Western countries in which, under intensifying international scrutiny, different and often deliberately delaying practices took shape. Alongside semantic and political strategies aimed at safeguarding existing holdings, various approaches to inventories, object catalogues, international exhibitions, and institutional collaborations can be observed. Museums thus became symbolically charged arenas where initial shifts in colonial epistemic authority, within an emerging transnational decolonial discourse, risked being stalled or undermined.

Against this backdrop, the project examines the role of state-run museums in West Germany, the GDR, France, and Belgium in the broader context of global decolonization. It explores how these institutions positioned themselves as active agents at the intersection of international expectation and institutional self-conception, and which entangled historical mechanisms developed to negotiate issues of appropriation, participation, and access to objects tied to both individual and collective cultural identities.