Heritage and interculturality in EU science diplomacy

In recent years, culture and heritage have explicitly entered into science diplomacy debates and initiatives within the EU system and in EU’s foreign policy. For EU’s external relations heritage offers opportunities for developing partnerships based on shared, entangled histories but also challenges posed by dealing with difficult pasts of domination and colonialism. The paper, therefore, presents a new conceptual model for European science diplomacy that can enable more equitable ways of dealing with colonial heritage in relations between EU countries and partners outside Europe. It does so by combining recent literature on science diplomacy, heritage diplomacy, decolonial thinking, and on the concepts of interculturality. We argue that to engage successfully with colonial legacies and heritage, the concept of science diplomacy needs to be developed from a traditional “diffusionist” understanding towards a dialogical approach, which is epismologically open and acknowledges the inequalities in global knowledge production. In the second part of the paper, the practical implications of the theoretical framework are fleshed out in a discussion of three cases involving colonial heritage: The Tendaguru Fossil Collection, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels, and the work of Canadian indigenous artist Sonny Assu.