Purpose: This article explores the concept of “heritage futures”, the role of heritage in managing relations between present and future societies. It assesses how thinking strategically about the future changes, complicates and contextualises practices of heritage. What might an attention to the future bring to work in heritage, and simultaneously, what challenges—both practical and ethical—arise?

Design/methodology/approach: This article takes the form of a conversation about the nature of heritage futures and how such a project may be implemented in both heritage practice and field research in heritage studies. The two authors are heritage scholars who integrate heritage futures questions into their research in different ways, and their conversation uncovers potentialities and difficulties in the heritage futures project.

Findings: The discussion covers the particular ethical issues that arise when the dimension of time is added to heritage research and practice, including questions of continuism, presentism and specificity. The conversation argues for the importance of considering the future in heritage studies and heritage practice and that this forms a key part of understanding how heritage may be part of building a sustainable present and future.

Originality/value: The future is an under-examined concept within heritage studies, even as heritage is often framed as something to be preserved “for future generations”. But what impact might it have on heritage practice to really consider what this means, beyond the platitude? This article suggests that heritage scholars and practitioners direct their attention to this often-neglected facet of heritage.

Sites of plantation slavery that are now interpreted as heritage frequently spatialize their narratives by emphasizing White elites in monumental spaces and associating the Black enslaved with smaller, less-imposing and frequently worse-preserved elements. In the contemporary present, as heritage spaces increasingly push to focus on the enslaved instead of the elite, the preservation of elite monumentality can be viewed as honouring enslavers. This article explores the position of heritage professionals on St Croix, US Virgin Islands, who advocate instead for a respatialization of slavery's heritage: a resignification of these 'elite' monuments as monuments to - and created by - the enslaved themselves. Their emphasis on the resilience and ingenuity of the enslaved challenges the spatial foregrounding of White supremacy in monumental heritage and allows the persistent materiality of plantations to be reclaimed in order to elevate Black history and identity.

Highlighting the rural district of Nyanza in Rwanda, this article examines community relations to heritage resources. It investigates the possibilities for more ethical, engaged models of heritage management which can better deliver on agendas of decolonization and development. Our research finds that Nyanza’s heritage stakeholders highly value heritage’s social and economic roles, but communities are also significantly alienated from heritage resources. In seeking to bridge this gap, heritage professionals utilize a discourse of technocratic improvement, but community leaders emphasize ideas of ownership, drawing on higher state-level discourses of self-reliance and “homegrown solutions.” They mobilize the state’s own attempts to filter developing, decolonizing initiatives through Rwandan frameworks to advocate for communities’ right to participate in heritage. This local agency offers a roadmap for utilizing favorable aspects of existing governance to push heritage management toward community engagement and decolonization.

In this introduction to the “Where Heritage Meets Violence” series for the Social Science Research Council's "Items" publication, Annalisa Bolin encapsulates contemporary discussions and recent research on the connection between cultural heritage and violence—physical, symbolic, and structural. She argues that by acknowledging and engaging with these dynamics “we can negotiate what our societies become.”

Heritage, a practice shot through with political forces, is mobilized by states within their international relationships through methods such as heritage diplomacy. Focusing on the connections between Rwanda and Germany, this article traces how heritage serves as a technique of foreign relations for the Rwandan state. The uses of heritage are shaped by the state's higher-level political orientations, especially the project of agaciro, which pursues an agenda of increased sovereignty for Rwanda in relation to the rest of the world. This conditions how 'shared heritage' and heritage repatriation contribute to establishing strategic alliances and decolonizing, making heritage part of a suite of tools used to advantageously reposition the country in the international arena. The article deepens our understanding of the Rwandan state's governing techniques and examines heritage's role as a mediator of international relationships, even for less-powerful nations whose agency is sometimes neglected in discussions of heritage diplomacy.

A new study led by an anthropologist and a heritage sites protection specialist offers a path forward for decolonizing heritage management in Rwanda—and beyond.