Reclaiming Dignity: How BRICS Countries are Redefining Cultural Justice
BRICS nations are reshaping cultural justice by reclaiming stolen heritage, asserting sovereignty, and challenging colonial-era power structures through diplomacy, ethics, and human rights.
The global conversation around the return and restitution of cultural heritage is no longer a niche legal debate; it has become a central issue of national sovereignty, historical dignity, and the geopolitical balance of power. While the dialogue often centers on European nations reversing the brutal cultural extractivism suffered during the colonial era, countries of the BRICS grouping are rapidly positioning themselves as intellectual and political leaders in redefining the terms of this cultural justice.
Restitution, in this context, is understood as more than the mere physical transfer of objects; it is a profound process that touches the very fabric of societies, their sense of dignity, their access to history, and their fundamental right to narrate their own pasts. For countries that have been both former colonizers and collectors, or holders of cultural heritage, the challenge is to pioneer new standards for transparency, information sharing, and fair partnerships.
The Brazilian Seminar: A New Global Nexus
The recent International Seminar on the Return of Cultural Heritage, held in Brazil in November 2025, served as a vital forum to advance these discussions, bringing together experts, diplomats, and community leaders to share strategies for overcoming entrenched resistance.
For Brazil, the topic of the return of cultural heritage is one of the main priorities in its cultural diplomacy. Brazil’s foreign policy approaches this issue not just through bilateral negotiations but also by leveraging multilateral forums, including BRICS, the G20, UNESCO, and other organizations. This diplomatic focus is rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, reflecting principles like the sovereign equality of states and the peaceful resolution of disputes.
The engagement from Brazil demonstrates that the return of cultural heritage is intrinsically linked to broader human rights and the right to development, as access to heritage allows nations to rebuild their history and trace their paths of progress. This commitment has already yielded important successes, such as the return of the Pano-trousers (Tomb) from Denmark and the Javus fossil. Furthermore, Brazil actively works to ensure that cultural heritage that was illegally removed and taken to Brazil (such as archaeological articles from Guatemala) is restituted to its rightful country of origin.
BRICS Strategy: Restitution as a Human Rights Imperative
A defining characteristic of the BRICS approach, particularly demonstrated by South Africa and India, is the elevation of restitution beyond mere legal technicality, framing it instead as a moral and historical imperative.
South Africa: Defining Restitution as Social Restoration
South Africa, through its G20 presidency, took a powerful stance by placing the idea of restitution squarely within the context of human rights. Experts from South Africa emphasize a critical conceptual distinction:
Repatriation is often seen as focusing on logistics, legal matters (like changing laws), diplomacy, and transport dynamics.
Restitution is understood as a broader project of social restoration.
The South African policy notably refuses to distinguish between the dead (ancestors) and their possessions, employing a single policy for the return of human remains and material culture. This framework actively challenges the European museum classification system, which often operates on the presumption that material culture entered collections under “some kind of system of gift making”. Instead, South Africa advocates that everything that traveled with the dead, including material belongings, should be considered as belonging to the dead, pushing back against the objectification inherent in colonial museum governance.
Crucially, South African experts stress that Europeans cannot do restitution; they can only support repatriation. Restitution must be framed by the reclaiming nations themselves, ensuring that the process is not merely an “opportunity for Europeans to do repatriations” or a way of “cleaning the blood of their hands,” but a long-term work of rebuilding relations and cultivating a new ethics of humanity.
India: Narrating Its Own History
India, which was instrumental in putting the return of cultural heritage at the forefront of the 2020 G20 presidency, views restitution as essential to reasserting its national narrative. For diplomats and cultural leaders from India, the issue of restitution is seen as closely linked to the country’s cultural heritage, allowing them to finally narrate their own history.
Overcoming Entrenched Obstacles
The BRICS countries face shared obstacles, many stemming from the inherent power imbalances frozen by existing international legal frameworks.
1. The 1970 UNESCO Convention: Brazil notes that the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the main multilateral agreement on this topic, is often insufficient because its non-retroactivity freezes the unequal power structures. Since the convention only addresses movements after 1970, countries often use this temporal restriction as an excuse to ignore requests or insist on often unequal bilateral negotiations.
2. Lack of Transparency and Inventories: Holding institutions have historically resisted transparency. Secret documents produced by German museums in the 1970s, for instance, warned against publishing comprehensive inventories, fearing this “would only cause all the more cautiousness” from claiming nations. BRICS countries need to overcome the sheer difficulty in accessing and interpreting historical archives to prove provenance. For countries like Cameroon (whose objects are held in German museums), researchers sometimes find chilling notes in original inventories, such as “only possible to acquire by force, divided or violence,” underscoring the history of colonial violence behind the collections.
3. The Challenge of “Objects” vs. “Belongings”: The very language used can be an obstacle. Brazil and its partners must contend with the “western knowledge system” represented by 19th-century museum classifications. Objects that were complex spiritual systems were often labeled as “fetishes” by missionaries and ethnographers to justify domination, thereby criminalizing non-European knowledge systems. When returns occur, the objects must be recognized not as mere static items, but as “belongings” or “ancestors” which possess agency and relational power within their communities of origin.
4. Mobility Restrictions: A critical contradiction noted in the sources is the hypocrisy of institutions speaking about “restitution dialogue” while simultaneously maintaining restricted visa policies that prevent researchers and museum professionals from the reclaiming nations from entering Europe to work with their own heritage. The lack of mobility and access directly undercuts the stated ethics of restitution.
The Future: A New Balance of Exchange
Despite the challenges, the combined efforts and intellectual rigor of countries like Brazil, South Africa, and India are creating an unstoppable positive momentum.
The objective of restitution is not to “incarcerate the objects in their countries”. Rather, it is to level the playing field and enable new, balanced geographical possibilities of exchange. When a country has its cultural heritage back, it gains “cultural empowerment” and the ability to engage with global museum players on an equal footing. For example, if a major European museum wants to borrow an item, a country like Brazil or South Africa must have something to offer in return to participate in these exchanges. Restitution facilitates “south-south regulations,” reducing the dependency on former colonizers (like France or Germany) for dialogue and cooperation.
Ultimately, the BRICS nations are advocating for a future where cultural heritage is seen as a key component of reconciliation, helping to rebuild trust between societies and creating, step by step, a new ethic of relation for the future. This process is about transforming the relationship to the past, moving from an era of possession and extractivism to one of mutual respect and sovereign dignity.
Analogy: If colonial-era museums were vast, sealed vaults that froze history under uneven terms, the BRICS efforts are like applying geopolitical pressure and ethical keys to dismantle those vaults, not just to free the treasures, but to ensure that the rightful owners determine their future use, circulation, and meaning.
This is an excellent and timely analysis. The global restitution debate is no loner a technical or legal sidebar. It has become a defining measure of sovereignty, historical dignity and geopolitical self-determination. What this article captures so well is the way BRICS nations are reframing restitution not as a courtesy bestowed by formal colonial powers, but as a human rights imperative grounded in the moral right of societies to narrate their own past.
One other point I would add is that restitution is not merely about correcting the historical record but also about reshaping the future architecture of global cultural authority. For centuries, European museums have functioned as centralized vaults of world memory, consolidating knowledge and narrative power in Western capitals. When Brazil, South Africa, India and other BRICS countries reclaim their heritage, they are also reclaiming the power to interpret, curate and transmit their own civilizations. This represents a decisive shift from Western custodianship to multipolar cultural sovereignty.
Crucially, this leadership will not remain confined to BRICS. As these nations break the intellectual and diplomatic barriers that once protected colonial-era collections, they create a path for others across the world to assert their own claims with renewed confidence. BRICS is, in effect, forging a new global norm, one in which restitution becomes not an exception but an expectation.
In this sense, restitution is not only the return of belongings but a redistribution of moral, cultural and epistemic power. It signals the emergence of a world in which history is no longer defined by those who stole it, but by those who are finally taking it back.
We need to make that kind of transformation on so many levels. There is so much bias at every turn.