World heritage and ethnic minority rights in Phong Nha Ke Bang, Vietnam: cosmopolitan assemblages in neoliberal times Peter Bille Larsen Introduction How do human rights and world heritage relate to each other in Vietnam? Whereas both international human rights and world heritage processes up to the early 1990s were largely absent and even rejected by official discourse, the picture today is very different. Ancient buildings alongside nature are no longer signs of a threatening feudal past, colonial power or neglected backwaters to be replaced by socialist development. Nor are human rights merely the threatening politics of the diplomatic other. The language of diversity and heritage, whether in political, cultural or historical terms – or through its material or immaterial manifestations – is a firm part of contemporary politics. World Heritage processes in Vietnam have been embraced and gained high visibility through multiple nominations and outward-looking diplomatic activity, alongside soaring tourism figures. Even the more contentious human rights field is, even if timidly, recognised, not least in the 2013 Constitution. Furthermore, in 2016, Vietnam was a member of both the World Heritage Committee and the Human Rights Council. The Asian values debate, which reduced human rights to a Western construct, seems bypassed, despite occasional eruptions. While Confucian values of virtue and duty may be in conflict with the literal translation of the Vietnamese term for rights (quyền lợi), ‘power and interest/benefit’ (Ta 1988), historical analysis also reveals common grounds such as those between the legal regimes of the Lê and Nguyen dynasties and contemporary human rights standards (ibid., 233). There are, in short, good grounds for reconsidering how rights and heritage practices intersect in Vietnam. Even more important are the immediate implications of intensive heritage-making for local communities. Heritagisation in Vietnam, it has been suggested, can provoke local disconnection and disenfranchised communities which are ‘written off’ by external players such as experts, state agencies and tourist companies (Salemink 2016). Phong Nha Ke Bang in Quang Binh Province, abutting the border with Laos, is Vietnam’s largest protected area and known across the globe for its spectacular landscapes, biodiversity values and cave structures. What is less well-known are the lives and rights of the ethnic minorities and other local communities living there. Tourism rates have jumped and boosted the provincial economy, this chapter argues, without resolving the rights of people living in the heart of the area. This chapter seeks to understand such injustices by combining historical and ethnographic perspectives based on field visits to the Phong Nha Ke Bang area in 2015 and 2016. 1 The field research forms part of a larger research initiative conducted in collaboration with Nghiem Thi Kim Hoa, Nguyen Duy Luong and Nguyen Linh Giang. The chapter, in particular, explores how World Heritage designation affected land, resource and property rights as well as livelihood and development rights. It also addresses the theme of indigenous, ethnic minority and cultural rights as well as implications in terms of rights to consultation, participation and consent. Findings have been presented to provincial and national authorities, and this chapter seeks to analyse implications. The ontology of rights in cosmopolitan heritage assemblages Between World Heritage ‘as a source of identity and dignity for local communities’ 2 on the one hand, and the critique of heritage-driven dispossession and marginalisation on the other (Disko and Tugendhat 2014), neither heritage nor rights are social categories with stable