Over the past two decades, international law has seen a remarkable intensifi cation of interest in cultural property and a signifi cant expansion of the legal tools for its protection. New multilateral conventions have been negotiated and soft-law instruments adopted to address new types of cultural heritage, such as the 2001 Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention, the 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the 2003 Declaration on the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage, and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Intense work has been undertaken in the same period for updating and completing older regimes on cultural property protection. Th is is the case with the 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Confl ict (1954), and with the adoption of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, which has fi lled some private law gaps of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Th is law-making activity has stimulated the development of a vast body of academic writings spanning diff erent disciplines and aspects of cultural heritage, from the material to the intangible.