Emma Cunliffe

The 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) created a new legal framework to improve protection for the world’s most important cultural property in cases of conflict, called enhanced protection. However, it has never been tested. In representing the NGO Blue Shield International, I had the opportunity to test it on the NATO training exercise STEADFAST JACKAL 2023. The training audience, Eurocorps, was presented with a complex non-international armed conflict in which tensions escalated over a (fictional) site under enhanced protection. Multiple stakeholders, including the national owners and armed non-state groups, provoked conflicting legal and policy obligations. The actions taken by Eurocorps raised implications for safeguarding enhanced protection sites in real situations, which this article seeks to highlight and explore, offering a new understanding of the application of law in practice. The article argues that in certain circumstances enhanced protection may lead to competing obligations regarding human rights, justice, and cultural protection. Those registering sites and acting to protect them must consider likely scenarios carefully to establish good practices. Otherwise, enhanced protection could defend sites to the detriment of those that value them.

This chapter provides a fresh perspective on cultural heritage damage: by creating a new framework to consider risk to cultural heritage, it provides a first step to approach damage mitigation and prevention more effectively. Damage occurs in a range of contexts: existing studies have examined specific actors and their motivations, specific heritage types, damage types, areas, and/or circumstances across the cycle of peace and conflict. Using the ABC Risk Management Approach as a departure point, this chapter untangles and explores the key facets of damage studies to understand the problem holistically: who are the stakeholders in destruction; what is lost; when does it occur; where is it most likely to occur; how does it occur; and why is it destroyed, placing them in a comparable framework. By understanding their interrelation, broad risk drivers are established, along with the magnifying and reducing factors that affect them, providing a detailed view of potential risks to sites and enabling cross-comparison to develop understanding of risk of loss to cultural heritage, and in doing so, providing steps towards prioritising mitigation.

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction presents a comprehensive view on the destruction of cultural heritage and offers insights into this multifaceted, interdisciplinary phenomenon; the methods scholars have used to study it; and the results these various methods have produced. By juxtaposing theoretical and legal frameworks and conceptual contexts alongside a wide distribution of geographical and temporal case studies, this book throws light upon the risks, and the realizations, of art and heritage destruction. Exploring the variety of forces that drive the destruction of heritage, the volume also contains contributions that consider what forms heritage destruction takes and in which contexts and circumstances it manifests. Contributors, including local scholars, also consider how these drivers and contexts change, and what effect this has on heritage destruction, and how we conceptualise it. Overall, the book establishes the importance of the need to study the destruction of art and cultural heritage within a wider framework that encompasses not only theory but also legal, military, social, and ontological issues. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction will contribute to the development of a more complete understanding and analysis of heritage destruction. The Handbook will be useful to academics, students, and professionals with interest in heritage, conservation and preservation, history and art history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, and law.

Heritage destruction is not a new phenomenon. The destruction of symbols of the identity of the Other has long been a prevalent feature of warfare and civil unrest, as has the more subtle and insidious erasure as part of development (intended and in ignorance), alongside the unintentional but often instantaneous and devastating loss from disasters. The English antiquarian William Camden wrote in his great work Britannia at the turn of the sixteenth century: To teach us that cities dye as well as men, it is at this day a cornfield, wherein the corn is grown up, one may observe the draughts of streets crossing one another. ¹

While periods of war have always seen cultural heritage placed at risk, the recent rise of ISIS has involved the deliberate targeting of heritage sites as part of a broader strategy towards local communities in Syria and Iraq. Using data collated from social media (Twitter), the authors conducted sentiment analysis of reactions to instances of heritage destruction and repurposing in the Middle East between 2015 and 2016. It is hoped that the insights gained can help the international community better tackle terrorism, protecting heritage and supporting affected communities.

This paper addresses the first three questions posed by the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights in the framework of the study of intentional destruction of cultural heritage as a violation of human rights: (1) What is the impact of the intentional destruction of cultural heritage on the enjoyment of human rights, and particularly, on cultural rights? What is the impact of destruction of tangible cultural heritage on intangible cultural heritage, on cultural practices and beliefs, and on the right of concerned persons to participate in cultural life? (2) What are examples of different situations illustrating the above? (3) What are examples of good practices, especially with regard to prevention and protection against destruction, as well as repatriation and reconstruction measures of cultural heritage, including through human and cultural rights education and awareness?

Transitional justice is considered a building block of peacebuilding in post-conflict scenarios. Processes may include criminal justice mechanisms, reparation programmes, truth-seeking bodies and institutional reforms which seek to provide redress for victims of human rights atrocities. However, it is now widely acknowledged that the destruction of cultural heritage plays a significant role in and of itself in modern conflicts, affecting entire societies, as it is linked to the destruction of group identity, and can even prolong violence in the post-conflict period. The loss of cultural heritage has been devastating in the ongoing civil war in Syria, most notably in World Heritage sites. Despite this, discussions of potential peacebuilding methods and ideas for transitional justice programmes in Syria have failed to incorporate it. This paper argues that cultural heritage should be included in such work in its own right, and suggests ways this could be accomplished to encourage greater awareness of Syria’s cultural diversity, and the understanding and healing that can bring.