Cultural Heritage In Modern Conflict

This edited volume offers an in-depth study of heritage and warfare from the perspective of defence studies. The book focuses on how, in different contexts, heritage can be a catalyst and target of conflict, an obstacle to stabilisation, and a driver of peace-building. It documents the changing role of heritage – in terms of both exploitation and protection – in various military capabilities, theatres, and operations. With particular concern for the areas of subthreshold and hybrid warfare, stabilisation, cultural relationships, human security, and disaster response, the volume reviews the historical relationship between heritage and armed conflict, including the roles of embedded archaeologists, safeguarding of ethics, and dislodgement and destruction of material culture. Various chapters in the book also demonstrate the value of understanding how state and non-state actors exploit cultural heritage across different defence postures and within both subthreshold and proxy warfare in order to achieve military, political, economic, and diplomatic advantages. This book will be of interest to students of defence studies, heritage studies, anthropology and security studies in general, as well as military practitioners.

Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco documents and interprets the physical remains and afterlives of the Chaco War (1932–35) – known as South America’s first ‘modern’ armed conflict – in what is now present-day Paraguay. It focuses not only on archaeological remains as conventionally understood, but takes an ontological approach to heterogeneous assemblages of objects, texts, practices and landscapes shaped by industrial war and people’s past and present engagements with them. These assemblages could be understood to constitute a ‘dark heritage’, the debris of a failed modernity. Yet it is clear that they are not simply dead memorials to this bloody war, but have been, and continue to be active in making, unmaking and remaking worlds – both for the participants and spectators of the war itself, as well as those who continue to occupy and live amongst the vast accretions of war matériel which persist in the present.

This book explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict through the use of new empirical evidence and critical theory and by focusing on postconflict scenarios. It includes in-depth case studies and analytic reflections on the common threads and wider implications of the agency of cultural heritage in postconflict scenarios.

"Since the publication of the first edition of War and Cultural Heritage in 2004 there have been a number of important developments. The Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict has entered into force and there are now 64 States Parties. The Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict provided for under the Second Protocol has been set up and has adopted the Guidelines for the Implementation of the Second Protocol. Disbursements have been made from the Fund for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. In 2008 the United Kingdom published for public consultation the draft Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill, the legislation to enable the United Kingdom to become a Party to the 1954 Convention and its two Protocols and in 2009 the United States ratified the 1954 Hague Convention (but neither of its two Protocols). The time to publish a second edition of War and Cultural Heritage to take account of these and other developments is long overdue. The civil war in Syria has resulted in extensive destruction of that nation's cultural heritage. More recently in the conflict of Mali Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, described by the town's mayor as a 'devastating blow' to world heritage. These incidents demonstrate the need for all parties engaged in armed conflict to have regard to the rules of international law concerning the protection of cultural property. War and Cultural Heritage contains in a single volume an article-by-article commentary on the 1954 Hague Convention and its Two Protocols. The book also analyses other instruments of international humanitarian law relevant to the protection of cultural property. These include the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols, which had a profound influence on the drafting of the 1954 Convention and the Second Protocol respectively. The book also examines the extent to which the provisions of the 1954 Convention and its Protocols are part of customary international humanitarian law. The book takes into account the latest developments regarding the international efforts to secure restitution of Holocaust-looted cultural property, including the work of the UK's Spoliation Advisory Panel"--Page 4 of cover

The world's cultural heritage is currently not only threatened by time, nature, and human development and also increasingly by armed conflicts. We see destructions caused by looting and illicit traffic but also iconoclasm and manipulations of cultural heritage for political, religious, economic, and propaganda reasons. Revenues derived from the illegal selling are often used to finance conflicts as illustrated in the Da'esh business model example in this publication. Cultural Property Protection (CPP), while legally mandatory under national and international law, are poorly implemented and sanctions are rarely enforced. There is however, a constant and international demand for education and outcomes of multidisciplinary research on the topic, especially in the context of conflict and crime. Research must include military perspectives, and common mechanisms connected to abuse and protection. Outcomes should contain academic conceptualization, as well as practice based solutions to diminish and mitigate damage. To meet demands while expanding, and following up on their previous work Military Involvement in Cultural Property Protection: An Overview (Joint Force Quarterly, JFQ 74, 3rd Quarter 2014 July 2014) the authors wrote this publication. It contains a selection of field case examples and incorporates recent developments and trends. All ingredients serve to feed research and dialogue about the use and abuse of cultural heritage especially in the event of conflict, with a focus on cooperation and coordination between civil stakeholders and military parties. A selection of identified fundamental CPP problems is discussed as part of a comparative analysis with field examples such as the Dugong case, an illustration of overlap between cultural and natural heritage coined as hybrid heritage. Other cases include events in Libya, Estonia, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Mali. All are weighed against Horst Rittel's wicked problems theory and other concepts while involving new notions of securitization, politicization, memorialization and propagandization of cultural property. Last but not least, the authors signal within circles of IO's, NGO's and Governmental parties involved in the management and protection of heritage, an increase of bureaucratic behavior and political use of mankind's cultural heritage contributing to the current deplorable situation.

The protection of cultural property during times of armed conflict and social unrest has been an on-going challenge for military forces throughout the world even after the ratification and implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention and its two Protocols by participating nations. This volume provides a series of case studies and “lessons learned” to assess the current status of Cultural Property Protection (CPP) and the military, and use that information to rethink the way forward. The contributors are all recognized experts in the field of military CPP or cultural heritage and conflict, and all are actively engaged in developing national and international solutions for the protection and conservation of these non-renewable resources and the intangible cultural values that they represent.

Modern Conflict and the Senses investigates the sensual worlds created by modern war, focusing on the sensorial responses embodied in and provoked by the materiality of conflict and its aftermath. The volume positions the industrialized nature of twentieth-century war as a unique cultural phenomenon, in possession of a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of human behaviour, from total economic mobilization to the unbearable sadness of individual loss. Adopting a coherent and integrated hybrid approach to the complexities of modern conflict, the book considers issues of memory, identity, and emotion through wartime experiences of tangible sensations and bodily requirements. This comprehensive and interdisciplinary collection draws upon archaeology, anthropology, military and cultural history, art history, cultural geography, and museum and heritage studies in order to revitalize our understandings of the role of the senses in conflict.

The Heritage of War is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which heritage is mobilized in remembering war, and in reconstructing landscapes, political systems and identities after conflict. It examines the deeply contested nature of war heritage in a series of places and contexts, highlighting the modes by which governments, communities, and individuals claim validity for their own experiences of war, and the meanings they attach to them. From colonizing violence in South America to the United States’ Civil War, the Second World War on three continents, genocide in Rwanda and continuing divisions in Europe and the Middle East, these studies bring us closer to the very processes of heritage production. The Heritage of War uncovers the histories of heritage: it charts the constant social and political construction of heritage sites over time, by a series of different agents, and explores the continuous reworking of meaning into the present. What are the forces of contingency, agency and political power that produce, define and sustain the heritage of war? How do particular versions of the past and particular identities gain legitimacy, while others are marginalised? In this book contributors explore the active work by which heritage is produced and reproduced in a series of case studies of memorialization, battlefield preservation, tourism development, private remembering and urban reconstruction. These are the acts of making sense of war; they are acts that continue long after violent conflict itself has ended.