Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify.

Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume’s guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today’s policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and—as this book argues—must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action.

• Foreword, Irina Bokova
• Preface and Acknowledgments, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
• Part 1. Cultural Heritage and Values,
  • Introduction: Part 1, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
  • 1. Who Are We? Identity and Cultural Heritage, Kwame Anthony Appiah
  • 2. Why Do We Value Cultural Heritage?, Neil MacGregor
  • 3. Cultural Heritage under Attack: Learning from History, Hermann Parzinger
  • 4. The Cultural Heritage of Late Antiquity, Glen W. Bowersock
  • 5. The Written Heritage of the Muslim World, Sabine Schmidtke
  • 6. Valuing the Legacy of Our Cultural Heritage, Ismail Serageldin
• Part 2. Cultural Heritage under Siege: Recent Cases
  • Introduction: Part 2, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
  • 7. Uyghur Heritage under China’s “Antireligious Extremism” Campaigns, Rachel Harris
  • 8. When Peace Is Defeat, Reconstruction Is Damage: “Rebuilding” Heritage in Post-conflict Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Kavita Singh
  • 9. Performative Destruction: Da’esh (ISIS) Ideology and the War on Heritage in Iraq, Gil J. Stein
  • 10. The Destruction of Aleppo: The Impact of the Syrian War on a World Heritage City, Francesco Bandarin
  • 11. The Lost Heritage of Homs: From the Destruction of Monuments to the Destruction of Meaning, Marwa al-Sabouni
  • 12. Reconstruction, Who Decides?, Frederick Deknatel
  • 13. Yemen’s Manuscript Culture under Attack, Sabine Schmidtke
  • 14. Cultural Heritage at Risk in Mali: The Destruction of Timbuktu’s Mausoleums of Saints, Lazare Eloundou Assomo
  • 15. Indigenous Threatened Heritage in Guatemala, Victor Montejo
• Part 3. Cultural Heritage and Populations at Risk
  • Introduction: Part 3, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
  • 16. Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities, Simon Adams
  • 17. Choosing between Human Life and Cultural Heritage in War, Hugo Slim
  • 18. Saving Stones and Saving Lives: A Humanitarian Perspective on Protecting Cultural Heritage in War, Paul H. Wise
  • 19. Engaging Nonstate Armed Groups in the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Jennifer M. Welsh
  • 20. After the Dust Settles: Transitional Justice and Identity in the Aftermath of Cultural Destruction, Philippe Sands and Ashrutha Rai
• Part 4. Cultural Heritage and International Law
  • Introduction: Part 4, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
  • 21. Protecting Cultural Heritage: The Ties between People and Places, Patty Gerstenblith
  • 22. International Humanitarian Law and the Protection of Cultural Property, Benjamin Charlier and Tural Mustafayev
  • 23. International Human Rights Law and Cultural Heritage, Marc-André Renold and Alessandro Chechi
  • 24. Customs, General Principles, and the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Property, Francesco Francioni
  • 25. Prosecuting Heritage Destruction, Joseph Powderly
  • 26. Fighting Terrorist Attacks against World Heritage and Global Cultural Heritage Governance, Sabine von Schorlemer
• Part 5. Cultural Heritage and Military Perspectives
  • Introduction: Part 5, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
  • 27. Protecting Cultural Heritage on the Battlefield: The Hard Case of Religion, Ron E. Hassner
  • 28. From Kyoto to Baghdad to Tehran: Leadership, Law, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Scott D. Sagan
  • 29. Practicing the Art of War While Protecting Cultural Heritage: A Military Perspective, Ruth Margolies Beitler and Dexter W. Dugan
  • 30. Peace Operations and the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Richard Gowan
  • 31. Protecting Cultural Property in Armed Conflict: The Necessity for Dialogue and Action Integrating the Heritage, Military, and Humanitarian Sectors, Peter G. Stone
  • 32. When Peace Breaks Out: The Peril and Promise of “Afterwar”, Hugh Eakin
• Conclusion: Toward Research, Policy, and Action Agendas, James Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss
• Suggested Readings
• Contributors
• About

James Cuno is president emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust and cochair of its Cultural Heritage at Risk Project. His recent single- and coauthored books include Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (2011), Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities (2009), and Who Owns Antiquity: Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage (2008).

Thomas G. Weiss is cochair of the Cultural Heritage at Risk Project of the J. Paul Getty Trust and Presidential Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center; he is also Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Global Eminence Scholar, Kyung Hee University, Korea. His recent single- and coauthored books include The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (2021), Rethinking Global Governance (2019), The United Nations and Changing World Politics (2019), Would the World Be Better without the UN? (2018), and Humanitarianism, War, and Politics: Solferino to Syria and Beyond (2018).

Irina Bokova is a Bulgarian politician and was director-general of UNESCO from 2009 to 2017.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He has taught philosophy in Ghana, France, Britain, and the United States. He has written the New York Times column “The Ethicist” since 2015. His most recent book is The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018).

Neil MacGregor was director of the National Gallery and British Museum in London, and a founding director of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin. He is the author of many books, including Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (2000), A History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), Shakespeare’s Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects (2012), Germany: Memories of a Nation (2016), and Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples (2018).

Hermann Parzinger was appointed director in 1990 and president in 2003 of the German Archaeological Institute, where he headed archaeological excavations in the Near East and Central Asia. Since 2008 he has been president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, one of the largest cultural institutions in the world. For his academic work he has received awards and memberships from academies in Russia, China, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany. He is the author of fifteen books and over 250 essays on research and cultural policy issues.

Glen W. Bowersock is professor emeritus of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He was professor of history and classics at Harvard University from 1962 until 1980, when he accepted a professorship in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. He retired in 1986. His many books range from Augustus and the Greek World in 1965 to The Crucible of Islam in 2017. He is a member of numerous academies, including the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Accademia dei Lincei, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and the American Philosophical Society.

Sabine Schmidtke is professor of Islamic intellectual history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her research interests include Shiʿism (Zaydism and Twelver Shiʿism), intersections of Jewish and Muslim intellectual history, the Arabic Bible, the history of Orientalism and the Science of Judaism, and the history of the book and libraries in the Islamicate world. Her recent publications include Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible: Texts and Studies (2019), with Camilla Adang; Traditional Yemeni Scholarship amidst Political Turmoil and War: Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl b. al-Muṭahhar al-Manṣūr (1915–2016) and His Personal Library (2018); and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2017), coedited with Khaled el-Rouayheb.

Ismail Serageldin is emeritus librarian of Alexandria and was the founding director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the New Library of Alexandria in Egypt (2001–17). Before that he was vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000). He has received many awards including the Order of the Rising Sun of Japan. He is a knight of the French Légion d’honneur and a Commander of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. He has lectured widely, published more than one hundred books and five hundred articles, and has received over thirty-five honorary doctorates.

Rachel Harris is professor of ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on expressive culture, religion, and the politics of heritage in China’s Muslim borderlands, and she has conducted long-term fieldwork with Uyghur communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. She led the Leverhulme Research Project “Sounding Islam in China” (2014–17) and a British Academy Sustainable Development Project to revitalize Uyghur cultural heritage in the diaspora (2018–21). Her latest books are Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam (2020) and, coedited with Guangtian Ha and Maria Jaschok, Ethnographies of Islam in China (2021).

Kavita Singh is professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she teaches courses in the history of Indian painting, particularly the Mughal and Rajput schools, and the history and politics of museums. Singh has published on secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialization of difficult histories as they relate to museums in South Asia and beyond. She has also published essays and monographs on aspects of Mughal and Rajput painting, particularly on style as a signifying system. In 2018 she was awarded the Infosys Prize for Humanities and in 2020 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gil J. Stein is professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation. His research investigates ancient colonialism, the development of early urban civilizations in Mesopotamia, and cultural heritage preservation. He has directed archaeological excavations in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Since 2012 he has led six US State Department–funded cultural heritage projects in Afghanistan and Central Asia. He is lead editor of Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Afghanistan (2017).

Francesco Bandarin is an architect and urban planner. From 2000 to 2018 he was the director of the World Heritage Centre and Assistant Director-General for Culture at UNESCO. He is currently special advisor of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), senior advisor of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a member of the Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and a founding member of the international nongovernmental organization OurWorldHeritage. His recent publications include The Historic Urban Landscape (2012), Reconnecting the City (2015), and Re-shaping Urban Conservation (2019).

Marwa al-Sabouni is an award-winning architect, author, and well-known international public speaker. She holds a PhD in architectural design and Islamic architecture and has published two books, The Battle for Home (2016) and Building for Hope (2021). She received the Prince Claus award in 2018 and was recognized as one of the BBC 100 Women in 2019.

Frederick Deknatel is the executive editor of Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). His writing and reporting have appeared in the Nation, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, the National (UAE), and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He was previously the managing editor of World Politics Review and has also been a staff editor at Foreign Affairs. Deknatel is a former Fulbright fellow in Syria, where he also worked for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Lazare Eloundou Assomo is director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and was previously director of Culture and Emergencies in the Culture Sector of UNESCO and UNESCO’s head representative in Mali. He joined UNESCO in 2003, and from 2008 to 2013 was head of the Africa Unit of the World Heritage Centre. Together with Ishanlosen Odiaua, he is coauthor of African World Heritage: A Remarkable Diversity (2012). He holds degrees in architecture and urban planning.

Victor Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya originally from Guatemala and a retired professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. His academic interests focus on Latin American diasporas, human rights, migration, transnationalism, Native knowledge, and Indigenous literatures. From 2004 to 2008, he served in the Guatemalan National Congress. He has also served as Minister of Peace, in which capacity he worked out the National Program for Reparation to the victims of the armed conflict in Guatemala. Montejo is a nationally and internationally recognized author, whose major publications include Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village (1987), Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History (1999), Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Critical Essays on Identity, Representation, and Leadership (2003), Entre dos Mundos: Una Memoria (2021), The Rabbit and the Goat: A Trickster’s Tale of Transnational Migration to the United States of America (El Norte), and Other Stories (2021), and Mayalogue: An Interactionist Theory on Indigenous Culture (2021).

Simon Adams is president and CEO of the Center for Victims of Torture, the world’s largest organization for the treatment of torture survivors. CVT also publicly advocates for an end to torture around the world. From 2011 to 2021 Adams served as executive director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, an organization that provides policy advice and carries out advocacy with the UN Security Council and Human Rights Council regarding the prevention of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. Adams is the author of five books on international conflict, and regularly appears in the media on matters related to human rights.

Hugo Slim is a senior research fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford and at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He is also a visiting professor at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. He was previously head of policy and humanitarian diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. His most recent books are Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty-First Century (2022) and Humanitarian Ethics: The Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (2015).

Paul H. Wise, MD, MPH, is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society and professor of pediatrics and health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also senior fellow in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and in the Center for International Security and Cooperation, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on protecting health in violent and politically complex environments.

Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously chair in international relations at the European University Institute and professor in international relations at the University of Oxford, where she cofounded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013 to 2016 she served as the special adviser on the Responsibility to Protect to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. She has published several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the “responsibility to protect” in international society, the UN Security Council, norm conflict and contestation, and Canadian foreign policy.

Philippe Sands is professor of law and director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, and the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a practicing barrister at Matrix Chambers with extensive experience litigating cases before international courts and tribunals including the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Criminal Court, and the European Court of Justice.

Ashrutha Rai is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, where her research focuses on the protection of intangible cultural heritage in armed conflict and forced displacement. She was previously an associate legal officer and judicial fellow at the International Court of Justice.

Patty Gerstenblith is distinguished research professor of law at DePaul University and faculty director of its Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law. In 2011, President Obama appointed her to serve as chair of the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the US Department of State, on which she had previously served as a public representative during the Clinton administration. She is currently the president of the board of directors of the US Committee of the Blue Shield and chairs the Working Group on Illegal Trafficking of Cultural Objects of Blue Shield International. She publishes and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on the international trade in art and antiquities and the protection of cultural heritage during armed conflict. The fourth edition of her casebook, Art, Cultural Heritage, and the Law, was published in 2019.

Benjamin Charlier is a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross. From 2016 to 2021, he was the ICRC coordinator for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict. During that time, he acted as a legal expert on cultural property protection and coordinated the ICRC’s operational, capacity-building, and diplomatic initiatives in that field. Prior to that, he worked at the Office of the Belgian Federal Prosecutor in Brussels and carried out field missions for the ICRC in Myanmar, Darfur, Kosovo, and Rwanda.

Tural Mustafayev is associate programme specialist at the Cultural Heritage Protection Treaties Unit at UNESCO. He specializes in cultural property protection legislation in the context of armed conflict and advises on the execution of UNESCO’s program related to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two protocols. Previously he was the director of research and the Education Department of the NATO International School of Azerbaijan and worked at the Department of International Law and Treaties of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Marc-André Renold is professor at the University of Geneva Law School, where he teaches art and cultural heritage law and, since 2012, has held the UNESCO Chair in International Law for the Protection of Cultural Property. In this capacity he established the ArThemis database on the resolution of disputes relating to cultural heritage. He serves as the director of the Art–Law Centre, which is dedicated to research and teaching on legal issues relating to works of art and cultural property. Renold is also a practicing attorney and member of the Geneva Bar, where he practices in the fields of art and cultural heritage law, international civil and commercial law, and intellectual property law.

Alessandro Chechi is a lecturer at the University of Geneva, at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, and at the Université Catholique de Lille. He serves as a member of the editorial boards of the Italian Yearbook of International Law and the Santander Art and Culture Law Review. He was consultant for the European Committee on Crime Problems (CDPC) of the Council of Europe for the revision of the Convention on Offences Relating to Cultural Property. He is the author of The Settlement of International Cultural Heritage Disputes (2014).

Francesco Francioni is professor emeritus of international law, European University Institute, and professor of international cultural heritage law, LUISS University, Rome. A member of the Institut de Droit International and of the American Law Institute, he was chair of international law at the University of Siena from 1980 to 2003 and a visiting professor in the law faculties of Cornell University, the University of Texas, the University of Oxford, Columbia University, and Panthéon-Assas University (Paris 2). He is the author and editor of a large number of books and articles on cultural heritage and international law, including The Oxford Commentary to the 1972 World Heritage Convention (2008), with Federico Lenzerini, and The Oxford Handbook of International Cultural Heritage Law (2020), with Ana Filipa Vrdoljak. He participated in the negotiation and drafting of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, the 1999 Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention, the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and the 2003 UNESCO Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage. In 1997–98, he was President of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Joseph Powderly is associate professor of public international law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. His research focuses broadly on issues relevant to international criminal law, international human rights law, and cultural heritage law. He published Judges and the Making of International Criminal Law in 2020.

Sabine von Schorlemer holds the chair of international law, European Union law and international relations, and the UNESCO Chair in International Relations, both at Technische Universität Dresden. From September 2009 to November 2014, she served as the Saxon state minister for Higher Education, Research and the Fine Arts. She is an elected member of the German Commission for UNESCO, the German Foundation for Peace Research, and of the International Law Association Committee on Participation in Global Cultural Heritage Governance, among others. Von Schorlemer has published several books and more than one hundred articles on the United Nations, many related to cultural heritage.

Ron E. Hassner is the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at Berkeley. He studies the role of ideas, practices, and symbols in international security with particular attention to the relationship between religion and violence. His books include War on Sacred Grounds (2009), Religion in the Military Worldwide (2014), and Religion on the Battlefield (2016). He is the editor of the Cornell University Press book series “Religion and Conflict.”

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science and senior fellow and codirector at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Sagan is the author of The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (1993) and, with Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (2012). Sagan previously was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the US Department of Defense.

Ruth Margolies Beitler is professor of comparative politics at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She is the director of the Conflict and Human Security Studies Program and author or coauthor of four books and numerous book chapters and journal articles.

Dexter W. Dugan is an active-duty major in the US Army and teaches at the United States Military Academy at West Point as an assistant professor in international affairs. His military experience includes battalion and brigade staff officer positions in the Republic of Korea and Kuwait. With an academic focus in international security, he was a contributing author for the 2019 Columbia University report to the United Kingdom Home Office on prevention and deterrence strategies for transnational organized crime.

Richard Gowan is UN Director at the International Crisis Group. He has worked with the European Council on Foreign Relations, the New York University Center on International Cooperation, and the Foreign Policy Centre (London). He has taught at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has also worked as a consultant for organizations, including the UN Department of Political Affairs, the UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on International Migration, and the British, Canadian, and Finnish foreign ministries.

Peter G. Stone is the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Protection (CPP) and Peace at Newcastle University, the United Kingdom, and president of the nongovernmental organization the Blue Shield, an advisory body to UNESCO on CPP in the event of armed conflict. He has worked in CPP since 2003 and has written extensively on this topic, including editing with Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq (2008) and editing Cultural Heritage, Ethics and the Military (2011). His article “The 4 Tier Approach” in The British Army Review led directly to the establishment of the Cultural Property Protection Unit in the British armed forces.

Hugh Eakin is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs. He has written on cultural heritage and international politics for the New York Review of Books, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, and other publications. His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Fritt Ord Foundation. His book Picasso’s War will be published in 2022.