Many observers view culture as a shared endeavor across peoples, time, and place—as evidence of our common humanity. Yet, the 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.
Using Getty’s digital publishing platform Quire, Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities (Getty Publications) assembles essays by 38 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.
Visit the free online edition of this publication. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
Volume Editors:
James Cuno is president emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and director emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Additional Contributors:
Simon Adams is president and CEO of the Center for Victims of Torture, the world’s largest organization for the treatment of torture survivors.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University.
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.
Francesco Bandarin is an architect and urban planner.
Ruth Margolies Beitler is professor of comparative politics at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Irina Bokova is a Bulgarian politician and was director-general of UNESCO from 2009 to 2017.
Glen W. Bowersock is professor emeritus of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Benjamin Charlier is a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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.
Frederick Deknatel is the executive editor of Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
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.
Hugh Eakin is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.
Francesco Francioni is professor emeritus of international law, European University Institute, and professor of international cultural heritage law, LUISS University, Rome.
Patty Gerstenblith is distinguished research professor of law at DePaul University and faculty director of its Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law.
Richard Gowan is UN Director at the International Crisis Group.
Rachel Harris is professor of ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London.
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 and is also the faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at Berkeley.
Neil MacGregor was director of the National Gallery and British Museum in London, and a founding director of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin.
Victor Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya originally from Guatemala and a retired professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Tural Mustafayev is associate programme specialist at the Cultural Heritage Protection Treaties Unit at UNESCO.
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.
Joseph Powderly is associate professor of public international law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University.
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.
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.
Marwa al-Sabouni is an award-winning architect, author, and well-known international public speaker.
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.
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.
Sabine Schmidtke is professor of Islamic intellectual history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
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).
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.
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.
Gil J. Stein is professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation.
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.
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.
Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University.
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.
