5Social and Cultural Costs

My presentation considers the economic assessment of the value of cultural heritage. Generally speaking, we have two approaches. If something is considered a must-do no matter what, then we are looking at cost-effectiveness—different techniques for achieving the same result, the most cost-effective way. I mean, if you are fixing the Sphinx or you are fixing Abu Simbel, it fits in this category. All other cases really tend to be not a matter of cost-effectiveness but cost-benefits. And if you are doing cost-benefits, you need to estimate the costs, direct and indirect, and the benefits, tangible and intangible. And then you have to have a discount rate, because money in the future is not worth the same as it is right now. Generally stated, you have to discount the money in the future. And the formula for net present value is simply the discounted benefit stream minus the discounted cost stream. And that is the net present value for a project that is worth doing or not worth doing. We sometimes do a benefit-cost ratio, divide one by the other. Or because we are so dependent on the discount rate, some people say, “No, we want to solve for the discount rate,” and find out what we call the internal rate of return and compare that to, for example, what you would get from treasury bills or some other opportunity cost of capital.

So these are the rules generally followed. Estimating cost-benefits is fairly straightforward. But the benefits become tricky because they include tourism revenues but cannot be limited to tourism revenues, because if you do that, then you miss the intrinsic value of heritage. And it leads you immediately to three wrong conclusions. The first is that if foreigners are not interested in paying, it is not worth saving and protecting. That is the logic of the argument. So if you want to keep something or some different types of landscapes pristine but they are not seen, they have no value in the benefit-cost calculation if tourism is the only benefit stream.

The second mistake is to try to maximize the tourist revenues, which denatures what you value. So you go to the American wilderness, and then you find Sidi Bou Said with too many tourists and the Great Wall of China, where you are looking at the back of the person in front of you. I mean, surely this is not what we want. Then there is Barcelona. Pushing the logic of tourism as being the only real value for cultural heritage leads to all these aberrations that we cannot live with. And then worst of all, if building a new facility like a casino gets more tourist revenues than protecting, let’s say, Fes in Morocco, then you should build the casino. That is what the logic of using this type of calculation says. Forget about trying to maintain beautiful things like that.

Now, it is essential, therefore, to recognize the intrinsic value of cultural heritage and not just limit it, as they do. That was how I found it at the World Bank when I fought my battles on these issues back in the 1990s. So how do we calculate the economic value of cultural assets? We need a conceptual framework. And here it is. There is a total economic value, and there are use values and non–use values. And there are direct use values and indirect use values; and among the non–use values, there are existence values and others, bequest values, for example. And in between the two, there is a third category, which economists are very good at, which is option values. It is to say, what do I need to invest now in order to maintain my options for the future? So we do this. These are very straightforward. But the ones that are a little less straightforward, these are the ones that cause the most arguments. Direct benefit includes things like, for example, in historic cities, built space, circulation space, tourism, economic activity. Indirect benefit includes community image, environmental quality, social interaction, aesthetics, and, of course, options to maintain your options for the future. And then there is existence value: identity, uniqueness, significance of the event or the piece of heritage or artifact itself. And the bequest value is something that we would like to give to future generations. For example, we do not want to see the whales or the pandas go extinct, because we think future generations should have them, not because they are of economic use to us. We donate money for that.

On tangible and intangible cultural heritage, beyond individual buildings, there is protecting something like the urban character. In many of the historic cities, you really are not protecting individual buildings. You look at the layout of the historic buildings and look at the buildings that are in the infill. Bukhara is an example. You can see immediately that you cannot just destroy that overall character, even though every individual part of it is not particularly worth protecting. The urban character, the whole, is more than the sum of the parts. And here we have to think in terms of how to value that entirety through scale, volumetric patterns, street alignment, mix of land use, different ages of buildings, street activity. So then there is existence value. The easiest argument to make is to see how people are actually willing to donate funds, governments as well as people, for the protection of endangered species. Why? Not because of their commercial value, but because of their existence value. And the economics of reuse, of reusing buildings, are going to be important.

So how do we deal with intangible benefits? These were primarily developed for environmental benefits, but they are very easy to adapt to cultural heritage benefits. We have traded and nontraded goods and services. Traded goods are easy: it is how much goods and services. How much would you be willing to pay to listen to music, see a play, get a massage, go to a movie, whatever? It is traded. You pay for it, so there is a clearance mechanism. And its valuation is equal to the amount you are willing to pay.

But nontraded goods are more difficult. We are trying to measure the value, for example, of enjoying the view of a mountain. There are two general approaches. We have revealed preference through price-based models, for example two houses that are pretty similar to each other, except that one has a beautiful view and the other one does not. How much is the difference in price for the two? Or one is next to a dump and one isn’t. How much is the difference between the two? That is called a revealed preference based on price. Then we have stated preference. This is, of course, where most of it becomes quite complicated. In price-based preference, we use travel cost, hedonic pricing. I will not go into detail about how to do it, but trust me, we do it. And contingent valuation is the important model because it has been supported at the highest levels of the courts.

Now, economists generally prefer revealed preference, as it involves real money that people are actually paying, as opposed to simply asking someone, “How much is it worth to you to have this beautiful view?” Of course they say, “Oh, a million dollars.” “Well, would you be willing to pay Y?” “I haven’t got a million dollars.” So you want to get something much more precise, and it is a different way of doing it. So let’s look at these examples. There is the travel-cost method: simply, how far do people travel to go to this historic site? That is a way of saying, then, I can imagine the valuation of that site because people go all the way there. And demand varies with the cost incurred. If you start charging for tickets, will the number of people diminish? Where do they come from? Where do they go? All these calculations are considered. We can actually construct a demand curve like that. In this case, we do not have a producer surplus but a consumer surplus, which is the sum under this curve. And we can calculate that as being the worthwhile investment that should be made to improve the condition of this cultural heritage site, this particular site, based on a regression of the number of people who actually visit the site. So, in several zones, if the costs are greater than this, the staff would have to do something else.

Contingent valuation really is a survey-based technique for the valuation of nonmarket resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of contamination or the preservation of cultural heritage. Existence values cannot be assessed through market pricing, so contingent valuation surveys were suggested to assess them. The value of cultural heritage is not physically used, such as a restaurant or a hotel or whatever; it is a value, an intrinsic, intangible value of its own.

So we can see that these methods exist. We have succeeded, in the case of the environment, in generating the Global Environment Facility. I was telling Irina [Bokova] that my dream was to establish as well a global cultural facility. But we did that. So the problem is that something else comes up when you have to make choices. And the choices are not always that easy to make, and they are not just mathematical. Why? Well, here is an example, a very beautiful story, because we need social choice to give purpose to social action nationally and internationally. So, let me describe a small parable, the story of the flute and the children.

It comes from my friend Amartya Sen. You see three children, and they have a flute in front of them. The first kid, the one on the left, says, “I’m very poor. I don’t have any toys. This is the only thing I will have. The other two kids are very rich. They have tons of toys. Why should they get it? So I should get it.” Well, the information is not contested, and you think it is a fair statement, so you give it to him. Rewind. Same three kids, same flute. The one in the middle says, “Wait a minute. I’m a musician. I play the flute. These two guys just blow on it like a whistle. They love listening to me play the flute; I love playing the flute. So give me the flute, and I will play, and they will listen and everybody will be happy.” Not contested again; facts. It makes sense. But let’s take the third scenario. Same three kids, same flute. The third kid says, “He is poor, she is talented, but I made the flute. I cut the reed and then put holes in it. I made the flute, so how could you give it to anybody else?” Now, what you have here, in more technical parlance, is a preference for equity or utility or entitlement. What happens is that most of the time, choices, whether about cultural heritage or about other investments, involve all of these. And they usually are in conflict, which people do not like to think. “Well, you know, everybody wants to be fair, so it’ll be X.” No. Fairness does not fall so cleanly. We frequently will have to consciously say that we will value one over the others, at least for a period of time. For example, when we say we want to have a quota for minority groups or for women in particular programs, and so on, we will revisit it in five years or ten years. But for the time being, yes, we recognize that it is not, in terms of equality or justice, the best; but this is needed now. So if we do this, then I think we have other criteria we can discuss in social choice. But fundamentally, designing appropriate actions, I think, requires agreement on the criteria of social choice and what should be favored at a particular point in time and for a certain period. Unfortunately, arguments tend to be very unstructured, not at all like Helen [Frowe]’s presentation, where it is very clear argumentation.

So I conclude with the following: We need to evaluate possibilities using the best techniques and giving new weight to intangible aspects, and we need to mobilize clear-eyed approaches to social choice for making decisions.

We are going to move from the telescope to the microscope; the very broad view is not something I can offer. I am going to be talking about very small-scale observations. I tried to engage with the theme of our workshop, but as an academic art historian who spends all her time in an armchair, my position was a little different; my experience was a little different. It has been a fantastic experience for me to be in the same room as people from these amazingly diverse disciplines. But I felt all I can do is think about what it would mean to get people to engage with active conflict situations and try to save heritage over there but to try and look at remedial action that has been taken after conflict. And I could only come up with three observations that I thought I would share with you, which are grounded in three very quick case studies.

Not far from where I live in Delhi, there is the historic neighborhood of Nizamuddin, which Luis [Monreal] knows so well. This neighborhood used to be next to a river, before the river changed its course. And this must have made it a very good place to catch cooling breezes. And therefore, you have a structure like this, with airy pavilions, which seems to be designed just to catch the evening breeze. This structure was built in AD 1240. And I have made it the oldest Islamic palace building—not a mosque, but a palace—that survived into the twentieth century. But it did not survive into the twenty-first. In 2008, it was razed to the ground. And apparently, because it was on private property, the state was powerless to prevent the destruction of this building when the owner decided that he would rather build an apartment block in its place. So something irreplaceable was lost in Nizamuddin ten years ago. But this loss was something that was felt by just a few people. The destruction of the Isla Mahal disturbed some conservationists in Delhi. It occasioned a few articles in the city pages of some Delhi newspapers. But the owner took the building down. The government wrung its hands, and the journalists moved on to other stories.

This loss was rather different from the other acts of monumental losses that we have been focusing on in the past few days, like the Bamiyan Buddhas, the structures at Palmyra, the shrines of Timbuktu, which all caused an international outcry. So I began to wonder, why do some things capture our attention and others not? The fact is that we are losing a tremendous amount of heritage material every day. And dare I say that it is not what is lost. It is not really the intrinsic value of the monument or the site that actually raises our temperatures around the loss, but rather it is why it is lost, in what way it is lost. Because the losses that are caused by the banalities of economic development can be tremendous, but they do not cause the same sort of indignation in all of us. We do not feel wounded in the same way. So this makes me feel that what is crucial is not what we lose but how we lose it. And from Bamiyan to Timbuktu to Mosul and Palmyra, I feel that we have all been executing moves that are kind of a slow dance. And like every dance, it grips both partners in a series of predictable moves. Those who set out to destroy these monuments are enacting for us our specters of Islamophobia. And then we become a collectivity that forms in and through our opposition to them, and we make the reciprocal move. We unite to denounce these senseless acts of deliberate and gratuitous damage. We assert the value of the objects and the sites that are destroyed. We reiterate the deep and profound significance to all of humanity. And isn’t it kind of ironic that so many of us feel the loss of these obscure sites and become keenly aware of them only in the moment of, only because of, their destruction? And it is only by experiencing the spectacle of loss that we actually become united in claiming them as part of our heritage.

I want to ask now, what happens in the aftermath, when it is time to turn our attention to these places after peace returns to them? Because the site is no longer the site that it was before. And this is not just because something was destroyed over there but also because it has been transformed, retrospectively and prospectively, by the broadening circle of those who have become concerned about it and have come to have a stake in it. And when the world community becomes seized about the value of a damaged heritage site, then it is the world that turns attention to it, offers its expertise and its funds and its advice. And it will do this through international organizations, which will bring their professional standards, their established methods or best practice. When this happens, then the site turns into another kind of site. It becomes placed within a different paradigm, and different kinds of protocols start to apply for it.

How does the arrival of a world heritage paradigm start affecting the local culture that had subsisted, that had attached local meanings to the monuments that were part of their environment? There is no better place to understand this than Bamiyan, I think, whose culture, landscape, and archaeological remains were given the status of a World Heritage Site and a World Heritage Site in danger, both in 2003, after the destruction. Most analyses that have been written about what motivated the Taliban to target these sculptures in 2001 speak of it as a deliberate provocation that was aimed at the international community. There are fewer sources that actually discuss the meaning that the destruction of these sculptures would have had for the inhabitants of the Bamiyan Valley. The Bamiyan Valley is home to a community of Hazaras, who are a Shi’a minority. They are religiously, ethnically, and linguistically distinct from the Afghan majority, which is Sunni and Pashtun. It is this minority of Hazaras who have suffered a very long history of persecution in Afghanistan. And predictably, under the Taliban, this persecution was particularly fierce. The destruction of the Buddhas took place in March 2001. It actually followed on the heels of several massacres, in particular one that wiped out a couple of entire Hazara villages in January 2001.

In Hazara folklore, the figures that were destroyed were not two sixth-century Buddhas. Centuries ago, actually, the Hazaras had already incorporated these Buddha figures into a local epic, which was about two doomed lovers. There was Salzal, a hero, who had been commanded to slay a dragon to win the hand of Princess Shamama. And although Salzal managed to kill the dragon, in the combat he got pierced by one of the spines of the dragon, the poison entered his body, and he died on the eve of the wedding. When the bride saw his body, she also died. Both the dead lovers turned to stone, so the two sculptures are their petrified bodies. The larger one is the hero Salzal, and the smaller one is the princess Shamama. The story of Salzal and Shamama, the Bamiyan colossi as the physical remains, is central to Hazara identity. You can see this in the number of times that the Hazaras in Bamiyan and in the Hazara diaspora actually evoke the names of Salzal and Shamama in the organizations that they have set up. There are various Facebook groups and other such organizations. There are lots of art projects as well that I could talk about.

Now, in the years since, some kind of peace has returned to the Bamiyan Valley. And since 2005 Bamiyan’s governor has actually been a woman, which is another indication of how different Bamiyan is from the other provinces of Afghanistan. As a visible symbol of the new era that they should be in now, the Hazaras of the valley have longed to see the statues of Salzal and Shamama rebuilt. They want to see it as a kind of undoing of the erasure, of the Taliban’s erasure, of their heritage. They want to affirm their right to repopulate the landscape with symbols of their culture. But Bamiyan is a World Heritage Site now, and work on the site has to be governed by certain standards and protocols. And although the shattered fragments have been gathered, and they have been kept in shelter, experts are of the view that a new construction would not be possible. It would be a kind of “Disneyfication” of the site. Clumsy rebuilding would actually lead to a withdrawal of the World Heritage status. And so here the desires of the local community have actually run up against a wall of professional standards. So when you had a sympathetic German restorer tasked with consolidating the base of one of these sculptures, starting to build these two cylinders that began to look suspiciously like legs, the central Afghanistan government immediately sent a team to halt the work and take it down. Although the government from Kabul said that it is only trying to protect Bamiyan’s World Heritage status, which will be helpful for the local economy in the long run, the Hazaras of Bamiyan are not convinced. They point out that the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia that was completely destroyed was rebuilt; it was given World Heritage status. And so in the view from Bamiyan, it seems as though there is not quite a level playing field in the world. The authorities in Paris and in Kabul are using the “World Heritage” label to take something away from the Hazaras, not to give it back to them. So the question that the Hazaras may well be asking is this: If it belongs to the world, does it still belong to me?

I think we need to look into the complications that happen on the ground, what happens when a wider circle of different kinds of people come to have a stake in the same site of the monument and bring their different regimes of value to the place, their different sense of what ought to be done and how. That is the third and final issue that I want to raise today. It is a kind of caution about how to think about the meaning of peace in a postconflict society. And it is a question I could have raised from the grounds of Bamiyan. But let me ask it even more directly, through the example of a place that has been very much on our minds over the past few weeks. Since Easter Sunday, many of us have been thinking about Sri Lanka. And we have been thinking about it with grief about what happened and with a sense of foreboding about what is yet to come. Along with the churches, we know that the bombs went off in a number of luxury hotels. The Shangri-La Hotel was a relatively recent addition to the tourism landscape of the capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo. It was inaugurated only in 2017. But when the ground was being dug and cleared to build this hotel, human bones were discovered. Is this something that could be related to the fact that this was the very site that had been the army headquarters during the bitter civil war that had convulsed Sri Lanka for thirty years? There is a history that is buried here.

The history is being buried even more energetically in the far north of Sri Lanka, where the Hindu Tamil majority regions were the ones that had bitterly and very bloodily tried to separate from the Buddhist Sinhala south. The civil war between Tamils in the north and Sinhalas in the south ended with a most emphatic victory for the Sinhala side, and the peace is very aggressively celebrated with triumphalist statues, which even celebrate the army’s role in bringing peace, being built near sites where forty thousand Tamil civilians were killed by army forces in the last push of the campaign. In the north now, trenches and bunkers and remains of villages and the burned hulks of cars are part of a war tourism circuit, whose audience becomes obvious when you see that all the labels are just in Sinhala and English, not in Tamil. And so southerners are now coming up to travel a circuit of Tamil humiliations. Meanwhile, Buddhist sculptures are being built upon the temples where the Tamils used to worship.

So, then I have to ask, what does peace look like when a conflict ends with a winner on one side and a loser on the other? Those on the losing side are always reminded that they are lucky to have survived so far. If they want to carry on, it has to be on someone else’s terms. And in situations like these, the national government will be in the hands of the winning side. When an international community, with the best intentions, offers help for reconstruction, will it be able to see the granularity on the ground? And will it be able to do anything about this granularity, given that they need the permissions and the cooperation of the national government? So we have to be alert to questions of who in this era of peace and reconstruction is allowed to be visible, whose presence is kept hidden and suppressed, what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is allowed to occupy space, what has to be buried, what has to be swept away, whose heritage is reconstructed or constructed in the name of reconstruction, for whom, and on what terms. And being aware of all this, I think we have to ask, what can we do about the fact that in a postconflict period what looks like peace to one group looks very much like subjugation to another?

I am a philosopher. We might disagree with the economists about whether we are measuring value with economic measures or whether we are probably reconstructing value. And basically, the kind of thing that Ismail [Serageldin] has talked about is the kind of thing that philosophers discuss, the kind of thing that we think we are very good at. So we have a lot to contribute for each of those projects.

Just some preliminaries. I have been talking to various people, soldiers included, over the past eighteen months. And it is possible, I think, that there are at least two sorts of cases. This has come up repeatedly in the past day or two. The first is cultural property protections as a force multiplier, which is a phrase in my mind. And this is one of the UNESCO handbooks on cultural property protection, called Cultural Property Protection as a Force Multiplier. When you talk to soldiers, this is often just what they mean. To the extent that not damaging X is an efficient way for you to achieve minimal loss of life, you should not damage X. That is just a standard bit of military thinking. And then X could be the water supply, the railway system, and so on; it could also be cultural property. So inasmuch as damaging cultural property is going to damage your mission or is going to lead to loss of life in the long run, you should not damage cultural property. But the same can be said for pretty much anything else. There is nothing specific about cultural property. One of the most interesting things, for me at least, that has come up in the past day or two is how enormously complicated that calculation is going to have to be, with indirect effects, and so on. But it is basically an empirical matter.

This is just to talk about the instrumental value of not destroying cultural property. The second set of cases are those that draw on the value of cultural property, in particular. So it is not just something that for instrumental reasons you should not damage. The 1954 Convention asks warring parties to avoid damaging items of cultural property; this has been made into an objective, and there is no feasible alternative available to obtain military advantage to that offered by a direct act of hostility against that object. So the upshot is that, faced with a certain situation on the battlefield, a commander needs to decide between alternatives. The first will lead to the destruction of some cultural property, and the second will not. Now, unless he or she is very fortunate, adopting the second alternative will not be cost-free. Why would it be? And such a cost will sometimes or often be borne by costs to human welfare. So there is increased risk to combatants or increased risk to civilians. In this kind of case, when we are talking about stuff that is not simply a force multiplier, it does seem inevitable that there are going to be choices that you need to make between damaging cultural property or imposing costs on human welfare.

Then in the many meetings we have had over the past eighteen months, and talking to many heritage professionals, this claim often comes up. Cultural heritage is important to people in a particular culture. This is clearly right, and this is the truth in the inseparability thesis, or it is part of the truth in the inseparability thesis, so I am just going to call this the general claim. The problem is that the general claim provides no guidance about what to do in particular cases. We can say the general claim is true, but it is actually not useful. Why doesn’t it provide any guidance in particular cases? Well, it is simply a matter of a kind of logic, if you like. So take the dieter. It is true that in general eating is good for human welfare. There is a connection between eating and general human welfare. That gives you no guidance at all about what and whether you should eat in a particular case. A better example is the philanderer. There is a general value connection between sex and human welfare, we can certainly say. If that gave you a justification for sex in a particular case, then being a philanderer would be a lot easier than in fact it is, a lot more justifiable. There is no route from the truth of the general case to the truth of a particular case. But the problem is, the general case does not give you any guidance about what to do.

So what we need is a claim like this. In particular cases, the value of an item of heritage should have weight sufficient to stack up against other goods. This is the kind of thing that Ismail was talking about. We need some account of the intrinsic value, in such a way that in the particular case we can say, “Okay, here’s the cost, and the benefit is preserving the cultural property. And that’s a good thing, because the cultural property has this value.” However, as I said, you cannot get from the general claim to the particular claim. But I think there is another danger, which is that if we cannot substantiate the particular claim, we are in danger of undermining the general claim. Because if in each particular case you cannot justify preserving the cultural value, then the general claim dies a death by a thousand cuts. Because if in each particular case the cultural property goes down, then in the end the general link between value and cultural property is going to be eroded. So this is very brief. I’m going to just sketch three possible solutions to this, three possible ways out.

The first is to talk to people like Ismail and what he means by intrinsic value of the cultural property. It is an age-old debate between philosophers and economists as to whether there is such a value, which is not simply exchange value. So can we establish a notion of heritage value, the value of the stuff, sufficient to stack up against moral values? Because if cultural property does have a value, then maybe that stacks up against damage to human welfare and we are quite right to prioritize it. There are such accounts. Carolyn Korsmeyer has published a book called Things: In Touch with the Past [2018], which I think is the most sophisticated defense of the value of cultural property in philosophy so far. She does not attribute to cultural property the kind of value that is going to stack up against things like risk to human life. Then there is my favorite philosopher, Richard Wollheim, who is quite happy to let people just go down the tubes in order to prevent any damage to works of art. So he has the strong view, which would help us out here; but his view is unacceptable for other reasons. So there are such accounts. I do not think this approach should be ruled out. Maybe we can come up with a notion of intrinsic value that will stack up against moral value, the welfare for human beings. But it has not been done yet. So I do not think we should rule out that if one wanted to go down this road there is work that would really need to be done.

A second possible solution is aggregation. This is a nice technical bit of philosophy. Let me give you an example. Say you have fifty villagers, each with fifty beans, and fifty hungry soldiers are coming to the village. Now, you might think that if one of the soldiers takes one of the beans from the villager, they are not doing that villager any harm, because they are leaving that villager with forty-nine beans. So no harm is done by taking just one bean. So then you get each of the fifty soldiers to take just one bean from each of the fifty villagers. The soldiers end up with fifty beans each, and the villagers end up with no beans; but no harm has been done because no soldier has taken more than one bean from every villager. Now, that is clearly an unacceptable result. So what we do is, we say that you have to aggregate harms. Taking one bean from one villager is not no harm at all; it is a small harm. And then you aggregate the small harms, and they add up to a big harm. So on that kind of principle, what you would do is say the value of an item of cultural heritage contributes to future millennia, so that maybe people are going to look at it, people are learning from it, all these little values are going to happen for the next few hundred years. You stack all those up, you aggregate them, and maybe you end up with something big enough to outweigh the disvalue to human value in preserving it, in a particular instance on the battlefield. But this relies on us having some kind of notion of the value of cultural property. And unless we are working with a substantial notion of the value of heritage, then simply piling up the numbers does not help. Unless you have a fairly substantial notion of what the value of cultural heritage is, then just adding it together is probably not going to stack up against damage to human welfare. Again, I do think aggregation is going to have to get into the picture somewhere. But without some notion of the value of cultural property, then this isn’t it. This does not yet help.

The third solution says, “Let’s fix some conception of a flourishing, worthwhile life.” Call that K. I just picked a letter out of the alphabet. So there is some conception of a worthwhile life. K will include access to basics. This is a flourishing, worthwhile life for some reasonably affluent Western person, let’s say. Include access to basics but also to health services—hospitals, education; schools, universities, and culture, books and museums. So K is what it is to have a worthwhile life. Then the claim is that individuals can reasonably be expected to make sacrifices. If they are not making sacrifices, it would degrade K. So you cannot call on people to not make sacrifices if they are not doing so to K. So the very sick have no call on our resources if expending those resources on them would degrade, say, general access to education. So we do not have to give up our humanities departments and funnel the money into medical research, which, if you are a consequentialist, you might think you have to do. Why not? Well, existence of humanities departments is part of what it is to live a flourishing, worthwhile life. So you cannot take away what is part of a flourishing, worthwhile life in order to meet even urgent needs. So if you can find something in K that will give us the particular claim—that is, that in each and every instance, there is something to be said for preserving cultural property; it stacks up against welfare—then we’re home and dry.

Okay, we might say that it is part of a flourishing, worthwhile life that people have access to cultural heritage. That is not going to be strong enough, because all you need is some cultural heritage around. That just gives you the general claim; it does not give you the particular claim. That just says people need to have access to cultural heritage, but that is not going to help the commander on the ground to decide whether or not to destroy the Roman fort or risk his helicopter crews. So try this one. It is part of K to live in a community that values each and every person having access to cultural heritage. Maybe that is plausibly part of what it is to live a flourishing, worthwhile life. But again, that is not strong enough to give us the particular claim; that probably just gives us the general claim. Or again, we need some cultural heritage and to make sure that people, each and every person, have some kind of access to it. Again, that is not strong enough, so let’s try another one. We could say, “Well, part of living a flourishing, worthwhile life is living in a community that values heritage to the extent that it will value each and every instance of heritage.” And this will certainly give us the particular claim. So now the commander on the hill says, “Okay, I am part of the community that values heritage to the extent that it values each and every instance of cultural heritage. This is an instance of cultural heritage; hence, my destroying it will degrade what it is to live a flourishing and worthwhile life.” The trouble is, that gives us a particular claim, but it is difficult to show why that should be part of what it is to live a flourishing and worthwhile life. So we are stuck in a kind of dilemma. It just seems plausible that some kind of relation to cultural heritage is going to be part of what it is to live a flourishing and worthwhile life. The trouble is, the more plausible we make that claim, the less it gives us the particular claim. It only gives us the general claim. I think, basically, this is another route to roughly the same conclusion that Helen [Frowe] came to yesterday, which is that it is difficult to see how we can make concrete and enlightened progress in this area without having a more substantial account of what the intrinsic value—the value of cultural property—is that stacks up against other values.

I want to suggest the example of Isaiah Berlin and his thoughts about reconciling incompatible goods, which he said you cannot always do. It does seem to me that that is important, because I think we all, in our bones, know that there is no perfect magical solution that will maximally protect every human being and maximally protect every worthwhile cultural site or property or whatever. So it does come around to some sort of compromise between the two. And it just struck me in your third solution, and that is, of course, what we have been struggling with. What is that? How does that compromise, and how do those individual judgments, how are they taken in individual cases, as you are setting it up here? But it does seem to me in this third solution, the one dimension that you have not brought into play is the level of importance of the cultural heritage targets, as it were, here. You talk about whether it is just access to one or access to many. But, in practice, it comes down to decisions about which are the most important sites to be protected. And of course, there are World Heritage monument listings and other measures of the importance of individual sites. Surely that comes into play in the judgment, if you want this field commander or whoever you are imagining is making these decisions, if there are those reference lists of which are deeply important sites. In the Iraq War, there were consultations with archaeologists about what were the most important sites in Iraq. So that information was there. It was not always followed. It seems not to have been taken into account to the extent that it should have been. But surely that is the way to get some sort of third solution compromise between people and sites that gets the sites back into the picture in a way that can be quantified and where that evaluation of their importance comes into play.

I’m concerned that that is kind of an externally driven decision about what “K” is. So the World Heritage List, for example, is essentially technocrats and experts making a decision that Palmyra is more important than this local mosque. And if you feed that into the operational realities of a military on the ground, it is going to undermine what K means to the local people. So my thing on all of this is, if you are going to go around looking at K, the question about K is to ask people, “What does K say to you?” And that answers this question of which heritage site is most important to the value that you place on it as a local community, rather than we are going to make these sorts of aggregate decisions that cultural heritage is part of K. And we are also then going to make a decision about which cultural heritage site is part of K. So again, clearly, in the UNESCO World Heritage List there would be particular sites. But do those have any local currency to a civilian population that is much more concerned about protecting a Shi’a mosque, for example, that may have no aesthetic, no historical, no monetary value? No, you could not calculate it by any economic index because it is just built out of cinderblocks. But in terms of the religious and political currency for that local population, it is very high on their K ranking. I mean, they may not even know that they live next to an archaeological site. They may not be at all interested. So there is a whole heap of problems about this idea that we can make decisions about what K is for other people.

I have one observation and a question. When you [Matravers] spoke earlier on aggregation, and you said the loss of one heritage site after the other would undermine in a thousand cuts and so on, why is that so? Again, let’s just go back to the environment for a few moments. The loss of an individual whale does not diminish but in fact increases the desire to protect the remaining whales. So in no way does that reduce the value of cultural heritage. It just makes it more important. And second, on the question of valuation, which as Tim [Potts] just said—I happen to agree with you fully that what we have now is better than nothing. Wherever people can criticize it, it is better than nothing. But there is something else, which is the issue of unique exemplars. So I remember, for example, a very tiny godforsaken hammam in Old Cairo, which my mother used to show me. It was the only Ayyubid hammam. And it was destroyed by the local population. Not in any act of vandalism. It was kind of a rundown little place, so somebody would take a lintel, somebody would take a piece of wood, and somebody would take something else. The people are building their shacks out of bits and pieces, and pretty soon the hammam disappeared. It was not a monument, especially when you compare it to the monuments in Cairo—the Mamluk monuments, the Fatimid monuments, and so on. It was not that. But it was unique. It was the only exemplar that we had from this period. And that adds a special quality that we also need to think about: Do we want to have a continuity, like putting beads on a string, a continuity of various periods of our past existence represented in various exemplars small and big, even though individually it may not say much? Even if the local community does not care. I mean, today, let’s say their children have gone to university and these guys have come from the villages, and they are just agglomerated in Cairo. In the university, they will learn about Salahudin Ayyubi and the Ayyubid dynasty and so on. And don’t I wish that we had one thing to show you? So I think that, therefore, the criteria that we are using have to be also, as I think Kavita [Singh] mentioned, partially local. But “local” in a broader sense that would say not just what the local guys today want but that in essence, potentially, their children will. For sure, their children will change attitudes. So I find that part of how to bring in the locals or the local view with a perspective of the specialists and the historians particularly complex in how to put these things together.

Just on the first point on the whales, I was not factoring in human psychology. The thought was just this: If we say, look, we value whales being around, but we do not have an account of the value of the whales such that whenever an individual whale comes up to be killed or not, we cannot say it should not be killed, then every time it is up for a whale to be killed and it gets killed, sooner or later there won’t be any whales. And we can have our general claim that we value whales but without whales.

The general claim then translates into don’t kill any whales. That is the tricky bit. But that is why in practice there are certain types of regulations. I mean, we have gone through this again with the environment, on fishing and sustainable fishing and whatnot. There are regulations that put some boundaries on what you can do. But there are others that say this is completely forbidden.

As an economist or a lawyer, you can rely on existing law to say, “Look, the justification for not doing this is that the law says you shouldn’t.” But you have to ask the further question as to what is the justification. It is not just that it is a sentence written in a certain book.

Tim, on your thought about the ranking, the problem is that— I mean, I agree with you. You could factor that into how you rank internally within the group. The problem with commensurability is that you have to rank across types. And knowing that we can choose, from best to worst, does not tell us anything about how the shoes compare to the hats. And what we are after is an account of value that we can factor into comparisons. So an internal ranking within the group is not very useful without what Derek’s pointing to. It is a sort of value that stacks up against other values. So just knowing the internal ordering of a group does not give you an ability to compare across groups.

So if what we are after is something like, what should you do in these cases where you have to say that if you damage the site, then you face other costs? Just pointing to the fact that we have a list that ranks the sites does not help.

The answer to the question as to whether we should try harder if a site has a very high ranking is “not necessarily,” because it might be that none of the shoes are worth one of these. Even the least good hat is worth more than all of the shoes, right? That could be true. So, no, it does not follow that you try harder. It is that you have to have some way of comparing the goods where there is some unit of common currency, which is whether you can translate them into something that can be traded, which we talked about yesterday. What are the currencies that could be on the table? But the mere fact that within the group this is number 1 does not show that you sacrifice more of some other good for number 1 of that group.

No, but surely in the humanitarian case, if there is one life at risk there and a thousand lives at risk there, that is a basis for protecting a thousand lives with one. So in the same way, if there is a monument of extreme importance quality-wise versus one of minor importance, you try harder to preserve the one of more importance. So in the real world, I think, even though the perfect calculus says how many lives are worth this listed building, there is never going to be a calculus that delivers a clear answer. But in terms of relativities, then the more important monuments are taken into consideration more, in the same way that more lives are taken into consideration.

Lives are commensurable, but heritage is not. What we are trying to articulate is the feeling, right? What does that consist in that justifies that kind of way? Why is it appropriate in the heritage? I agree with you that it is. But we need to know why it is. So what we are contesting is not that people care about this stuff. It is just saying, “Well, it’s woolly and it’s difficult, you can’t.” The complaint is not that we do not have a precise number; the complaint is that it is really hard to go about making any kind of comparisons at all. And ranking internally in groups does not help.

I think this argument actually links back to what I was trying to say from the Bamiyan example, because if we went around asking people what actually constitutes K for them, who we ask changes the answer. So if you ask what you consider a local community with other people who are living right around a monument, or you ask a very far-flung set of people who will make pilgrimages to that place but do not live physically contiguous to it, or you ask archaeologists, as you start asking different sets of people, you will have different kinds of answers and different reasons for valuing certain things, and it keeps skewing the answer and the valuation that you make. So here I just want to point to the danger—I’m calling it danger; you may not call it danger. But just the change or the shift that happens as something starts meaning something to a very large group of people, what it means can be in complete opposition to what it meant, you know? And therefore skewing can happen. We have to be aware of that.

I want to point out that when philosophers use the term “true,” they mean it in a very distinct way, which is that I can think of some logical problem that makes it so that it is not true in all cases, and therefore it is not true. I would side with Tim that in the real world we ask soldiers all the time to make proportionality judgments about how to trade off human lives, collateral damage, against the value of a military target. It would be disproportionate if in order to kill one enemy soldier, which is a legitimate military target, you have lots and lots of collateral damage. But we definitely restrain ourselves from having a strict definition, because we want that commander to use his or her judgment about how important this target is in this particular case. And we cannot figure out an abstract law that will be useful, because it would end up being quite artificial. I think it is the same here. We have to have some judgment about how important that cultural heritage is, and why. It could be important for many different reasons. And then we have to make judgments about two different things. One is the value of collateral damage: What other harm is being done? But the other is the value of the soldiers. And I would object to calling them all the same value because those are very different values. We want our soldiers to take some risks, whether to protect our cultural heritage or somebody else’s cultural heritage. So I think we have laws that are built in order to preserve some human judgment about these issues but take into account the difficult-to-measure value of cultural heritage but also of military advantage.

I agree with Scott on this point. But I think the key point that I find is that people do not want to put a number on life, simply stated. We know how to do it, we can do it, there are many techniques, and so on. But the fact is, you make an implicit judgment. I will give an example. How many redundant systems do you put in? At some point, you say, “Enough.” When you say, “Enough,” I can tell you, given probabilities and so on, what that means in terms of what value you have put on a human life in a future accident, as opposed to putting in a third or a fourth redundant system, for example. There are a lot of calculations that were involved in the early parts of the space program when the redundant systems were being put into the International Space Station and things of that nature. So we also do not want to say that I will value my soldier’s life as twenty-five collateral damage lives. Nobody wants to say that. It can be done, but nobody wants to do that. So that is a taboo area where nobody goes. And therefore you are never going to get into a situation that says, “My God, this is so great, we should be willing to sacrifice 125 lives for it.” That is never going to happen. And therefore we are going to have to live with this. I think in many ways that is the best of all possible worlds. Because you will never get agreement even among those who legislate, much less among those who will actually implement, on points like that. “My soldier’s life is worth twenty or twelve or five collateral damage lives or whatever.” So you are going to end up with situations where we just have to accept a blurred boundary rather than a clean boundary, in the sense of being able to say quantitatively what needs to be done. And I think that that is just part of the reality of the problem we are dealing with and the manifestation that cultural heritage is not an absolute measure, because we among ourselves could even disagree on the individual ranking of particular monuments. But as I said, I agree with you that what we have is better than anything else, so let’s start with it. But if you sat down, you could say, “No, I think this one should be number 34 and this one should be number 42 rather than the other way around.” So if you have that mushiness, we should not try to take it too far toward the very precise calculation, because we will not get there. And then we will have to accept that it is very difficult to justify losing human lives for the protection of cultural heritage.

I think that’s right. I do not think the argument is about exactitude. I think the argument is this: You are quite right, soldiers are used to making decisions about collateral damage and loss of human life among troops and so on. There is never going to be exactness. But now we just shove something else in, and we say, “Oh, and by the way, another calculation you have to make is that there is a lot of cultural property out there, and you have to make a judgment about destroying the cultural property or losing soldiers’ lives. But we are not going to tell you anything about the value of the cultural property. We are not even going to justify that cultural property has a value. We are just going to leave you to hang out to dry.” And that is the tricky bit—not to do with exact values or anything, just to do with we do not say anything.

Well, that is what I wanted to say. I feel we have a responsibility. It does not matter whether it is in peace or in war. It is about decision-making, which is what you are saying. And unless we can give the people who are making the decisions, whoever they are, the information and the evidence—and this is what I was saying yesterday—I think we have a responsibility, as cultural heritage specialists, to actually say, “This is what we think in terms of the priorities.” There may be other priorities if we have the time to discuss it with the local community. But given that we are at war, we probably won’t. And in peacetime, we probably would have the time, but we never actually make the time. And we should.

A commander has to have as much evidence as possible, so that he or she can say, “If I let go the artillery, what’s going to happen? Do I save many more lives but lose something that actually most people say is not very important?” But the local community might say, “Whatever you do, don’t touch that building.” And that is where you get a dilemma. I feel that we do have that responsibility to give as much information as possible, in whatever wording we might use, in a prioritized way. It is not so much ranking, because we are not ranking oranges and pears or whatever; we are saying that in terms of our expertise as cultural heritage specialists, we think this has cultural value that will be of benefit in the future. And it does not matter whether it is Stonehenge or just one bit of stone; it is important. But we need to have that so that the commander has that communicated on a map or somewhere.

I mean, the opposite happens. I have not mentioned this, but there is evidence that in the war in Yemen many of the cultural heritage targets were not hit, and then a no-strike list was sent. And I think they didn’t see the “no” bit, and it became a strike list. Of the ten sites that were given, within a day five had been hit. And suddenly a message was then sent, saying, “That was a no-strike list.” Because if you are a bored Saudi pilot flying an F-16 and you don’t know what to do, and you have a list in front of you, you might say, “Oh, we’ll go here.” So they press the coordinates and go. And they were bombing stuff that was in the middle of nowhere, and there were no Houthis around. So you have to be careful with the evidence you give.

I want to return to one of the questions that Kavita [Singh] asked us and think about this question of the banality of most cultural heritage destruction. It is this question of how things are lost, not how they are destroyed. But actually, Kavita, you said, “If it belongs to the world, does it still belong to me? But does it only belong to the world when it is destroyed?” So to ask the question that way, and to ask particularly of Derek [Matravers] as well, that all of these are addressed to what has been determined to be part of cultural heritage only under the conditions of war. The banality of the rest of destruction, is there some way to address that in your framework? And have I created a kind of corollary that it only belongs to the world under the conditions of destruction, and otherwise no one seems to pay attention?

That is not true, but it is one of the ironies of what has unfolded in recent years. We have become aware of things that were not part of the canon of things that people were concerned about. We have become extremely concerned by them because of the very dramatic and highly televised and reproduced images of destruction. And that caused some sense of urgency about cultural heritage, which is why even a meeting like this takes place. Without that, without those particular enactments, you would not have had a number of international endeavors; you would not have had a number of meetings, concerns, NGOs being formed, whatever has happened in the international arena. And it still does actually try to stave off these kinds of deliberate and symbolic acts or the collateral damage that we are all now seeing. It is exactly a tradeoff between human lives and heritage, because the nature of warfare is changing, where the wealthier countries want to spare the lives of their soldiers by not putting troops on the ground. They are doing more aerial bombing and drone bombing, and that is leading to more grand-scale destruction on the ground, which then has the effect of heritage destruction as a corollary. So I think an acceleration of a certain process in which—I do not know whether it is a kind of deliberate provocation on the part of some people or it is an “Oops, I did that” on the part of some other people—there is an awareness of this unnecessary destruction that is happening. And the same moral outrage does not apply to what is seen as necessary destruction for development.

This is a very interesting discussion, but I want to make just a few remarks. We all know that it is very messy when it comes to this type of conflict. It is very messy. It is not a structured kind of approach—you know, we first speak to the community, then the community takes a decision, then we have priority and all this. I do not know now of a case where there was an intervention that is totally justified only to liberate a World Heritage Site, let’s say. Or not a World Heritage Site but a heritage site. Of course, in some cases it was used for the justification of an intervention. I am speaking about Mali once again. It is not what was in the mind only of the French troops and others, but it was also part of the justification of an intervention that was having a military purpose, ousting the extremists. But it was a very strong case to say that on top of that, we are also acting here in order to rescue the manuscripts and the mausoleums and to rebuild. In other cases—Palmyra, the Russians—there was the same type of rationale, more or less. But I tend to think, as Tim [Potts] said, that in terms of this type of ranking, my experience in UNESCO was that whenever we had such cases we always tried to give the justification or to tell the intervening power, “Hey, watch it, because here there are World Heritage Sites or some other sites of importance.” I am speaking about Libya. When the Libyan operation started, we immediately sent all the maps and the lists of the World Heritage Sites in Libya to say, “Be careful, because this is something really important. We don’t know how you’re going to proceed, what your military operation is, what you are going to do, but you have to be careful.” The same with Mali. Again, we prepared this famous Passport of World Heritage, eight thousand pieces, and we wanted to put it in every single pocket of the soldiers there—the maps, a small passport with the World Heritage Sites—so that they would know its value. We explained, “This is important for this and this value,” in order to educate them. And then it was included in the peacekeeping training.

So my point is that it is indeed a messy kind of situation. It is difficult unless you are prepared. In many cases, like Yemen, we know the story because I also issued some statements. But in the end, we tried to intervene from the UN, from New York once again, with the Saudis and the others, in order to prevent destruction. But the argument that was given after the bombing and destruction of the old town of Sana’a was that rebels were there, the Houthis were there. So it was part of the military conflict, and it was difficult, of course, for us to to make a judgment. My point is that it is very difficult, in my view, in real life, to quantify. It is difficult to make a strict hierarchy, and it is difficult to make a very specific sequence of actions that we have to take. We just have a few elements that we know from practice, from real work. And I think this way of ranking the value side of it, if we can do it before a conflict, although we do not know where it will be, is important.

The distribution of information helped, as I said, in Yemen. It helped immensely. And the fact that now we have all kinds of peacekeepers training, even this is already a step forward. Because they will go to different places. We do not know where exactly they will go, but they will be cognizant of something that is important, that is of value. So I think that opinion is shifting. And this is already something positive, in my view.

I think with these interesting conversations about trading off between human life and heritage a calculation that can be considered is whether you are trying to win the war or whether you are trying to win the peace. So if the immediate calculation is between human life and heritage, and all you’re imagining is the kind of operational situation that you are in, then you have a fairly small view of the role that heritage could play into the future. What if heritage protection could be reframed to mean winning the peace and hearts and minds, about creating a counternarrative to ISIS? Let’s just take that as a really crucial example. If ISIS has been so oppressive and done all these horrible things and destroyed heritage, yet you are making calculations in the moment only about whether heritage is more important than one of our soldiers’ lives, it does not point to the power of the counternarrative of protecting heritage when you are trying to defeat the ideology. Because ISIS is much more about defeating the ideology than it is about the practical military gains you can make on the ground. So if you are thinking about winning the peace, this calculation, this kind of way of trading human life versus heritage, you cannot just be basing it on the strategic operational gain in the moment. That clearly might be a whole different set of situations and decisions from the strategic long-term gain of winning the peace, where you might actually save thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives by making decisions in the moment that affect the long-term consequences of the war and stop it from dragging out or degenerating into civil war and so on. So I think we have to be really careful that the moment represents an important point at which these military operatives have to make clear decisions, and we are putting them under very stringent ethical guidelines and all kinds of pressure. But we also need to be cognizant of the fact that those decisions have much more consequence in the long term than perhaps just one life versus one heritage site indicates here.

I have two points that I think we need to raise. I mentioned one before, and I really want to repeat it again, because I do not think we are giving it enough attention. But I have been encouraged by what Irina just said. I think that one area that is not going to be as controversial is to argue for a significant and expanded disaster-risk reduction by training people, by building additional facilities, by improving conditions in heritage sites, by preparing little maps, maybe, to have them available to storage facilities, transport systems. I think that we can probably use the specter of war as an added factor to encourage people to support a program of expanded preparation and disaster-risk reduction rather than focus on how we intervene when the war is there.

The second point, which has not been mentioned at all, is that there are significantly in the United States, but probably elsewhere as well, a number of people who are working on programming weapons of war. And so far the logic has been—and I had discussions with one or two of them—that they still insist on keeping a human person in the loop. They have not yet crossed the Rubicon of saying we shall delegate the authority to a drone or artificial intelligence, or whatever. And the very logic of being able to do that has now forced them to articulate the parameters of human choice. The computers will make calculations and tell you there is a chance of X collateral damage at such a distance. Based on what we know, the likelihood is Y collateral damage. Now, it is, I think, interesting and relevant to be able to talk to the people who are doing this kind of analysis and this kind of programming and at least for us to understand better what they are doing. Also, maybe we can suggest to them that one of the additional things they should put into their algorithms is cultural heritage sites. I mean, not just how many villagers would be killed by this drone or if it is fired right now within X meters, but they should also factor in cultural heritage sites, and that may slow the decision-making. This is real stuff going on right now. I am not inventing it.

This is a really interesting conversation. But it seems like there is a taxonomy of considerations being developed. I just want to point out that the decision to put soldiers in harm’s way is a political decision. And we have not talked enough about the politics of warfare, the politics of destroying a cultural heritage site. There are cultural heritage sites that will cost lives in the end. The destruction of a mosque that sets off sectarian fighting for five years costs thousands of lives. There will be other types of attacks that we know will cost lives, and there is a high political cost in allowing those heritage sites to be destroyed. There will be other political costs that can be identified, not perhaps analytically, but merely by elevating case studies where over and over and over again the political cost of allowing a heritage site to be destroyed has been substantial, so that you begin to create political sensitivity to types of heritage sites that may not directly cost lives or indirectly cost lives but that would have a political cost in ways that are going to elevate their protection. There is a component of the taxonomy that is intensely local. And there, it may be that the reliance on local sensitivities is part of the calculations made by local commanders about local support for their occupation or their military activities. But any good commander is going to identify what is important to the local population. And that is the arena where it takes place. So it is a training aspect; it is a military concern. It could be counterinsurgency, and it could be other kinds of fighting. But that is going to fall into a local commander’s smart fighting capability; it is never going to rise to the attention of a group that is going to be able to identify fifty thousand individual sites that are local. But it would be too bad if we allow this conversation to end up that everything is blurred. But rather we can create a taxonomy—I think there is one being created—in which you have five categories of significance. And virtually all will have political significance. And those political considerations, in the end, are going to be far more important than any ranking or cultural value, unless that cultural ranking is somehow transformed into political considerations. We have the ability to do that. But it will take some type of taxonomy or some type of strategic organization to make this clear.

How many parallels are there to this? In other words, probably there is a parallel between the decisions made about putting medical workers in harm’s way or journalists in harm’s way and the kind of conversations that they have as they make those kinds of calculations and decisions.

There are. And there are rules, and there are laws, and there are conventions. But in the end, it’s political. And it will be a political consideration. Anybody who is going to put a humanitarian potentially in harm’s way needs to understand the political situation, the political context, because Russians bombed hospitals. The Saudis are bombing water infrastructure and clinics. Nothing has happened to protect them. So your decision about sending me into Yemen, for example, has to be based on a fundamental understanding of the political war-fighting context in that setting. And that is why I am not in Yemen. But I went to Mosul, because there was a different kind of political military security consideration. And I am suggesting that we can create a taxonomy for decision-making that would help political and military security decision-makers understand the utility, the incentives, and the disincentives around cultural heritage protection. I think the elements have been discussed, coming from different disciplines; but it may be useful to now begin to identify those four categories of concern in which decision-makers, war fighters, and security people, as well as those inherently focused on protecting cultural heritage, can have some disciplined conversation about decision-making and not leave it to a commander to figure out without any type of guidance. But that is pretty unusual. These are political considerations about putting people in harm’s way, about what is going to be bombed and what is not going to be bombed. And we can, I think, do better in trying to inform those political considerations based on the experience and expertise sitting in this room.

This has been really fascinating to me as a specialist on the security side, to hear this conversation. I can see some analogies, and I want to make just two of them. One is that there is debate in the just war doctrine literature and the laws of our own conflict literature about how much you value your own compatriot combatant versus a foreign civilian, an adversary or a neutral civilian. One Israeli philosopher argues that a soldier is a civilian in uniform and that we should value his or her life the same way that we value a foreign noncombatant. And others, like the eminent philosopher Margalit and the political theorist Walter, argue, no, on the contrary, all civilians are of equal value, and you should value an adversary civilian just the way you value your own, and a military soldier should take the same risk to protect a civilian in another country as he or she should take to protect civilians at home. It seems to me that we could have similar kinds of debates about the protection of cultural heritage. Not just the question about which is more valuable, but ours or theirs? Ours or someone else’s? I would say we should view these all the same. So think about some of you who have offices near St. Paul’s. There is a statue to the firefighters, some of whom lost their lives saving cultural heritage in London. There are probably tradeoffs. They could have worked on a house nearby as well, but they prioritized protecting cultural heritage. And we value that. We honor them because of that. Shouldn’t we also, then, honor the soldier who decides to protect cultural heritage somewhere else, even at some risk to his unit or at some risk to winning the war, the soldier who says, “I’ll fight another day rather than shoot at that sniper”? Now the dilemma here is that the more that is known, the more incentive you give an adversary to do these things. I think it is great that you gave the forces in a bombing campaign in Libya a list of sites, but that should have been classified information, because all that information would lead people to move to those sites so that they could fight more effectively. So in warfare you have this other dilemma that we have to be addressing.

The second point I want to make is about the role of technology here. It would be useful to think about what kinds of technologies could be more useful and could be developed that would protect cultural heritage with less cost to military advantage. So, to give an example in terms of collateral damage, the Wall Street Journal has just leaked information that the U.S. military has developed a new version of the Hellfire missile, which is commonly used on drones [May 9, 2019]. Instead of having an explosion—the question always has been how much ordnance to use—this new version, according to the paper, penetrates with just an inert warhead and then opens up like a trident. So there is no explosion at all. If you can pinpoint the person you are going after, you can execute him without blowing up anything around him. Now, that creates a lot of questions about moral hazard and how often you use it, and so on. But it is an example of an expensive military technology developed in order to avoid collateral damage. Has anyone thought through what kinds of, not target maps, not prioritization lists, but what kinds of technologies you could use, in terms of nonlethal weapons, to protect an area?

I want to try to shift the discussion a bit, because I think we are in danger of focusing too much on the military dimension to all of this, and life versus statue, rocks versus troops’ lives. It seems to me that these are obviously the most extreme situations, and they are very, very important for that reason. And I think there are efforts being made. Irina mentioned what happened in relation to Mali and Libya and so forth. But, for example, if you look at what I would consider one of the most dangerous programs of, to use that term, “cultural cleansing” that is going on right now, something I mentioned yesterday, the case of the Uyghurs, this is not a military question at all. In fact, looking at it from a military point of view is completely unhelpful. No one is going to invade China and come to the defense of the Uyghurs. It is really just a question of whether the international community has the political will to confront the Chinese about this question. And to the question of whether it is a value discussion at all, are you willing to risk your trade relationship with China in order to raise the question of the Uyghurs and the fact that the Chinese government is systematically destroying mosques and other places of cultural significance? I think in the work that my organization does, that is actually the way in which it comes up most often: not in a military context, but in a nonmilitary situation. So even somewhere like Myanmar, where there has been this horrible genocide that happened from August 2017 on, with 720,000 people being forced to flee the country between then and December 30, and now with almost a million Rohingya refugees across the border in Bangladesh, the real question that keeps coming up is that the government of Myanmar, which is going out there every day and courting international investment, is trying to get investment in the Rakhine state, which is where the Rohingya come from. So then it becomes a question of on whose land they are going to be building and on what sites. And we know of the bulldozed and burned mosques and places that have other historical and cultural significance to the Rohingya. How are states that are interested in investing, or even—and I have to be very careful of what I say—

States that we have been talking to that are coming from the point of view of development assistance and trying to do the right things, because this is a very poor part of Myanmar. But our pushback with them is to say, “But who is this development assistance going to benefit in Myanmar? You’re not consulting the Rohingya, who have been cleansed out of that land, who are now sitting in Bangladesh. It’s only the remaining people who are there that you’re talking to about investment and development.” So that is actually a way in which for us the issue of culture comes up.

I want to give one other example. In many places that we deal with where there is identity-based conflict, the most common way that this comes out is about appropriation of cultural sites and changing them and trying to deny the previous existence of other groups of people. And that is overwhelmingly a state-led process. That is where it happens. They say, “This group of people didn’t exist here.” “Well, what do you mean, they didn’t exist here?” There’s, “No, no, no, that’s not there anymore, or it’s been removed, or it’s been eradicated.” It’s a case of, “That mosque is a church or that church is now a mosque,” or “It’s a Buddhist shrine,” or it’s something else other than what it was. “Oh, really? Because there used to be a minaret there.” “No, never. There was never a . . . fill in the blank.” It’s that kind of stuff. I am kind of making light of it, but that is the way in which it comes up. It is about appropriation of culture and attempts to eradicate culture, not so much through cruise missiles or tanks or people coming in and physically smashing stuff down, but more through a kind of organized campaign by either state or non-state actors to change, to alter, and to deny the presence of other people.

I think this conversation is very interesting, although a bit speculative. But I would also like to remind you that today, in the current conflicts we are discussing, regular troops are not causing the majority of the damage but rather irregular troops. So all these considerations are fine but not applicable. And the destruction is then, in most cases, outside of armed actions, done for ideological reasons. The destruction in Palmyra was done completely outside the battle context, and so on. So what I am missing here is consideration of the role of the local populations. We have not discussed that. We have been seeing the conflicts from outside, and we thought perhaps that the people on the ground, those who really own Bamiyan or Aleppo, have nothing to do. And we have not discussed what the means of empowering them are. The best protection is close range. It is the people who live there and who really have a sense of ownership of those places. We have not discussed that; we have not touched on that. There are some ideas about it that have been discussed in other fora. And that should be preventive; it should be within the local populations’ notions, support, capacity to document, capacity to know, like in civil emergencies. And we have not discussed that. And that, I think, if you want to have future meetings of this kind, is the missing agenda of these two days.