Next Steps and Concluding Remarks

Thomas G. Weiss Let me try to summarize, however inadequately, two things from what I have heard. This effort is to either reduce destruction or improve protection. But I suddenly realized, throughout the course of the conversation, that in our title we wrote “in Zones of Armed Conflict.” And listening to many of the places that people are worried about, lots of them are armed conflicts, but there is often a dispute about what is a war, what is really a declared war or an undeclared war. So there are three things that almost everyone would agree on, I think. ISIS contributes to our problems. And is the global war on terror really a war or not? Yet we need to look at those. The slow-motion attack on Uyghurs, or the rapid attack on the Rohingya—we want those in our project as well. But are those wars? No, not declared, although the impact on civilians is the equivalent. So I think we are back, actually, to where we started this whole effort. Namely, we are not going to call our focus “the responsibility to protect” but “mass atrocities.” So, this project is really about cultural heritage and mass atrocities, because that gives us more room on the margins. But it also allows us to focus, I think, on what has brought us together. What I am proposing is an adaptation of the 1954 Convention’s title. We are not going to create any international law but seek “the protection of cultural heritage in the event of mass atrocities,” to paraphrase the convention’s title.

So, if I understand that convention, I count four kinds of destruction. Again, it is incidental destruction and purposeful or intentional destruction. We are actually not looking at the incidental. We are not going to contribute any original research or insights on collateral damage. We are not really going to contribute anything new on forced neglect. We are going to focus our research efforts on the protection and care of heritage in light of atrocities. What we are looking at is the intentional destruction of heritage that has no military significance. The purpose of such attacks is to destroy people’s lives and destroy their futures. So there are two kinds of destruction to erase history: looting—we’ve talked about that—and strategic targeting. And it seems to me that that is where our comparative advantage lies.

The second big takeaway—and we have spent a lot of time on this—is the lack of data, the lack of evidence, the lack of knowledge on any topic that we should address. At best, we have poor data. Many of us stated this, I think, by saying it is hard or impossible to separate heritage and people. I think what we have come around to saying is that they are intertwined. It may be operationally, legally, and conceptually difficult to pull them apart; but for certain purposes, we are going to have to try to get a better handle on tradeoffs, contradictions, and priorities. Jim [Cuno] and I are going to have to do more than refer to Heine and Lemkin and say that heritage and people are linked. We have to see when and where they are linked. I believe that the attacks on immovable heritage would be a good trigger for R2P thinking. But is that always the case, or usually, or mostly a good indicator? Is it always a precursor? Is it always reliable or not? And that is, as you said, Paul [Wise], an empirical question. How can we quantify our concerns? It is not going to be easy, but there have to be ways we can attach numbers to them.

In a related way, if we are going to do consequentialist ethics, we actually have to have far more empirical data if policy makers or we ourselves are going to say “yes” or “no” or “maybe.” But I think we have overly simplified the argument by trying to say that it is going to be binary: either/or. There really are multiple reasons—and we have emphasized that over the past two days—to appreciate cultural heritage, why different people want to protect it or destroy it. We cannot sweep all that away. There are really multiple reasons. So whether something feels right or true, I think we have relied too much on anecdotes, or at least intuition, which is not the best way to push forward new policies. So even if there were sufficient political will to do something—and there certainly is not to routinely protect people or heritage—I think at least the social scientists in the room should appreciate why it is tough for states or international organizations to act without a more precise notion of what is worth doing versus not worth doing.

Hartwig Fischer Many cases that we have discussed over the past two days show how difficult it is to impose rules to protect cultural heritage and how difficult it is to make people abide by these rules, despite all the work that has been done to strengthen the awareness of what is at risk, which actions can be sanctioned, and what can be punished. If we adapt a strategy of de-investment to curb damage to the environment, the challenge we are facing becomes this: can we convince businesses to de-invest where cultural heritage is put at risk, damaged, or destroyed? Can we establish a system to sanction—financially, not just through naming and shaming—those who damage or destroy cultural heritage, in order to impose awareness that putting cultural heritage at risk, damaging or destroying it, does not happen without consequences? Yesterday, Tim [Potts] discussed investing in or profiting financially from the destruction of cultural heritage because it offers building opportunities. Follow the money. The war on drugs and the war on trafficking in arms seem related. So can we use these methods to intensify pressure to keep people from causing damage to cultural heritage?

In view of the many cases of damage that were presented during the last two days, I cannot tell if I’m depressed or inspired by our conversation. I must acknowledge a certain ambivalence. But the people and expertise you have brought together are truly inspiring. I have learned a lot, and I am grateful for that.

For me personally, three areas of thought and action seem particularly relevant. The first is the importance of communities, on local, national, and global levels, that identify with cultural heritage and thus have a natural propensity to take care of it. The second is norms and sanctions. And the third is the inherent tension, or discrepancy, between policy making on the one hand and the reality of power politics on the other. To better protect cultural heritage, we will have to remain aware of these three interrelated considerations.

Irina [Bokova] reminded us yesterday that setting norms does have a long-term, sustainable impact. We reflected on the major change in people’s concept of environment and wildlife. Or go back and consider for a moment the immense struggle in the nineteenth century to get people to recognize that slavery is unacceptable: it required an enormous effort, but the change of norms ultimately did change people’s perception and understanding. The struggle, as we all know, isn’t over.

There are many opportunities to change norms at all three of the nested levels of community, but it requires proactive measures of training and capacity building. We have to work on people’s norms at as many of those levels as we can. We are impeded in that, however, by the fact that nation-states stand between the international community and local communities. And we can only change norms and educate and train at the level of the local communities if we have the agreement of the states that have theoretical sovereignty over those areas. That is a very hard thing to do, but we still have to do it. So I would say that one of the basic principles would be—getting back to the discussion yesterday about UNESCO—to stress the “E” in UNESCO and really focus on education, training, and these proactive measures to get people to think about heritage in a different way. We need soft power, training, and systems of incentives in long-term projects to make people understand that they have something to lose, to educate them and have them internalize changed norms.

The other thing that really struck me in our conversation today is that imposing recipes or rules from the top down simply does not work. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. We should, instead of focusing on rules, focus on developing an agreed-upon set of variables to consider as part of a process. And the particular mix of how you assign value to different things, how you prioritize those things, that is all going to be dictated by the particulars of the specific situation and at the same time influenced by politics and power. It’s hard to control these dynamics.

Deploying soft power, meaning incentivizing people and focusing on education, will eventually have an impact on nation-state politics. We have to integrate heritage and economics into a framework that makes it attractive for nation-state governments to protect their own heritage and at the same time to not run roughshod over local communities. We can apply these principles to develop smaller-scale, pragmatically focused projects that in the end will have a long-term cumulative effect.

Luis Monreal We are in a crisis situation. And crisis generates emotion. Somebody around this table wrote a book called Art and Emotion. So we need to use the emotional power of cultural heritage. This is what speaks to people. Of course, it is relevant to society. It has to appeal to the emotional intelligence. I think the people in the environment field have done that. They do not talk about the science of the environment; they talk about emotions. That is the point. And in these situations of crisis, the context is even more emotional.

The second thing—I think you said it—is that we need to work with local people. And this is part of the agenda. We have to empower, through training, through planning, first the professionals on the ground, our colleagues on the ground on all levels, from craftsmen to museum directors, curators, and so on. And we have to mobilize civil society organizations. That is fundamental. But we have to anticipate that we are entering postwar situations. Postwar situations are equally very dangerous for cultural heritage. Building becomes a priority, and these people need to work quickly. So you see the example of Afghanistan, what is happening to Herat. I think this is also an agenda you should put on the table.

Irina Bokova Thank you very much for inviting me to join this group and this, I would say, very exciting and sometimes unexpected discussion—because I think in looking at heritage, I am used to an environment where there are experts and we are all like-minded people. Here we enlarged the space, and I think it is the right approach. I think with the future work, the publication, if there are events or activities around it, I think it is a great opportunity, on one side, to focus on advocacy once again, to keep the political momentum. Keeping the political momentum is very important after this period of a very high level of interest from political communities and from global leaders. I am afraid that changing geopolitics will shift attention from this issue. It is not a priority anymore. There are no longer these kinds of threats. And I think it is very dangerous. So with this publication, if we could keep the political momentum within the UN environment and widely, I think it will be very good.

The legal framework: I think I said yesterday that adopting a new law or changing a law is complicated. There is not much appetite on the part of member states. I mentioned the historic urban landscapes for which we wanted to make a convention but ended up with a recommendation. Still, it is a step forward. But I think there is a lot of need, and maybe the publication can recommend something that exists in some of the papers, to look actually at the armed non-state actors and what their responsibility is and how to approach them. The work that the NGO Geneva Call is doing on humanitarian protection, enlarging it now with work on the protection of cultural heritage, is very interesting. It is pioneering work in terms of enlarging the space for international law where it does not exist. I could maybe compare it very briefly with the refugee law and internally displaced people. We know, all the UN people working in the humanitarian system, that internally displaced people were not included in the refugee convention of 1951. And that is why it was difficult to work with them. But they were a reality. Finally in 2016, the General Assembly adopted the declaration and made this possible. So we have to be creative also in looking at how we deal with them—they call them actors—those who are in most cases destroying heritage. And we have to think about the place for the international law or some kind of another arrangement in order for them to work.

Two last remarks. Local communities. What about communities where the heritage they have is not from their culture? I have confronted this. I mentioned an exchange I had in a school in Tunisia. I was coming from the Bardo Museum. I went to a school, and I said, “Oh, you have fantastic Roman mosaics, and it’s so incredible. You have to feel very proud.” And a girl came up and said, “Why should I be proud of something that does not belong to my culture?” So this comes down to education. This type of work is tedious, but it is important; we have to do it. And this is exactly the soft power, both of culture and of education, if we want to protect and preserve cultural heritage

My last point. I think our discussion would benefit immensely from some really good empirical data or empirical examples that can demonstrate what we want to achieve. We spoke about how Borobudur was cleaned after the eruption of the volcano, and the Muslim community was caring about cleaning a Buddhist temple. This is a small thing, but there are many more that are good examples of this type of caring about cultural heritage that is not exactly ours. Or it is ours but much neglected. There are other points, but these are some of the ideas that came to my mind just today.

Ismail Serageldin I would like to thank you and thank everybody for this. It has been a very, very stimulating couple of days. But I still have two more things that I would like to emphasize. One is the fact that there is a case, a very special case, of historic cities or historic districts where, in fact, as I tried to say, the individual buildings are not very significant. But it is the whole—the character, the urban character, that intangible quality—that makes this particular sense of place meaningful and attractive. We need to also include that. When we talk about Aleppo, there is the souq, and there is a citadel, and so on. There are some important monuments per se; but beyond the monuments, there is the overall quality. And that frequently is under attack on a day-to-day basis, by local people, like the story of the parking lot that was turned into apartment buildings, and so on, which results in loss of cultural heritage over a longer period. It is like a slow, creeping disease, as opposed to war—fog of war and destruction of war. But we have to recognize that cities are living organisms, and different generations have different views about what is important, and local communities have their own perspective about what they need. I think that part—the historic cities part or the historic districts part—was not, perhaps, sufficiently captured in our discussion.

And finally, I would return again to the suggestion that I think we can do something short of intervention during or immediately after wars and conflicts. And that would be to take the approach of disaster-risk reduction. We want this to be not just for protection against a tsunami or a nuclear meltdown; we want it to be also to protect cultural heritage against the ravages of time or the ravages of the insensitivity of particular people. And there again, like Irina said, you have education and culture and so on.

Scott SaganI have learned a lot, so thank you. Three points. First, on the laws of armed conflict, there are often differences between what people will call standards and rules. And the metaphor that I have been using is driving. The rule is you cannot drive above seventy miles an hour. The standard is that you cannot drive recklessly. And when you design international rules, you have to choose which of those, and how much emphasis, how much specificity, you want, versus how much judgment you want. Most of what we have been talking about is standards. “Proportionality” does not tell you how you actually measure; it just tells you that you have to think about making a measure. “Feasible precautions” does not say what feasible is; it says that you have to take some risk or make an assessment. There are two standards, however; I mean, two cases where there are rules. That is, you do not deliberately kill civilians. The principle of distinction is strict. And I think we just need to have such. You do not deliberately destroy cultural heritage. That is a rule. That is not a standard. That is not one that you have to make judgments about. So viewing this in that straightforward way is important. And what I think some of the dangers are is that when somebody starts violating a rule, it may soften your views about the standards. We have to be very cautious that as we are combating people who are breaking rules, we do not, as we did with torture in the United States, say, “Well, it’s okay to torture these guys because of what they’ve done.” We should not change our views about how we evaluate standards because of that. And therefore, I think that is a cautionary note.

Second, I still think that it would be very valuable to try to figure out whether you should think about cultural heritage as a part of collateral damage that you are trying to avoid, measuring it against military advantage, or whether you should think about cultural heritage as part of military advantage broadly conceived to include peace and reconciliation contributions afterward. That is a very different conceptual framework; it could lead to different areas.

Paul H. Wise My suggestion is that we recognize that we need to enhance the political costs and enhance the political benefits of protecting cultural sites. And to do that will require technical guidance, new norms, education, empirical analysis. But it will ultimately depend on doing things differently than we have done them in the past. The challenges that we are facing are different in nature and intensity, and the status quo approaches need to be rethought, in my view. And I think the crucial issue will be to create linkages with disciplines and arenas of activity that are equally committed to social well-being and the protection of lives and to craft our analyses and create a kind of approach that we have discussed here for the past two days but make it accessible and compelling to other groups that are essential to creating, if you will, solidarity across different dimensions within a broad commitment to human life and social well-being. It will include enhanced voices from the victim communities. I think that is clear for local communities; that it is as increasingly essential to the protection of humanitarian workers as it is for cultural sites. But I would also suggest—and this is peculiar, as a pediatrician sitting in the Getty—that we look at other disciplines and forms that provide deeper insight into the power of cultural heritage to shape social well-being. I am talking about artists, musicians, poets, and novelists, because they can capture in different ways the importance of some of the cultural, not only objects, but intangible cultural concerns that academics and anthropologists, archaeologists, and a pediatrician could never do. As this initiative moves forward, whichever direction it takes, it should be very purposeful in thinking about how to build these bridges, how to make these analyses and concerns accessible and also compelling to the other essential voices that will ultimately prove highly beneficial to raise the political cost so that there is enforcement and enhance the political benefits that could shape a greater state or non-state commitment to the protection of sites. Non-state actors respond to political costs and benefits like anybody else. And questions of legitimacy and the use of coercion are essential. But others are worried about this, too, and struggling with the same landscapes. My hope is that we can broaden this conversation and ultimately make it accessible and powerful to those essential groups.