Foreword

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Its goal is to build peace through international cooperation in education, the sciences, and culture.

Irina Bokova was UNESCO’s tenth, and first woman, director-general, serving from 2009 to 2017. She had previously served as Bulgaria’s first secretary of state for European integration, minister of foreign affairs ad interim, and as ambassador to France.

As director-general, Irina Bokova championed the protection of cultural heritage. On March 28, 2015, she launched #Unite4Heritage, a global campaign to raise awareness of the importance and vulnerability of the world’s cultural heritage, seeking to “protect and safeguard heritage under threat” in areas where it is endangered by extremists.¹ Among its most dramatic projects is a multipronged information campaign, “Safeguarding Syrian Cultural Heritage,” which aims to protect the movable and immovable heritage in the country’s museums and archaeological sites. There, she coined the phrase “cultural cleansing,” arguing that “[when] you destroy identities of people, destroy their history, you destroy the reasoning for future reconciliation and peace.”²

Currently, Irina is participating in a Getty Publications book project, Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities (due to be published in 2022), for which she contributed the foreword. There she wrote that heritage is “a vision for peace and mutual respect, carved in stone and cultural landscapes, with the power to change the minds of women and men, to shape a different future for all.…[A]ll cultures are different but that difference does not divide—it unites.” Getty is pleased to publish Irina Bokova’s reflections of her time as director-general of UNESCO in the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy.

• James CunoPresident and CEOJ. Paul Getty Trust