This edited volume offers an in-depth study of heritage and warfare from the perspective of defence studies.
The book focuses on how, in different contexts, heritage can be a catalyst and target of conflict, an obstacle to stabilisation, and a driver of peace-building. It documents the changing role of heritage – in terms of both exploitation and protection – in various military capabilities, theatres, and operations. With particular concern for the areas of subthreshold and hybrid warfare, stabilisation, cultural relationships, human security, and disaster response, the volume reviews the historical relationship between heritage and armed conflict, including the roles of embedded archaeologists, safeguarding of ethics, and dislodgement and destruction of material culture. Various chapters in the book also demonstrate the value of understanding how state and non-state actors exploit cultural heritage across different defence postures and within both subthreshold and proxy warfare in order to achieve military, political, economic, and diplomatic advantages.
This book will be of interest to students of defence studies, heritage studies, anthropology and security studies in general, as well as military practitioners.
Foreword Preface Introduction: Culture, Heritage, Conflict Part I: The Past on Parade 1.Heritage and the (Re)shaping of Social Identities in Conflict Cycles: Anchor or Quicksand? 2. Napoleon, Savants, and the Description de l’Égypte: Capturing History 3. Military Cultural Property Protection from Hague 1907 to Hague 1954 4. Cultural Property Protection in the 21st Century: The Privilege of Working with the Most Deployed Division Part II: The Past as Propaganda 5. Islamic Terrorist Targeting of Contemporary Western Culture: ‘Deviant Chaos’ 6. The Russian Weaponization of Cultural Heritage 7. Heritage as Focus in US-Iran tensions: Implications for Aspects of Culture and Power in Modern Warfare Part III: The Past as Peacekeeper 8. Museums and the Restitution of ‘Spoils of War’ 9. Cultural Property Protection: The Work of the Blue Shield 10. Cultural Heritage and Peacebuilding in Rakhine State, Myanmar 11. An Excavation of the Bullecourt Battlefield: From Mud Through Blood to the Green Fields Beyond? Part IV: The Practice of Protection 12. Integrating Cultural Heritage into Civil Affairs Operations: Reinventing the Monuments Men and Women for the 21st Century Force 13. Rescuing Heritage in ‘Natural’ Disasters 14. Culture, heritage, security: an interview with Colonel Rosie Stone, Captain Mark Waring, Major Anne Seton-Sykes, and Major Luke Wattam
Timothy Clack is the Chingiz Gutseriev Fellow at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) and Dean of Reuben College, University of Oxford, UK. He is general editor of the Routledge Advances in Defence Studies (RAiDS) book series and co-editor, with Robert Johnson, of The World Information War (2021), Before Military Intervention (2018) and At the End of Military Intervention (2015). Mark Dunkley is a professional archaeologist specialising in the management of underwater cultural heritage. He has investigated archaeological sites across the UK, overseas and underwater, and has published widely on cultural heritage protection. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a visiting fellow at Cranfield University, and an adviser to UNESCO UK.
