1 Introduction

In a televised October 2020 wartime address to his nation, the leader of the South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan boasted of ongoing military advances against a breakaway ethnically Armenian republic, vowing that ‘[t]here will be no trace of them left on those lands’ (PRA, 2020). A decade and a half earlier, in the early days of his inherited presidency, Ilham Aliyev had accomplished precisely that in another historically disputed terrain. Concluding his KGB-leader-turned-president father’s mission of removing the Armenian cultural layer of the post-Soviet exclave of Nakhichevan, he left no recognisable trace of the region’s rich material Armenian memories: Between 1997 and 2006, dates reconstructed through various eyewitness accounts and official Azerbaijani publications (Maghakyan and Pickman, Reference Maghakyan and Pickman2019), an estimated inventory of eighty-nine medieval churches and chapels, 5,840 intricately carved khachkar memorial stelae, and over 22,000 tombstones (Ayvazyan, Reference Ayvazyan1986) were flattened to dust (Maghakyan and Pickman, Reference Maghakyan and Pickman2019; CHW, 2022). After an Azerbaijani official dismissed the newly exposed erasure as ‘a figment of … imagination’ (Womack, Reference Womack2019), a subsequent confirmation of the erasure through declassified satellite imagery (Maghakyan, Reference Maghakyan2021) provoked Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to the UK to simultaneously deny and confirm the findings:

That culture has been a deliberate target in violent conflicts is nothing new (Bevan, Reference Bevan2006). Anxieties over history, including the material past, are common in the everyday, let alone across existential ethnoterritorial conflicts. ‘Only a past seen as truly over’, writes David Lowenthal in his landmark study The Past is a Foreign Country, ‘ceases to be a threat’ (Lowenthal, Reference Lowenthal2015: 144). Anxiety over the past and how it shapes the present and future is normal. However, threat-free aspirations can take violent turns, even against as seemingly innocuous a target as cultural heritage, especially in the context of illiberal ethnoterritorial conflict resolutions. Those conflicts are, as of this writing, on the rise globally, often accompanied by hyper-‘authorised heritage discourses’ on historical material worth protecting (Smith L., Reference Smith2006: 29) and dying for, and sometimes result in campaigns in which state actors engaged in ethnoterritorial conflict systematically target cultural heritage on their own sovereign territory. This theoretical study is about the latter and how to prevent it.

Future-proofing the present through uses of the past is neither new nor a newly explained phenomenon (Orwell, Reference Orwell1950: 37; Tillett, Reference Tillett1969; Hobsbawm and Ranger, Reference Tillett1983; Arnold, Reference Arnold1992; Kohl and Fawcett, Reference Kohl and Fawcett1995; Díaz-Andreu and Champion, 1996; Meskell, Reference Meskell1998; Kohl et al., 2007; Boytner et al., Reference Boytner, Dodd and Parker2010; Harrison, Reference Harrison2010; Harrison et al., Reference Harrison, Dias and Kristiansen2023; Bozoğlu et al., Reference Bozoğlu, Campbell, Smith and Whitehead2024). Nationalistic leaders, especially autocratic ones, have long sought solace and legitimacy in history, often through rewriting it, not least because – as Clive Foss has argued – doing so is irresistibly easy (Foss, Reference Foss2014, Reference Foss and Sekunda2020). Changing the past can be addictive. As historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued, ‘history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. The past is an essential element … The past legitimizes’ (Hobsbawm, Reference Hobsbawm1993). While fantasising about problem-free futures is natural, nationalist projects pursued by states can have an irremediable impact because modern states possess the capability to surgically remove entire historical landscapes from their internationally recognised territories.

Theorising the erasure that took place of Armenian culture in Nakhichevan in 1997–2006 as ‘nationalism’ or ethnoterritorial conflict outcome, however, is not sufficient. Nationalistic policies are often populist, indicative of public support. Yet the destruction in Nakhichevan, despite Azerbaijan’s loss in the early 1990s Armenian–Azerbaijani war over another historically disputed region – Nagorno–Karabakh – was not a popular campaign (Aylisli, Reference Aylisli2018; Chapple, Reference Chapple2020; Maghakyan, Reference Maghakyan2025). Nor was it publicised by the perpetrator to achieve demoralisation among the Armenian population that no longer lived in the region. A more precise diagnosis of such campaigns is vital for prevention.

Why certain states systematically target heritage associated with an otherised domestic group on their own sovereign territory – while others do not – is an underexamined question. A large segment of the interdisciplinary scholarship on heritage crime has examined cultural property protection in armed conflict (Viejo-Rose, Reference Viejo-Rose, Helmut and Yudhishthir2007; Frowe and Matravers, Reference Frowe and Matravers2019; Hardy, Reference Hardy2015, Reference Hardy2021), investigating the destruction of cultural heritage in a foreign sovereign territory. However, further engagement is needed to examine heritage crime committed by states within their own internationally recognised territory. Heritage crime studies should, therefore, analyse and classify the domestic erasure campaigns against Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan, and the similar campaign against Uyghur heritage in Xinjiang, China, that have resulted in tremendous losses. And yet, so far, with the exception of genocide studies, academia has devoted little effort to understanding state-sponsored discriminatory erasure of material heritage, especially from the perspective of political science and the lens of resource competition. Nonetheless, there exists rich multidisciplinary literature to build upon.

Since state-sponsored campaigns are policy choices, political science, which studies the processes of pursuing power, should be the optic for understanding the actions of Azerbaijan and China and for predicting similar campaigns in other conflicts. This study, in a way, aligns with the realist school of thought in international relations, which seeks a ‘problem-solving theory’ that ‘takes the world as it finds it’ (Cox, Reference Cox1981). An accurate diagnosis is necessary not only for description but also for prediction and, most importantly, prescription. Nevertheless, it is essential to acknowledge and engage existing clusters of literature, some of which have been siloed from one another, to test their effectiveness in explaining Azerbaijan’s and China’s campaigns. After reviewing different explanations of such acts, this study argues that current frameworks are insufficient to describe, detect, predict, and prevent these campaigns. As a result, this study proposes new terminology and a tripartite theoretical framework to explain and anticipate such offences.

2 Heritage Crime

Heritage crime is a relatively new umbrella term for a long-practised cluster of offences, including, but not limited to, looting, antiquities trafficking, fakes and forgeries, museum theft, vandalism, and politically motivated destruction of cultural property. There are other related terms, including cultural heritage crime, art crime, and cultural property crime. Rarer – since they have not been widely embraced – are the terms heritocide (Grove, Reference Grove2013) and culturecide (Schreiber, Reference Schreiber, Michałowska and Schreiber2017). Heritage crime studies is a rising multidisciplinary field within criminology, drawing heavily on archaeology, art history, architectural history, security studies (political science), museology, and spatial sciences, among others. While Art Crime (Conklin, Reference Conklin1994) is widely considered the pioneering study of offences related to cultural property, The Art Crisis (Burnham, Reference Burnham1975) also referenced criminal behaviour. Nonetheless, ‘heritage crime’ has been far more systematically studied since the early twenty-first century. One of the earlier definitions of heritage crime comes from a 2006 study of Nordic antiquities:

It is worthwhile to clarify what ‘heritage’ means and what the working definition of ‘heritage’ in this study is. One compelling description of heritage has attempted to define it in four extents. Summarising three seminal studies (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Reference Kirshenblatt-Gimblett2004; Smith L., Reference Smith2006; Ashworth, Reference Ashworth2017), two scholars describe cultural heritage as ‘bequests and legacies from the past that are selected for use in the present and passed on to future generations; as the technocratic frameworks and institutions built to manage such selections; and as a mirror that society holds up to itself to understand or explain social change’ (Samuels and Daehnke, Reference Samuels and Daehnke2023). They also add a fourth dimension to their exploration of culture as rights. Such broad definitions are particularly beneficial for studies of heritage in general. However, a working definition is necessary for this study, given the specific case studies under consideration.

Since this study explores the discriminatory and politically motivated destruction of tangible sacred heritage associated with a securitised ethno-religious collectivity (i.e., Armenians, Uyghurs, etc.), the study’s default understanding of ‘heritage’ is composed of the historical, religious, and cultural sites and objects that targeted communities consider sacred, including – but not limited to – houses of worship (such as churches and mosques), cemeteries, and group-specific objects of cultural, religious, or historical significance, such as Armenian khachkars (cross-stones) that perpetrators unquestionably associate with the targeted group. The query of this writing does not entertain conceptual musings as to what heritage really is and who it belongs to, though future studies might benefit from such discussions, especially in showing the irony of othering, let alone securitising, monuments in geographies that have had histories of – even if not easy – coexistence. Because this study looks at the actions of perpetrators in the context of authoritarianism and security, ‘heritage’ is treated throughout the text as static and tangible sacred spaces and remnants of indigenous communities. In other words, heritage is approached in this study from a more primordial (in the political science understanding of the term) angle, not out of a rejection of constructivism, but to streamline the study’s focus on collective identities as a constant entity. This study’s definition of ‘heritage’ therefore understands the term as comprising sacred places and objects of memory and belonging that are distinctly tied to an ethno-religious collectivity.

However, despite having this strict working definition of heritage, while discussing ‘heritage crime’, especially in the literature review, the study does not restrict the use of the term to only infer the working definition of ‘heritage’ as suggested earlier, not least because heritage crime studies is – as it should be – a broad field that typically considers a variety of offences against wider heritage, impacting cultural and archaeological sites, artefacts, and art. This Element does not address the erasure of intangible cultural heritage (such as language, customs, or religious practice); while sovereign heritage crime may accompany or entail such forms of erasure, the present framework is developed specifically for the destruction of tangible sacred sites to have a more focused discussion of how securitising the material past creates regime survival opportunities in authoritarian contexts.

Some scholarly and practitioner circles, such as Historic England, have insisted on keeping the definition of heritage crime as deliberately broad as possible, defining it as ‘any offence which harms the value of heritage assets and their settings’ (What is Heritage Crime? 2024). Others have prioritised the legality of offences, offering the definition of heritage crime to be ‘any activity that is prohibited by law that causes loss of, damage to, or other harm to places, monuments or objects considered to be heritage’ (Grove and Thomas, Reference Grove and Thomas2014). However, the term ‘heritage crime’ can be misleading, since some practices covered by the term do not amount to legally prosecutable behaviour, hence the frequent use of ‘illicit’ to describe the antiquity trade (Passas, Reference Passas2003; Tijhuis, Reference Tijhuis2006; Bowman, Reference Bowman2008; Campbell, Reference Campbell2013). Despite emphasising the legality of heritage crime, Grove and Thomas themselves raise the issue of ‘the complicity of authorities in the issues of exploitation of cultural heritage – whether this is wilful or neglectful; stemming from ignorance or a different set of priorities; historical or current’. In other words, heritage crime cannot always be unequivocally described as ‘illegal’.

Another study agrees that not all heritage crime is technically criminal (Mackenzie et al., Reference Mackenzie, Brodie, Yates and Tsirogiannis2019). Accordingly, Mackenzie, his colleagues, and other scholars use ‘illicit antiquities’ to underscore that, in the cycle of looting, for example, some activities are, technically speaking, ‘legal’, with the classic example being the ‘grey zone’ practices of collectors of looted and trafficked antiquities that do not always engage in strictly illegal behaviour. A notable example of technically speaking ‘legal’ heritage crime is the normalised exercise of mass looting in the Republic of Turkey (Ungor and Polatel, Reference Ungor and Polatel2011). There, the government issues ‘treasure hunting licenses’ for looters – potentially numbering in the millions – that primarily target ‘abandoned properties’ related to the Armenian Genocide (Celik, Reference Celik2020; Suni, Reference Suni2023a, Reference Suni2023b; O’Brien, Reference O’Brien2024).

Early studies of heritage crime (Mackenzie and Green, Reference Mackenzie and Green2009) have been dominated by explorations of the antiquities trade, and studies of trafficking remain pivotal case studies for the obvious irremediable damage done to heritage through looting (Thompson, Reference Thompson2024), which as of this writing seems to have moved more art collection institutions to embrace the museum repatriation movement, including by creating consensual 3D renderings of returned artefacts to continue representing the art to patrons. Some scholars have noted the ‘obsession’ with already looted art, contrasting it with the little consideration and care offered to in-situ cultural sites (Mackenzie and Green, Reference Mackenzie and Green2009).

Confirmation that illicit antiquities have dominated concerns of heritage crime studies and practitioners comes in the form of specialised international organisations’ publications that outline mechanisms for crime prevention and punishment. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), with support from the European Union, for example, has published a toolkit for European judiciary and law enforcement on combating illicit antiquities trafficking (UNESCO, 2018). A growing list of legal scholarship devoted to heritage crime (Fabiani et al., Reference Fabiani, Burmon and Hufnagel2024) and an increased interest in provenance (Milosch and Pearce, Reference Milosch and Pearce2019; Watenpaugh, Reference Watenpaugh2019; Schorch, Reference Schorch2020; Kersel, Reference Kersel2021; Richards and Guerry, Reference Richards and Guerry2022; Rother et al., Reference Rother, Koss and Mariani2022) over the past decade highlight widespread concerns with the legality and ownership rights in heritage crime. However, heritage crime is more than property crime.

One of the underexplored areas of heritage crime – with the exception of conflict-related antiquity trade (Hardy, Reference Hardy2021, Reference Hardy2015), Islamist militant groups’ attacks on cultural sites (Manhart, Reference Manhart, Logan, Máiréad Nic and Ullrich2015; Mudie, Reference Mudie2018), and Nazi looting – is politically motivated domestic heritage crime perpetrated by state actors, and the theorising of such behaviour. While conflict-related destruction can take many forms (Viejo-Rose, Reference Viejo-Rose, Helmut and Yudhishthir2007), much of the scholarship on heritage and conflict has addressed material memories of painful pasts, offering terminology like ‘negative heritage’ (Meskell, Reference Meskell2002a), ‘places of pain and shame’ (Logan and Reeves, Reference Logan and Reeves2008), ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald, Reference Macdonald2010), ‘dissonant heritage’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth, Reference Tunbridge and Ashworth1996), ‘heritage that hurts’ (Uzzell and Ballantyne, Reference Uzzell, Ballantyne, Uzzell and Ballantyne1998), ‘dark tourism’ (Lennon and Foley, Reference Lennon and Foley2000) and ‘dark heritage’ (Thomas et al., Reference Thomas2019). Bevan (Reference Bevan2006) and Gamboni (Reference Gamboni1997) are among the exceptions to deeply tackle intentional destruction, with the former seeing dehumanisation as a key component in politically motivated heritage crime:

Intentional destruction – the targeting of sacred sites and cultural symbols – is an ancient feature of conflict and conquest, and an apparent power projection, with perpetrators of heritage crime like the eighth-century BCE Assyrian king Sargon proudly documenting the pillage of an adversary’s holy city in great detail – both in cuneiform inscription and in pictorial relief (Melville, Reference Melville2016). The discussion of politically motivated heritage crimes has taken, generally speaking, three forms, most outside heritage crime studies: as ‘cultural genocide’ of genocide studies; as part of war-related destruction; and as a political weapon in contexts of ethnoterritorial conflicts.

3 Cultural Genocide

In scholarly frameworks and some practitioner circles the term ‘cultural genocide’ is often evoked to describe state-sponsored heritage crime. Given the prevalent use of the term and the power that it carries, a detailed analysis of when it was created, how it did not become law, and why, despite the latter, it continues to be so relevant, can help understand the severity of politically motivated discriminatory erasure of cultures and the dire need for proper classification of such crimes.

The phrase ‘cultural genocide’ has its origins in the foundational research behind and the subsequent legal drafts for the concept and international crime of genocide. To describe the intentional, institutionalised elimiation of ethnic, national or religious communities, Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide during the Second World War (Lemkin, 1944). While a new word, ‘genocide’, in the words of Leo Kuper, is an ancient crime (Kuper, Reference Kuper1981: 19). Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on 9 December 1948, offers the following definition of genocide:

While the UN Convention on genocide is the traditional and only internationally recognised definition of genocide, it does not reflect the entirety of Lemkin’s original concept. Challenging the exclusion of the cultural aspect of the crime, legal scholar David Nersessian argues that ‘the present understanding of [the crime of] genocide preserves the body of the group but allows its very soul to be destroyed’ (Nersessian, Reference Nersessian2005). Lemkin would have agreed.

When in 1933 Lemkin first formulated the idea of punishing what he considered the crime of the crimes, which he later named genocide, he argued that barbarity – ‘the premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities’ – and vandalism – ‘destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of these collectivities’ – represented an ‘international danger’ (Lemkin, Reference Lemkin and Fussell1933). An attack against a community may not be only physical, argued Lemkin, but can ‘also take the form of systematic and organised destruction of the art and cultural heritage’ (Lemkin, Reference Lemkin and Fussell1933). Acts of vandalism, Lemkin said, ‘shock the conscience of all humanity’ (Lemkin, Reference Lemkin and Fussell1933). In other words, for Lemkin, destruction did not exclusively mean physical and biological.

Lemkin’s Reference Lemkin and Fussell1933 formulation was presented in a paper for the Fifth Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid, 14–20 October 1933. While his research made a distinction between the crimes of ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’, in later years Lemkin treated both offences as part of the same crime – genocide. After coining the term ‘genocide’, Lemkin further argued that cultural loss is inseparable from physical losses: ‘genocide’ is not a synonym for ‘mass murder’, he explained, because the latter ‘does not convey the specific losses to civilisation in the form of cultural contributions’ (Lemkin, Reference Lemkin1947). An early draft of the United Nations Genocide Convention boldly underlined the cultural aspect of genocide. Article III of the UN Secretariat draft of the Convention defined genocide as follows:

1. (1) prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group;

2. (2) destroying, or preventing the use of, libraries, museums, schools, historical monuments, places of worship or other cultural institutions and objects of the groups (qtd in Morsink, Reference Morsink1999).

But opposition from several states, including Western nations with histories of colonisation and forced ‘assimilation’, excluded cultural elements from the final convention draft adopted in 1948. One argument, as summarised by Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, was that ‘the proposed Genocide Convention would become a tool of political propaganda aimed at their assimilation policies to ‘civilise’ indigenous inhabitants’ (Vrdoljak, Reference Vrdoljak2006: 169).

Lemkin was still hopeful. Weeks after cultural genocide was deleted from the Genocide Convention, the notion of protecting the cultural rights of minorities was suggested but not adopted at the Third Committee discussing the Declaration on Human Rights. ‘If it had not been for the influence of the Cold War and its accompanying rhetoric’, explains Johannes Morsink, ‘there would have been enough votes for the inclusion of such an article in the Declaration’ (Morsink, Reference Morsink1999).

Lemkin may have found some solace in how his thinking regarding cultural genocide, despite not being codified, impacted post–Second World War prosecutions of Nazi officials. In the August-September 1946 trial of Amon Leopold Goeth in Kraków, Poland’s Supreme National Tribunal ruled that ‘[t]he wholesale extermination of Jews and also of Poles had all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term, and embraced in addition the destruction of the cultural life of these nations’ (United Nations War Crimes Commission, 1948a). In the 1947 prosecution of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, the Tribunal discussed genocide by specifying that ‘the Nazi Party had as one of its aims the biological and cultural extermination of subjugated nations’ (United Nations War Crimes Commission, 1948b).

Long after Lemkin’s death in 1959, references to ‘cultural genocide’ continued. In the case of the Prosecutor v. Blagojević and Jokić, a case for crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims following the fall of the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, for instance, the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found in 2005 ‘that the term “destroy” refers only to the physical and biological destruction of the group; it does not include cultural genocide’. The Trial Chamber further found in its judgment ‘that such destruction should not simply be equated with killing. While killing large numbers of a group may be the most direct means of destroying a group, other acts or series of acts, can also lead to the destruction of the group’ (The Prosecutor v. Vidoje Blagojevic and Dragan Jokic, 2005).

There were even hopes leading to an important event in 2006 that ‘cultural genocide’ may finally find explicit international recognition. Earlier drafts for a breakthrough declaration that had been in the making for many years, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, included the phrase ‘cultural genocide’ (UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2006). But, to the disappointment of those who advocated for the inclusion of the phrase, the final version eventually adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Resolution 2006/2 on 29 June 2006 saw ‘cultural genocide’ replaced with the ‘destruction of their [indigenous peoples’] culture’ (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2006). Despite this setback for the advocates, cultural genocide remains relevant today.

Notwithstanding the exclusion of ‘cultural genocide’ from key international conventions, the concept has lived on, at least in academia and in some practitioner circles. It has remained a powerful concept that, despite enjoying no legal codification, may still serve some purposes. David MacDonald and Graham Hudson, for example, summarise cultural genocide as ‘a moral descriptor anchored in a legal historical process’ (MacDonald and Hudson, Reference MacDonald and Hudson2012). Payam Akhavan builds on this by explaining how some indigenous populations find healing power in the use of the term, despite its legal ambiguity:

Despite lacking an international legal classification, the concept of cultural genocide continues to be invoked. In 2021, the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor, which prosecutes individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity, made it clear that the Genocide Convention’s ‘transfer of children’, which is already addressed in the convention, definition is inherently connected with culture:

It is important to note that another key court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has stated that the targeting of culture can establish genocidal intent: ‘Where there is physical or biological destruction there are often simultaneous attacks on the cultural and religious property and symbols of the targeted group as well, attacks which may legitimately be considered as evidence of intent to physically destroy the group’ (Bosnia v. Serbia), which the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor’s Office has referenced.

In summary, ‘cultural genocide’ is a powerful terminology with, at the very least, descriptive and healing power that acknowledges the enormous nature of assaults on the ‘soul’ that come with assaults on cultural heritage. It has continued and will likely continue to be a relevant part of discussing genocide and crimes against humanity when culture and traditions become targeted. There may never be an academic or legal reconciliation of the term, but it will remain relevant because culture is a key element of the collective human experience. In one of his despairing attempts to make a convincing case for cultural genocide, Lemkin may have said it best: ‘a racial, national, or religious group cannot continue to exist unless it preserves its spirit and moral unity’ (qtd in van Krieken, 2004).

4 Cultural Destruction and Law

There might be a surprising benefit to cultural destruction not being legally tied to genocide, the latter requiring a strict test for establishing intent to destroy. In a case addressing the destruction of Dubrovnik in 1991, for example, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia inferred maliciousness in part from the character of the target – a well-known historical city centre, designated as UNESCO World Heritage with the buildings bearing, as the defendant acknowledged, the Blue Shield emblem of the Hague Convention, populated by a civilian population (Prosecutor v. Pavle Strugar, Reference v. Pavle Strugar2008), whereas establishing intent to destroy a population through the targeting of buildings, as a Genocide Convention that included cultural genocide would have required, may have made it easier for perpetrators to evade accountability. Promisingly, the fact that, despite being left out from the Convention, ‘cultural genocide’ has enduringly lived on in academia, advocacy, and even some institutional circles, pinpoints the importance of acknowledging the severity of pain for the victims when culture and identity are targeted. Fortunately, such discussions are becoming more mainstream.

Looting of heritage assets is known to history as long as it has been written. An eighth-century bce. Assyrian relic, as already mentioned, proudly details the attack on the foremost Urartian temple in Musasir (Chahin, Reference Chahin2001: 157). Targeting the most sacred of Urartu’s houses of worship and taking its vast collection of gold and silver objects as loot was the Assyrian king’s method of projecting his power, dominance, and success, having the looting documented in detail. He boasted that the Urartian king committed suicide as a result of Musasir’s loss, and highlighted the transgenerational trauma he had intentionally created: ‘I caused cries of mourning to be uttered throughout the entire land Urartu and established wailing in the land Na’iri for all future time’ (Frame, Reference Frame2014).

The destruction of Musasir’s temple is just one of numerous instances of intentional, politically motivated heritage crime throughout recorded history. Though much of this demolition has taken place during wars, in more recent times the targets have also been domestic. Intentional destruction of cultural heritage by a polity that targets a minority is known by several names today. In genocide studies, it is often called ‘cultural genocide’, especially while describing offences that are interlinked with the targeted oppression against a collectivity. In legal scholarship, ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ have been used, particularly in recent developments at the ICC. In institutional circles the term ‘cultural cleansing’ has been used as well. As already discussed, the term heritage crime, unlike cultural property crime, also covers this crime, though the namesake field of heritage crime is primarily dominated by the private property paradigm, which renders the general term of ‘heritage crime’ inadequate in conveying the intentional, systemic, and systematic nature of a polity’s deliberate targeting of heritage. Notably, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s Reference Prosecutor2021 policy on the issue acknowledged that ‘cultural heritage’ is a more appropriate term than ‘cultural property’ since the former ‘more properly reflects the rich corpus of human achievement’ (Prosecutor, Reference Prosecutor2021).

Despite the inconsistent terminology, the issue of cultural heritage and cultural property has been a pivotal matter during and after conflicts, not least because cultural destruction has been a weapon of war for millennia. The issue of cultural protection has typically followed major wars, making politically motivated heritage crime discourse interlinked with war and aggression. One of the earliest such discussions took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it was not until over a century later that the issue was given much more serious consideration. Let us unfold these developments.

At the 1815 Convention of Paris, states allied against France ordered Napoleon to return cultural property, even those acquired by treaty. Duke Wellington, who delivered the request, stated that the cultural damage was ‘contrary to the principles of justice and the rules of modern war’ (Kaye, Reference Kaye and Simpson1997). A Pan-American document dealing with the protection of material heritage was organised as the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments, commonly known as the Roerich Pact. Adopted on 15 April 1935 and signed by most of the countries in the Americas, the Roerich Pact stated that ‘historic monuments, museums, scientific, artistic, educational and cultural institutions’ of any kind ‘shall be considered as neutral’ and will be protected and respected ‘[w]ithout any discrimination as to the State allegiance of said monuments and institutions’ (Protection, 1935).

The aftermath of wartime heritage crime was often addressed through repatriation. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, for example, compelled Germany to return artefacts and archives back to France that had been illicitly acquired in the wars of 1870–1871 and during the First World War. Even so, existing laws during and after the Great War did not necessarily translate to protection of cultures. None of the international discussions at the time seemed concerned about cultural property and sacred sites under the perpetrator’s territorial control. In 1918, the Soviet Union declared all cultural property as state property, paving the way for the destruction of numerous religious structures in the 1930s during the Stalinist Terror (Pospielovsky, Reference Pospielovsky1988).

Much of the law on cultural property protects monuments from being stolen, looted, and transferred. This projects the assumption that perpetrators of cultural destruction are believed to have an appreciation for their targets, at least for economic considerations. The Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, adopted at The Hague, is unique in its comprehensiveness and detail. While commonly associated with the Second World War, it had earlier roots in the Hague Regulations on warfare conduct that were first adopted in 1899, and the Convention was adopted in 1954. Stating that its purpose is ‘the safeguarding of and respect for’ cultural property, it prohibits destruction of monuments during war with the exception of a waiver of protection ‘only in cases where military necessity imperatively requires’. One bold difference between this Convention and the 1899/1907 Hague Regulations and the Roerich Pact is retribution. This may have been the first time when destruction of cultural sites was explicitly called to codify prosecution: Article 28 states that ‘The High Contracting Parties undertake to take, within the frameworks of their ordinary criminal jurisdiction, all necessary steps to prosecute and impose penal or disciplinary sanctions upon those persons, of whatever nationality, who commit or order to be committed a breach of the present Convention (Hague, 1954). Furthermore, Article 53 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and Article 16 of Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions reinforce the protection of ‘historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples’, with destruction explicitly designated as a ‘grave breach’ in Additional Protocol I, Art. 85(4)(d), bearing individual criminal responsibility.

But what if the destruction is done by a sovereign on its own territory? The 2003 UNESCO Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage was the first international instrument to explicitly address the issue of deliberate cultural destruction by a potential actor in trust. It expresses ‘serious concern about the growing number of acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage’ (UNESCO, 2003), suggesting in a sense that this crime is quite new. The Declaration also acknowledges that issues related to cultural destruction not covered by it ‘will continue to be governed by the principles of international law, the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience’.

International law is not the only means of protecting culture. States have national regulations for protecting cultural heritage. The constitution of one of the case study perpetrator regimes, for instance, states that ‘[e]veryone must respect and care for historical, cultural and spiritual heritage, protect historical and cultural monuments’ (Azerbaijan, 2009). As a group of international parliamentarians has noted in their written note to UNESCO (Memorandum, 2006), by eradicating Armenian heritage on its territory, Azerbaijan has violated its own Constitution.

Just because ‘cultural genocide’ has failed to materialise as a legal mechanism, it does not mean that politically motivated heritage crime has no prosecutorial precedent or prospect. On the contrary, in 2021 the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC, which prosecutes individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and the crime of genocide, clarified the importance of prosecuting heritage crime perpetrated in the context of the former by issuing an important policy paper. This policy paper was built on a crucial case that occurred half a decade earlier. In the precedent-setting 2016 Al Mahdi case involving a key perpetrator of the destruction of Muslim religious sites in Timbuktu, Mali, the ICC underlined the non-material value of cultural destruction. In the reparation order the following year, the ICC Trial Chamber acknowledged the ‘purpose and symbolism’ of ‘cultural property and cultural heritage’, their ‘unique’ and ‘sentimental value’, explaining by referencing an expert opinion that their ‘destruction thus carries a message of terror and helplessness; destroys part of humanity’s shared memory and collective consciousness, and renders humanity unable to transmit its values and knowledge to future generations’ (ICC, 2017).

In 2021, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor, building upon its decision against Ahmad al-Faqi al Mahdi in the Mali case, formulated a policy on cultural heritage (Prosecutor, Reference Prosecutor2021). Significantly, the same year marked a key breakthrough in sovereign heritage crime: the 7 December 2021 provisional measures injunction by the ICJ that orders Azerbaijan – under the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) – to ‘prevent and punish’ destruction of Armenian monuments (ICJ, 2021). While the final decision is pending, the emergency decision acknowledges that CERD may plausibly be applicable to discriminatory targeting of cultural heritage (Watenpaugh, Reference Watenpaugh2021; Gureghian-Hall, Reference Gureghian-Hall2022, Reference Gureghian-Hall2024). Most notably, tying cultural destruction to plausible racial discrimination expands opportunities for protecting threatened heritage: in general, discrimination does not have to be an intentional act.Footnote ¹ Politically motivated heritage crime received tremendous attention in 2014 when the terrorist group identifying as the ‘Islamic State’ of the Levant, most commonly known as ISIS, deliberately attacked heritage sites in Syria and Iraq. Much of this destruction was self-publicised, calculated to create fear and project power.Footnote ² Heritage crime researchers widely investigated this destruction, including through the use of satellite technologies, though the latter had been already used for documentation several years earlier, starting with the pioneer satellite investigation into Azerbaijan’s destruction erasure of Djulfa – the world’s largest field of khachkar headstones – by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in collaboration with this author (AAAS, 2010).

CERD might not be the only framework for fighting sovereign heritage crime, but the alternatives are rather conceptual. Edward C. Luck and other expert practitioners associated with The Getty, for example, have emphasised the potential relevance of ‘responsibility to protect’ or R2P, which effectively envisions the permissibility of violating a sovereign’s territorial integrity if it is engaged in atrocities on its own territory. Largely basing his case on non-state extremist actors’ vandalisms in Syria, Mali, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Luck argues that ‘[t]he threat to cultural heritage is emerging as a first-tier challenge to the established international order, yet it has been treated until now as a second- or third-tier policy priority’ (Luck, Reference Luck2020: 5).

Politically motivated discriminatory heritage crime is a serious concern. While these types of crimes often occur during wars and are typically perpetrated by aggressor states or by extremist non-state actors, the two major cases of cultural erasure in the first quarter of the twenty-first century studied here merit consideration, not least because of some unique features. It is not the lack of laws that leads to sovereign heritage crime.

5 Politicising the Past

Why is the past politicised, and why is minority culture marginalised in conflicts? The instrumentalisation of memory, history, and heritage, which sometimes – but not always – entails heritage crime, is a relatively well-researched area, despite the absence of a consensus on theoretical frameworks for dissecting such policies and practices. The Destruction of Memory summarises cultural destruction of an adversarial collectivity ‘as a means of dominating, terrorising, dividing or eradicating it altogether’ (Bevan, Reference Bevan2006: 8). Bevan differentiates between wartime and peacetime destruction, and acknowledges that more than purely political factors may also be at the heart of some destruction processes:

Discriminatory assaults on cultural heritage have been argued to be violations of human rights (Behzadi, Reference Behzadi2020). Cultural rights, activist circles increasingly chant, are human rights. Scholars and practitioners have argued that the real target of politically motivated discriminatory assaults on monuments and sites are the people whose lives are – as Islamic art scholar Stephennie Mulder once noted in a social media post – made meaningful by those heritage objects. Much of the thinking of ‘cultural rights’ was challenged in the 1990s, when the phenomenon was acknowledged to be an ‘under-developed category of human rights’ (Symonides, Reference Symonides1998). Since then, the issue has become more mainstream, including in global organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross, which in 2017 declared that ‘[a]ttacks on our cultural property are attacks on our humanity’ (I.C.R.C., 2017).

Since this study explores state-sponsored destruction of politically undesirable heritage in the context of ethnoterritorial conflicts, it is interested in why and how state actors erase in total destruction campaigns and how such behaviour can be exposed and pre-empted, which is why a human rights framework for cultural heritage is relevant here. Nevertheless, wider contexts of heritage politics shed light on the nuances of the topic. One of the most significant arguments for preservation is the notion that cultural destruction has been more than an assault on the targeted group. As Lucia Allais’s Designs of Destruction, which deconstructs the making of the contemporary global heritage, argues, ‘destruction may have been the [20th] century’s great unifying political experience …’ (Allais, Reference Allais2018: 8). She describes how the modern construction of the idea of a monument has been in response to the catastrophic events of the two world wars, culminating in UNESCO’s designation of key sites as protected World Heritage, noting that ‘The phrase “world heritage” was coined in 1965 in Washington, DC, during a White House Conference that had been convened to assess America’s interests in a shifting landscape of international cooperation’ (Allais, Reference Allais2018: 27). Other scholars have argued that some preservation efforts inadvertently amount to destruction, as Allais evokes in quoting a 1905 French language appeal on the importance of protecting cultural heritage from its loathers and lovers alike:

The current study, written within a political science framework that views the world as a complex competition for resources, primarily seeks to understand cultural destruction from the perspective of the perpetrator. Far too often, mass atrocities are seen in scholarship and much more so in everyday life as evil or delusion that escapes reason. Since the primary case of destruction studied is Azerbaijan’s 1997–2006 erasure of an estimated 28,000 medieval Armenian monuments – the entire known inventory of Armenian Christian heritage in the exclave of Nakhichevan (Naxçıvan) – it consults literature on nationalism, authoritarianism, and the broader Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict vis-à-vis history, heritage, and memory.

Nationalism and heritage has been extensively studied (Kohl and Tsetskhladze, Reference Kohl, Tsetskhladze, Kohl and Fawcett1995; Handler, Reference Handler1988; Smith A. D., Reference Smith2000; Meskell, 2002; Labadi, Reference Labadi2007; Macdonald, Reference Macdonald2010; Silverman, Reference Silverman2010; Aitchison, Reference Aitchison2013; Díaz-Andreu and Champion, Reference Díaz-Andreu and Champion2014), but relatively less attention has been paid to the context of cultural heritage and authoritarianism, with exceptions like area or epoch specific studies, including the systematic utilisation of archaeology in Nazi Germany (Arnold, Reference Arnold1992; Reference Arnold2006), Victor Shnirelman’s scholarship documenting and analysing Soviet impacts on nationalistic historiographies in constituent Soviet then post-Soviet independent republics (Shnirelman, Reference Shnirelman2001), and studies on China (Zhu and Maags, Reference Zhu and Maags2020). While political science offers different levels of analysis, from global systems to the personal levels, some scholars have underlined the role of individuals in politicising the past. Clive Foss, for example, while a specialist on one particular leader’s obsession with history, has comparatively studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century authoritarian rulers’ instrumentalisation of antiquity, including in France, Italy, Turkey, and Germany, concluding that ‘dictators [have taken] special pleasure in utilising antiquity to boost their own power and secure … their legitimacy and their own place in history’ (Foss, Reference Foss and Sekunda2020).

Dictatorial instrumentalisation of history and antiquity is not just a relic of the past. Historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, as partly quoted earlier, as follows in a 1993 New York Review of Books essay based on a prior speech, in a message that continues to ring true today:

Hobsbawm’s timeless message is particularly resonant at the time of this writing, given authoritarian countries’ – particularly Russia’s (Shlapentokh, Reference Shlapentokh2022) and Azerbaijan’s (Dorfmann-Lazarev, Reference Dorfmann-Lazarev, Dorfmann-Lazarev and Khatchadourian2023) – instrumentalisation of curious narratives of history to justify hostilities against neighbours. With the world in a ‘democratic recession’ (Diamond, Reference Diamond2015), authoritarians’ instrumentalisation of history – including, and especially, through the employment of heritage crime – is a subject that merits understanding and analysis beyond studies of nationalism.

To illustrate the need for a precise diagnosis and to trace the transformation of this study that has identified a framework to explain politically motivated discriminatory heritage crime, let the reader consider a question that for two decades had been posed to the author. When, as early as late December 2005, the author started investigating and writing about Azerbaijan’s destruction of the world’s largest medieval Armenian cemetery of Djulfa (also transliterated as Julfa, both names derived from the original Armenian toponym of Jugha), it was often asked – in light of the 1990s Armenian–Azerbaijani war over the disputed region of Nagorno–Karabakh and the mutual bloodlettings and displacements that it caused – whether Armenians had done the same to Azerbaijani mosques and cemeteries.

The answer of ‘no’ was always unconvincing, often including the author, because it would make sense in the mind of a rational person for conflicting nations to engage in mutual cultural destruction. Gradually, however, to the author realised that – even though parties to an ethnic conflict are rarely blameless – there are other examples of specific monuments becoming asymmetrical victims of heritage crime, even when the heritage of all parties is harmed in some way. András J. Riedlmayer, in his report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on the destruction of cultural heritage during the armed conflicts of the 1990s, detailed that while the heritage of every culture had suffered due to the wars, there was widespread and systematic targeting of the Croat and especially Muslim communities of Bosnia (Riedlmayer, Reference Riedlmayer2002). Drawing parallels with the Balkan experience, however, does not automatically offer an explanation as to why a specific group’s heritage is targeted by a specific regime, when others with the same opportunities refrain from such violent choices. The combination of authoritarianism bordering on totalitarianism and ultra-nationalism has, intuitively, felt like the right answer. But it was not until the writing of this study – twenty years into the author’s investigative research into cultural erasure and the struggle to make a realistic and precise sense of it – that the key political processes of politically motivated discriminatory erasure of an entire community’s cultural heritage were identified, as discussed later. While state-sponsored erasure of cultural heritage is a specific political decision, anxieties over the material past of a perceived enemy are relatively common, especially if there is a widespread perception of an existential crisis.

Ontological security studies have considered existentiality and conflict, including in exploring identity and ontological security (Kinnvall, Reference Kinnvall2004; Mitzen, Reference Mitzen2006) and, particularly, ‘victimhood nationalism’ (Lerner, Reference Lerner2020). This might be an important window into the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict in general and its multidirectional memory of trauma, in particular, relevant, especially in light of Azerbaijan’s political elites obsessing with a strong victimhood narrative following the 1990s war over Nagorno–Karabakh.Footnote ³ Ontological security studies have been helpful in explaining anxieties in ethnoterritorial conflicts, especially those associated with memory and trauma (Innes and Steele, Reference Innes, Steele, Resende and Budryte2013), anxieties that are often dismissed as expressions of ‘nationalism’. Further application of ontological security studies may, at first, appear to justify sovereign heritage crime under concepts such as ‘normative threat’ (Creppell, Reference Creppell2011). Another important discussion within ontological security is the extent to which an insecure identity contributes to conflict (Abulof, Reference Abulof2009). The latter might better align with nationalistic narratives more popular in Armenia that claim that the Aliyev regime of Azerbaijan has an inferiority complex and that the Azerbaijani identity’s fluidity and relative recent construction may be grounds for insecurities that contribute to hatred toward Armenian history and heritage. More nuanced and comprehensive explorations of these matters – including considering rethinking, as Ayse Zarakol (Reference Zarakol2017) suggests, the overappreciated importance of ontological security to states – might help to better understand the construction process of securitising heritage. That ontological security is a key to the security aspect of heritage also becomes apparent from the way Azerbaijani and Chinese officials have spoken about the cultures they have respectively targeted, by often denying their existence in the first place to begin with, or – in China’s case – arguing that Xinjiang is home to thousands of [not destroyed] mosques. This denial is not just a cover-up of a crime, but a part of it.

The campaigns in Nakhichevan and Xinjiang have much to inform political science, law, and heritage crime studies. Their uniqueness has shaped investigative methods (AAAS, 2010; ASPI, 2020; Maghakyan, Reference Maghakyan2021; CHW, 2022). Their scale and scope are a reminder that states remain the most resourceful and, thus, most dangerous actors. While there are only two major contemporary cases of these types of major heritage crime, understanding them will help to better predict and, ideally, prevent similar crimes.

6 Case Studies

‘If one were to remove these … shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural, and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong’. These were the words of Rahile Dawut, a well-known Uyghur academic who documented Islamic shrines across Xinjiang. The Turkic Uyghur region in China is officially called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, shortened as XUAR, also referred to as East Turkistan or Uyghuristan by many Uyghurs and their supporters. Dawut’s words, quoted in The Guardian (Kuo, Reference Kuo2019), were pronounced in 2012, five years before the monuments’ – and her own – disappearance. In 2017, her prediction came true: China launched a campaign of massively destroying or architecturally altering Uyghur’s religious heritage, primarily mosques, as part of a larger ongoing assault on the Turkic population.

Oppression in Xinjiang, like everywhere, did not start overnight and stemmed from or was justified by security concerns. One might argue that the ‘cultural genocide’ – that is, gradual ‘ethnocide’ through social engineering (Han settlement) of Xinjiang – started much earlier, but the sovereign heritage crime relevant to this study reportedly started around 2017, as one scholar explains,

The destruction of the Uyghur heritage that started in 2016 or 2017 has received considerable media attention in the West, probably because China is the United States’ geopolitical adversary. However, there has been limited scholarly consideration of the matter. One of the major reports related to this was published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in September 2020 (ASPI, 2020). The researchers surveyed 533 mosques in Xinjiang, finding that 170 had been destroyed (31.9%), 175 sustained damage (32.8%), and 188 were intact (35.3%). Based on this sample survey, they inferred that a rough estimate of 8,500 mosques have been flattened in recent years. Some Chinese officials previously argued that mosques had become gathering places or recruitment centres for extremists, while simultaneously denying the destruction (Reuters, 2020). The claim that mosques are gathering places for extremists – and, thus, ‘legitimate’ targets – is weakened by the fact that, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s report, other Uyghur Islamic sacred sites (including shrines and cemeteries, which are not alleged to have been gathering spaces) have a similar rate of being destroyed as mosques: approximately 30 per cent. The methodology for investigating this destruction was remote sensing technology, using before-and-after satellite images of the sacred spaces in question (which has been cited by other reputable sources, including an expert report by a group of barristers), which compels a discussion of the dual uses of technology in state crimes.

7 Proposal: Sovereign Heritage Crime

Existing terminology in heritage crime and related studies does not capture the combination of (1) sovereign agency, (2) systematic and covert implementation, and (3) discriminatory intent; therefore, a new analytic category is needed. Nor is there a framework for predicting such crimes. Since statist campaigns of cultural erasure in their own jurisdictions are distinct, deliberate, and extraordinary measures, these state-sponsored heritage crimes are not typical cases of wartime destruction, let alone ‘ordinary’ vandalism. Azerbaijan’s and China’s erasure of respective Armenian and Uyghur heritage is intentional, systemic, systematic, and committed by the sovereign government. While these campaigns are politically motivated, like war crimes and heritage crime perpetrated by non-state actors, they are distinct due to the involvement of a party in trust. In short, the distinction between the erasure of Armenian and Uyghur cultures and other well-known politically motivated heritage crimes like the targeting of cultural monuments by ISIS is that the perpetrator in the former is the internationally recognised sovereign. Terminology that portrays the specific act – heritage crime – and the actor – the party in trust, that is, the sovereign – captures the nature and projects the specificity of Azerbaijan’s and China’s respective campaigns.

Sovereign heritage crimes are intentional and calculated policies by the state to discriminate against a collectivity. These crimes are systematic: they do not happen independently or sporadically, as their perpetration is state policy. These crimes are systemic: they are typically large-scale and involve hundreds of sites. These crimes are covert, the state does not acknowledge the erasure, let alone proactively publicise it, an aspect that highlights the importance of the forensic component – typically conducted through satellite studies – and the preventative and prosecutorial challenges given the jurisdictional circumstances.

Classifying ‘sovereign heritage crime’, therefore, does three things: First, it makes it evident that a trusted party is perpetrating the crime. Second, it recognises that states should not be automatically deemed to be acting in good faith. Third, the term also projects the inherent forensic and prosecutorial challenges when dealing with a state perpetrator. The terminology builds upon state crime literature (Chambliss, Reference Chambliss, Michalowski and Kramer2013; Hutchings and Salle, Reference Hutchings and Salle2017), but new terminology alone is not helpful: More important than a new term is explaining why sovereign heritage crime takes place, that is, what the motivation and methodology of the perpetrator is, so that similar acts can be anticipated and, ideally, prevented.

Some may critique this terminology due to its on-the-surface resonance with ‘sovereign violence’, a term describing a state’s inherent ‘right’ to use violence in the pursuits of its interest. ‘Sovereign violence’ has been argued to be both legal and illegal (Newman, Reference Newman2004), and the terminology has various connotations. However, the term ‘sovereign heritage crime’ does not leave room for such equivocation because of the inclusion of the term ‘crime’. Others may argue that ‘politically motivated heritage crime’ or ‘state-sponsored heritage crime’ or ‘state heritage crime’ are better and more inclusive terms. In this case, however, inclusivity is not helpful: a state is expected to protect, not eradicate, heritage. Therefore, a state’s engagement in heritage crime is not comparable to that of private actors or aggressor states. ‘Sovereign’ clarifies the perpetrator’s status.

Classifying and labelling a crime, however descriptive, is not enough. The sovereign heritage crime framework can be ‘problem-solving’ only if it fundamentally explains the processes of erasure, makes predictions, and offers prescriptions. To accomplish the latter, this study interweaves a tripartite theoretical framework comprising securitisation, permanent security, and performance legitimacy. These theoretical frameworks have not been used in conjunction before, but in this case jointly offer compelling and instructive explanations.

8 Heritage Securitisation

Securitisation – the construction of something into an existential threat – was introduced by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde in the 1990s. According to securitisation theory, threats can be constructed and addressed through military, environmental, economic, societal, and political sectors, though there is often a synthesis among two or more: In speaking about the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict, for example, they note that the issue is both societal and political (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 136). The scholars emphasise the political nature of security and securitisation alike:

Securitisation theory distinguishes between a ‘securitising move’ and ‘successful securitisation’, with the former being the attempt and the latter requiring some acceptance (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 25). In either scenario, they note, ‘it is always a political choice to securitise or to accept a securitisation’ (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 29). Securitisation, therefore, is not so much about objective security but what key stakeholders perceive to be – and, more importantly, benefit from – security. Real and imminent threats can allow securitisation to become a tool for something other than security: national security, for instance, enables powerholders ‘to claim a right to handle something with less democratic control and constraint’ (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 29). Even in the noblest of pursuits, ‘The defense of state and sovereignty will tend to strengthen those in power’ (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 123). In other words, securitisation tends to benefit the party ‘solving the problem’. Nothing should therefore be more beneficial than permanently solving a security problem.

Can heritage – such as the sacred material past of an adversary group – be securitised? While Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde do not discuss heritage securitisation, they refer to identity and sovereignty, among others, as the referent object in need of protection, paving the way for scholarship on heritage securitisation, which is in its early stages. One of the first uses of the term ‘heritage securitisation’ that comprehends and expands Buzan et al.’s framework to include heritage conceptualises conflict-related cultural destruction, such as Azerbaijan’s erasure of the Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan, the post-Yugoslavian wars, and the 2010s destruction of heritage by the terrorist group ISIS, through societal security (Puskás, Reference Puskás2021). While Puskás’s revised approach is a welcome transformation from an atypical application of securitisation theory in which the latter framework is used to describe Western policies responding to organised threats against tangible cultural heritage (Foradori et al., Reference Foradori, Giusti and Lamonica2018; Puskás, Reference Puskás2019; Russo and Giusti, Reference Russo and Giusti2019), securitisation practices in ethnoterritorial conflicts are typically multidimensional and should, therefore, be explained not by one sector but by a combination of sectors (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 136). Another recent research, building upon Russo and Giusti, Reference Russo and Giusti2019 and Puskás, Reference Puskás2019’s definition of ‘heritage securitisation’, likewise partly departs from the original application of securitisation theory, but persuasively incorporates ontological security framework to explain anxieties associated with an authoritarian actor’s acquisition of historical properties (Kazharski, 2024), an important consideration given that, as another scholar argues, ‘[v]ulnerability is a legitimising necessity, a condicio sine qua non of securitisation’ (Markiewicz, Reference Markiewicz2024). More broadly, the growing recognition of the need to systematically study heritage and security (Legnér, Reference Legnér2017; Christensen, Reference Christensen2022; Rosén, Reference Rosén, Finkelstein, Gillman and Rosén2022; Lazzaretti, Reference Lazzaretti2024) underscores the importance of integrating securitisation theory to understand sovereign heritage crime.

Heritage securitisation can be defined as the construction of disquieting material memories or that of the tangible heritage associated with a perceived adversary – into an ontological threat. This definition both corresponds with Buzan et al.’s pioneering framework of securitisation and clarifies the foundational logic of sovereign heritage crime. An example of securitised heritage in ethnoterritorial conflict – regardless if it is based on a genuine anxiety or is a justification for criminal behaviour – is a quote from an online forum, in which an anonymous user once explained the systematic destruction of a famed medieval cemetery associated with an aggrieved minority as pre-emption of potential aggression: ‘for those resting under the cross-stones, the living ones will come with arms’ (qtd in Maghakyan, Reference Maghakyan2006a). The fact that similar pronunciations are rarely officially made by state bodies that engage in sovereign heritage crime, however, pinpoints to specific nuances of heritage securitisation that do not fully align with first generation securitisation studies: for instance, traditional securitisation entails ‘the speech act’ (Buzan et al., Reference Buzan, Wæver and Wilde1998: 26–27), whereas heritage in ethnoterritorial conflict is securitised more subtly, and sovereign heritage crime – like most crimes against humanity – is traditionally committed covertly. Subtlety of the Speech Act is important because it parallels the intentional aspect of the legal definition of genocide. A majority of criminals do not publicise their criminal intent, and certainly in the twenty-first-century age of ‘informational autocracy’ (Guriev and Treisman, Reference Guriev and Treisman2020), every autocrat intends to come across as legitimate and democratic. Nevertheless, no theoretical framework explains how an entire cultural heritage can ‘become’ a threat better than securitisation. But that alone is not enough to explain sovereign heritage crime, because while securitisation of heritage is common across ethnoterritorial conflicts, sovereign heritage crime is not.

9 Permanent Security and Heritage

How can heritage securitisation lead to sovereign heritage crime? In other words, why do escalated anxieties over an aggrieved minority’s material memories lead to the latter’s erasure? This question is indirectly addressed by a seminal work that challenges the entire academic field of genocide studies and the way that military operations are perceived by the wider public, which argues that wars and mass atrocities should be understood not as different phenomena but as campaigns of ‘permanent security’ (Moses, Reference Moses2021). The concept of ‘genocide’, according to Moses, has effectively normalised mass killings in responses to real or imagined threats that are much more effectively communicated to publics, especially by Western actors, in the name of ‘permanent security’, a term the scholar adopts from one Nazi’s justification of Germany’s Second World War–era actions. Moses proposes that real or imagined threats are securitised by perpetrators in both ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ permanent security pursuits. While securitisation, as discussed earlier, is a well-researched field of its own with compelling assumptions and predictable propositions, Moses demonstrates how specific people – and by extension their cultures – are securitised in every conflict. ‘Permanent security’ is the envisioned enduring safety in such military campaigns, regardless of how they are conducted:

In the eyes of the perpetrator, sovereign heritage crime is ‘permanent security’. While Moses’s scholastic goal entails rethinking the assumption that ‘genocide’ is a monumental crime – because that thinking inadvertently helps to justify ‘liberal’ mass civilian killings – the studied cases of sovereign heritage crime are illiberal permanent security campaigns, requiring further examination of the suitability of ‘permanent security’ framework to state-sponsored cultural destruction. Moses portrays ‘permanent security’ campaigns as panic politics – acts of delusion, paranoia, and hysteria. To imagine that cancelling an entire material past can create a better future is possible, but hysteria presupposes public moods – if not pressure for – in support of such campaigns. There is no evidence to suggest that the total sovereign heritage crime in Nakhichevan and the limited sovereign heritage crime in Xinjiang are popular practices, or that there can be any military objective – however perverted – for dedicating massive resources to systematically eradicate an entire historical landscape. On the contrary, such erasures are not driven by ‘delusional rationality’, which is a common explanation of genocidal logic, but by what the author has proposed elsewhere to be understood as ‘regime rationality’ (Maghakyan, Reference Maghakyan2025).

Securitisation and ‘permanent security’, therefore, do not comprehensively explain why sovereign heritage crimes take place. But since both perpetrators – Azerbaijan and China – are affluent autocracies or resource-rich states where politics are monopolised – and since a key deficiency of autocracies is legitimacy, the latter – as Azerbaijani dissident historian Arif Yunus has intuitively alluded to by stating that ‘Nothing projects the Aliyev dictatorship’s power to Azerbaijani dissidents like committing cultural genocide in Nakhichevan then showering in international praises of tolerance’ (Yunus, 2018, personal communication, originally published in Maghakyan and Pickman, Reference Maghakyan and Pickman2019) – is the third proposed component, along with heritage securitisation and permanent security, for understanding heritage crime.

10 Performance Legitimacy

Legitimation of power has long been a subject of research, including in the celebrated works of David Beetham and Max Weber. In recent years, however, more specific scholarship has considered the curious conduct of autocracies in relation to legitimacy. One key proposition is the term ‘sharp power’ (Walker and Ludwig, Reference Walker and Ludwig2017), which emerged in 2017 to describe authoritarian regimes’ attempts as seeking a shortcut to ‘soft power’ – the latter being a popular term that Joseph Nye proposed in the 1980s to describe how countries use their culture and appeal to influence the world, as opposed to the ‘hard power’ of military and economic might (Nye, Reference Nye2004). ‘Sharp power’ was largely introduced to describe China’s, and to a lesser degree Russia’s, attempts to bribe and manipulate Western thinking about their regimes, but the framework is helpful in understanding the lobbying and other outreach activities in the West conducted by resource-rich authoritarian regimes, like Azerbaijan and the Gulf states. While ‘sharp power’ does not explain why some countries engage in the total erasure of cultural heritage, the latter can certainly explain why the former is sought.Footnote ⁵

Resonating with this study, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have advanced several propositions that explain – albeit often from an economic angle, yet ultimately addressing political processes – how and why dictators manipulate and benefit from information and public relations. The scholarly duo has developed ‘an informational theory’ of authoritarian legitimacy-seeking, arguing that ‘[d]ictators survive not because of their use of force or ideology but because they convince the public – rightly or wrongly – that they are competent’ (Guriev and Treisman, Reference Guriev and Treisman2015). In subsequent publications, they have suggested specific phraseology for this phenomenon, offering terminology like ‘informational autocrats’ (Guriev and Treisman, Reference Guriev and Treisman2019) and ‘spin dictators’ (Guriev and Treisman, Reference Guriev and Treisman2022).

Guriev’s and Treisman’s research expands the concept of ‘performance legitimacy’, which they aptly described, with some departure from original theories, ‘as a perceived competence at securing prosperity and defending the nation against external threats’ (Guriev and Treisman, Reference Guriev and Treisman2015). Pioneering studies by Zhao (Reference Zhao2009) and Zhu (Reference Zhu2011) on ‘performance legitimacy’ in China have been bases for further explorations of the concept, including by scholars who employed quantitative methodology to assess the effectiveness of ‘performance legitimacy’, concluding that ‘the performance which matters is not so much economic as political’ (Munro, Reference Munro2013). While economics has been an integral part of studying ‘performance legitimacy’, this study has borrowed the political sense of the concept, particularly since Guriev’s and Treisman’s definition of performance legitimacy is partly an ontological competency test for ‘defending the nation against external threats’. As Arif Yunus’s already quoted insight regarding Azerbaijan’s domestic power-projection suggests, however, the ability to evade responsibility is the key factor in using sovereign heritage crime for performance legitimacy. Both China and Azerbaijan, including through their financial charm offensives toward UNESCO – the global organisation that is expected to criticise heritage crime – possess the resources to evade responsibility. Azerbaijan, for instance, launched the first part of the campaign of eradicating Armenian culture in 1997, an important year of major oil contracts and finalised the erasure starting in late 2005, just months after unveiling a major oil pipeline. China, as the world’s largest economy, is by default affluent enough to assume that it can get away with sovereign heritage crime. In both instances, evading responsibility for such monumental crimes is a projection of near-absolute power. It is, therefore, an act of legitimation. Taken together, heritage securitisation, permanent security, and what one might call affluent performance legitimacy offer a fundamental explanation for sovereign heritage crime. While a theoretical framework explaining sovereign heritage crime is helpful for prediction and prevention, the study also compels a consideration of the role of conventional and emerging technologies in perpetration and detection.

11 Technologies for Human Rights and Wrongs

Covert execution and cover-up are defining features of sovereign heritage crime, making questions of detection and documentation central to understanding how such state-sponsored erasures operate. Because perpetrators control the territory, restrict access, censor internal reporting, and deny wrongdoing, investigators have increasingly turned to remote sensing and other open-source methodologies to document cultural destruction. What began as a set of experimental tools has, over the past two decades, become a central component of human rights research. In the process, technologies originally designed for power have been repurposed for justice, enabling investigators to expose the destruction that sovereigns seek to conceal. This section briefly discusses the dual use of technologies in the context of sovereign heritage crime.

12 Discussion and Conclusion

This concluding section synthesises the conceptual, comparative, and methodological lessons emerging from the study of sovereign heritage crime, evaluates the broader significance of the term, and reflects on pathways for documentation, interpretation, and prevention. It revisits the relationships among securitisation theory, permanent security, performance legitimacy, and authoritarian governance, using the extreme yet instructive cases of Nakhichevan and Xinjiang to clarify the processes through which some states destroy securitised material pasts within their own jurisdictions. Finally, the section assesses the prospects and limits of sovereign heritage crime as a conceptual category and a practical tool for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.