Introduction
Cultural heritage sites and national cultural treasures are frequently targeted in war. The protection of cultural heritage from armed conflict and destruction is sold to global audiences as a way of avoiding humanity being fragmented into conflictual antagonistic spaces, instead promoting imaginings of a shared humanity, transcending national dividing lines. Yet, it would be erroneous to disregard the militarismFootnote 1 and securitisationFootnote 2 and other disagreementsFootnote 3 that surround cultural protection. As former United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Director-General Irinia Bokova has noted: ‘culture has moved to the frontline of war, both as collateral damage and as a target for belligerents who use its destruction to foster violence, hatred and vengeance … weakening the foundations of peace’.Footnote 4
Such cultural cleansing is detrimental to the peaceful and universal ambitions of UNESCO, which is often viewed as the vanguard of cultural protection. It is also inconsistent with the logics of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, adopted 1954.Footnote 5 The Hague Convention specifically states that ‘irrespective of the people it belongs to’, cultural property is a concern for ‘all humanity, because every people contributes to the world’s culture’.Footnote 6
Here I propose that cultural protection in armed conflict is a cosmopolitan agenda, charging humanity at large with such protection.Footnote 7 However, this agenda is rooted in a western universalist tradition that produces policies and discourses that are both gendered and neocolonial in character. As such, it privileges western experiences and conceptions of rights and obligation as well as well as western forms of knowledge and expertise, while suppressing others.Footnote 8 Inevitably, this has led to western dominance in determining what cultural heritage should be awarded recognition and how to best protect it from destruction. Thus, ‘we need more scholarship making visible the many ways in which coloniality manifests itself in contemporary global normative theorising’ so as to challenge ‘the unequal distribution of epistemic respect’.Footnote 9 This also involves being sensitive to the gendered dynamics that surround cultural protection, not least the tendency to assign certain attributes to western actors, including rationality, chivalry, and competence, and feminising non-western others by reducing their knowledge and ability to fully protect their cultural treasures.
Gender is here understood as a relational social construct and performative act as well as a structured power relation, producing binaries between men and women, in particular in times of war, binaries that are also reproduced in international policies on cultural protection.Footnote 10 Drawing on Edward Said, I employ an understanding of colonialism as a form of military oppression and rule as well as domination of culture and language. While colonialism has formally ceased to exist in most parts of the world, people and nations continue to be subordinated and assigned the characteristics of chaos and corruption, setting them apart from a supposedly civilised west. These characterisations, as I will show below, tend to shape global responses to military protection of heritage. While national militaries and international organisations, including UNESCO, have increasingly come to recognise their shared responsibility to protect heritage in armed conflict, publishing military manuals to this effect,Footnote 11 there is still insufficient attention to the gendered and colonial undertones embedded in such policies, which in part at least is mirrored in scholarship.
By bringing together thinking on critical heritage studies, a tradition that seeks to challenge the western dominance that is inherent in heritage and its protection, philosophical and global ethical interventions on heritage, centring on cosmopolitanism and questions pertaining to when to employ military force to protect heritage, as well as feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, I suggest ways in which the wider field of heritage studies can be enriched. To this effect I make two distinct contributions, first, by providing a critical assessment of the western liberal cosmopolitan tradition that undergirds heritage protection, employing a gender and colonial lens, and proposing an alternative ethical framework that takes account of feminist ethical and decolonial ethical reasoning and is sensitive to care relations and embodied lived experiences. Second, I conduct a feminist narrative analysis of cultural protection, commencing with the broader storytelling surrounding heritage as well as the distinct narration of military heritage protection. Thus far, there have been few attempts to study heritage protection through a distinct feminist narrative lens, and my study seeks to fill this gap.Footnote 12
The article proceeds as follows. First I contextualise the study within critical heritage studies, which I pair with a discussion of cosmopolitanism and how to rearticulate its key premises through a gender and decolonial lens. The framework informs my critical assessment of the western cosmopolitan underpinnings of heritage protection in the latter parts of the article. I also suggest that philosophical engagements with the use of force for the purpose of protecting heritage as well as feminist engagements with militarism, masculinity, and protection provide analytical rigour in the unpacking of military responses to heritage protection in armed conflict. I then present my feminist narrative approach, including its theoretical underpinnings and how, practically, I conduct the analysis. While identifying the fabulae and plots employed in official documents on heritage protection, I stay sensitive to silences in those texts.Footnote 13 I am mindful of the ethical, gendered, and colonial dynamics of the storytelling that surrounds heritage. The analysis proceeds in two stages. First I unpack the wider context of heritage protection, and second, I unpack the specific narration of military protection in the UNESCO military manual published in 2016, staying sensitive to the ‘masculinist protection’ logics that underpin the document.Footnote 14 I pair this gender analysis with attentiveness to the privileging of western military knowledge in the storytelling about military protection in the UNESCO manual.Footnote 15 I conclude by arguing for a feminist ethical approach to heritage protection and propose some avenues for future research on military protection of heritage, in particular by highlighting the importance of engaging with embodied experiences of heritage.
Locating the study
Heritage studies is a well-established hybrid scholarly field, comprised of anthropology,Footnote 16 archaeology, and conservation,Footnote 17 amongst others. There is also growing interest in heritage within the field of conflict studies, diplomatic studies, and globalisation,Footnote 18 philosophy,Footnote 19 and, international relations.Footnote 20 These strands share an intellectual curiosity in how the past and present constitute each other and how this relationship shapes individual and group identities affecting people’s sense of belonging. Heritage studies initially was shaped by western ontologies, privileging western knowledge and expertise,Footnote 21 often favouring positivist categorisation and quantification, rather than intangible heritage.Footnote 22 Increasingly, scholars came to challenge the western and colonial gaze on heritage studies, favouring ‘a position that stresses pluralisation and a theoretical approach to heritage that better addresses the sociocultural pasts and futures for different regions of the world and recognises the need to de-centre Europe and the West in the way heritage’.Footnote 23 This requires asking questions with regard to ownership and whose heritage should be preserved and by whom, and what the role of humanity at large should be in offering such protection.
Ethical foundations of heritage: Cosmopolitanism and beyond
As I have proposed elsewhere, global heritage protection, in general terms and in times of armed conflict, rests on a broad cosmopolitan agenda. It centres on the idea that humanity has a shared responsibility for the protection of cultural and national heritage sites and artefacts that are ‘of outstanding universal value to humanity’.Footnote 24 However, this is an ethical imperative undergirded by tensions and disagreements with stakeholders varying in their conception of how to protect national and world heritage.Footnote 25 Thus, we need to stay attentive to such tensions and variations, asking whether the western cosmopolitan tradition inherent in heritage really is universally applicable? This requires scholarly engagement with cosmopolitanism’s rootedness in the enlightenment, notably the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and the idea that all human beings are part of a shared moral order of sorts. Within that order they have ethical obligations to the citizens of their own political communities and those of other nations, producing universal obligations to further the rights and freedoms of all people. Kant noted that this includes demonstrating hospitality to newcomers who enter new lands and political communities working together to achieve perpetual peace.Footnote 26 Thus, national borders have limited ethical relevance as humans are obliged to nurture the well-being of all people, including furthering their cultural rights. While many actors adhere to a moderate form cosmopolitanism, they rarely advocate the abolition of the state.Footnote 27 As David Held noted, ‘cosmopolitanism is concerned to disclose the ethical, cultural and legal basis of political order in a world where political communities and states matter, but not only and exclusively’.Footnote 28 Cosmopolitanism, then, is rarely pure, rather surrounded by ‘discourses of citizenship, patterns of exclusion and the symbolic meanings attached to these sites’.Footnote 29 It is also rooted in ‘colonialism and practices of racialisation’, dating back to Kant’s racialised treatment of non-white people as inferior to white and European people. Here Gani notes that ‘modern’ cosmopolitan thinkers, not least those within an interest in hospitality, have disregarded ‘the historical, racist context’ in which cosmopolitanism emerged.Footnote 30 This has produced scholarship and policy practices that have insufficiently questioned the colonial and ‘racist ontology and epistemology’ of cosmopolitan thinking.Footnote 31
Arguably, as Colwell and Joy note,Footnote 32 heritage protection is ‘most closely identified with a cosmopolitan project of universal human rights, though ‘this universalism is immediately brought into conversation with different forms of relativism’ producing a range of responses and preferences. Yet, western knowledge production and expertise, rooted in a colonial cosmopolitan project, historically have dominated heritage protection, in theory and in practice, producing practices that silence local and Indigenous knowledge and practices. We might ask, then, whether cosmopolitanism is a fruitful ethical platform for philosophical reasoning on and practices of heritage protection, and what are the alternatives?
One alternative is to approach heritage through the lens of mediated or dialogical cosmopolitanism, which concedes that cultural rights and responsibilities should be afforded to all people, though this universalism needs to be accompanied with care, dialogue, and empathy, so as to be mindful of the very people whose heritage is at risk.Footnote 33 This position resonates with a feminist ethics of care approach that is based on a relational ontology, enabling the study of morality in actual human relations and learning from their ethical experiences.Footnote 34 Rooted in social psychology, such an approach assumes that mothers, through the nurturing of their children, acquire moral care skills that transcend the family, for example making them particularly suitable for peacebuilding.Footnote 35 However, this position has been critiqued for being essentialist, inferring a range of skills from the act of maternal care. Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has critiqued ethics of care ‘within Western-centric assumptions and registers’.Footnote 36 As a result, global transformative processes, including the protection of heritage, are often imagined with the ‘normative white body’ in mind,Footnote 37 with global care provisions becoming ‘relations of domination, oppression, injustice, inequality, or paternalism’.Footnote 38 How can this dilemma be resolved? Here I propose that Fiona Robinson’s critical ethics of care could provide an alternative framework for deliberation heritage protection, in theory and in actual practice, by critiquing the ‘western liberal modes of domination’ in cosmopolitan approaches to cultural protection, while retaining a commitment to transnational anti-imperialist solidarities.Footnote 39 This is in line with Serene Khader’s feminist decolonisation of universalism. She proposes that ‘universalism could be part of an anti-imperialist feminist solution’ if it refrains from both colonialism, and what she labels missionary liberal feminism – a practice not dissimilar from the western dominance present in heritage protection – in favour of ‘real-world’ heritage care needs and embodied experiences, not least in times of conflict.
Heritage, armed conflict, and the use of force
To be sure, the protection of heritage is surrounded by disagreements and disputesFootnote 40 as well as militarisationFootnote 41 and violent conflict and cultural cleansing.Footnote 42 Such episodes increasingly are covered in the world’s media outlets, with, for example, the ISIS attacks on Palmyra in 2015 attracting a good deal of coverage.Footnote 43 Cultural cleansing leaves wounds in civilian populations in times of war and conflict. Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine has led to the destruction of 432 national heritage sites and cultural properties.Footnote 44 Such attacks tend to destabilise the nation’s identity, ‘history and culture’, producing embodied harms in civilian populations.Footnote 45 The destabilisation of identity fragments individual human beings’ sense of security, with the field of ontological security studies offering key insights here.Footnote 46 Rory Cox, a just war theorist, proposes that the destruction of heritage has a profound impact on people’s sense of ontological security, that is, the security of being, with their identities and daily whereabouts and routines being uprooted. This is particularly so when communities’ identities and collective memories are ‘deeply associated with certain sites, objects or practices’.Footnote 47 Yet, many heritage actors fail to address those embodied experiences of cultural cleansing.
Cultural cleansing can in the worst-case scenario lead to genocide, with militaries increasingly recognising that there is a connection between the destruction of heritage and mass killings. There is also attentiveness to the ways in which extremist and terrorist groups finance their illicit activities through looting, negatively impacting on the ontological security and sense of identity of civilians.Footnote 48 Meanwhile, national militaries and international forces have come to realise that protecting national heritage sites from armed conflict can be a productive military strategy. Through such protection, intervening military forces can build a closer report with local populations, which in turn might increase the chances of military victory.Footnote 49
The aforementioned examples point to the importance of asking when it is ethically permissible for military force to be employed to protect cultural sites, museums, libraries, and other artefacts.Footnote 50 Frowe and Matravers’ philosophical scholarship provides some insights here. Much of their scholarship centres on when, if ever, military force should be used to protect cultural heritage from the damage of armed conflict.Footnote 51 The Hague Convention holds that states are obliged to protect both people and heritage from the harms of armed conflict, a dual obligation that Frowe and Matravers define as the ‘Inseparability Thesis’.Footnote 52 Weiss and Connelly are of the view that the inseparability thesis should always guide the protection of cultural property.Footnote 53 Meanwhile, Frowe and Matravers are less convinced, pointing to the difficulty of adhering to this position, given that the protection of cultural property in the midst of conflict inevitably incurs loss of life, both civilian and military.Footnote 54 Frowe and Matravers also ask whether soldiers serving on international missions can be expected to sacrifice their lives for the sake of protecting the heritage of foreign lands, having little or no connection to the sites that are under threat.Footnote 55 My account thus far tells us that heritage protection, while located in a notional shared sense of ethical obligation, is a highly militarised and affective practice, which I turn to next.
Feminist engagements with armed conflict, masculinity, and protection
IR feminist scholars of war have long argued that war is an embodied and affective experience.Footnote 56 Christine Sylvester notes that ‘[t]o study war as experience requires that the human body come into focus as a unit that has agency in war and is also the target of war’s violence’.Footnote 57 The emphasis on embodied experience is also present in feminist disruptions of the heteronormative and abstract underpinnings of orthodox just war theory. As Laura Sjoberg posits, ‘an ethics of care recognizes war as an emotional experience, and the victims of war (soldiers and civilians) as human beings with dignity’.Footnote 58 In keeping with this position, heritage actors, not least militaries, need to be mindful of people’s distinct lived experiences of war and cultural destruction, with Cecilia Åse and Maria Wendt arguing that encounters with heritage sites are embodied militarised experiences, evoking emotional responses in people.Footnote 59
Feminists can help to capture such militarised and gendered dynamics of heritage protection.Footnote 60 Militarisation refers to war preparedness, which involves increased acquisition of arms and military expenditure and favouring military responses to crises, the escalation of violence, and armed conflict.Footnote 61 Militarisation, moreover, is sustained by military masculinities and other intersectional hierarchies, including class, ethnicity, age, and religion.Footnote 62 By considering such hierarchies and how they intersect with various forms of oppression, including colonialism and empire, we can acquire a sense of the power relations that undergird the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict.
Militarisation, moreover, is interconnected to violent forms of military masculinity.Footnote 63 Military masculinity is often upheld as a superior form of being a man, resting on bodily strength, rationality, aggression, endurance, and a willingness to engage in war.Footnote 64 The righteous soldier recognises the duty to protect the nation from foreign threat and destruction. Thus, protection is a gendered practice that rests on essentialist assumptions about the superiority of male bodies in offering protection. However, not all male bodies are trusted protectors, though, with western soldiers often being assumed to be superior and more rational than their counterparts in the global south.Footnote 65
In addition, not all soldiers are aggressive and overly militarised, rather adhering to what might be defined as masculinist protection. The masculinist protector is a chivalrous man whose primary obligation is to protect innocent lives from harm, not least those of women.Footnote 66 Moreover, he is courageous and virtuous, rather than violent and aggressive. He offers protection and is prepared to sacrifice his life for those he seeks to protect. The protected, often women, defer their decisions to his judgement, and in return she is offered protection and a sense of being safe and secure. Thus, ‘central to the logic of masculinist protection is the subordinate relation of those in the protected position’.Footnote 67
Thus, masculinist protection is a range of political and security relations in global politics. As Jeff Hearn tells us, masculinised protection has become firmly entrenched in global politics and security practices,Footnote 68 with few questions being raised about its destructive and gendered effects. For example, military interventionism is rooted in the idea that western (male) soldiers are particularly good at rescuing women beyond borders from oppression and harm.Footnote 69 Masculinist protection is also a feature of just war reasoning,Footnote 70 with dichotomised understandings of gender roles in war and conflict being employed within the theory, which assigns protection qualities to male bodies while victimising female bodies.
As I will go onto demonstrate, the UNESCO military manual unpacked below rests on language pertaining to the mythical nature of the masculinist protector, dedicated to international law and military protection of heritage. The western military commander is a privileged protagonist in the manual, charged with ‘masculinised leadership and protection’ while the ‘agency and voice’ of non-western actors is for the most part insignificant’.Footnote 71 Admittedly, UNESCO has recently sought to address some of the gender-blindness and coloniality of military heritage protection, though that commitment is absent from the UNESCO military manual.Footnote 72 Next, I turn to the methodological underpinnings of the narrative analysis conducted below.
A feminist narrative approach to the protection of heritage
Narrative analysis is employed in IR enquiry,Footnote 73 with several feminist accounts of gender, peace, and war resting on such a framework.Footnote 74 Laura Shepherd defines a narrative as ‘a particular configuration of a story…, a sequenced representation of events or experiences’.Footnote 75 They ‘produce meanings, articulate intentions, and legitimise actions’.Footnote 76 Thus, narratives are not neutral but are ‘always partial and necessarily exclude much in their telling’.Footnote 77 Through narration, global actors can ‘legitimise, authorise and value certain narratives over others.’Footnote 78 Narratives, then, have political implications, with some plots enjoying a dominant status in global relations. Those ‘grand narratives restrict which meanings are possible…and which are not’.Footnote 79 They also determine which solutions are prioritised and what political actions are taken.Footnote 80 Thus, a feminist narrative approach that is sensitive to power relations enables us to identify what meanings and solutions are prioritised and what forms of knowledge are upheld as superior in the storytelling about issues. This offers opportunities to identify both colonial and gendered language employed in international narratives. For example, my analysis below establishes that non-western forms of knowledge and heritage expertise often are subordinated to western military expertise in the narration of military protection.
Employing a feminist gaze on narratives, I identify both articulations and silences in the storytelling about heritage protection.Footnote 81 Feminist IR scholarship is particularly sensitive to the question of who gets to speak in international relations, and whose stories are silenced.Footnote 82 As Shepherd has observed ‘a narrative approach attends to which stories are told, and when, and which stories are (dis)counted’,Footnote 83 with states and other actors curating the contents (and silences) of their storytelling. Below, I pay equal attention to patterns of language use and ‘exclusion and silencing’, which involves being cognisant of how ‘particular bodies and voices…are not recognised as speaking subjects’.Footnote 84 In what follows I briefly reflect on the research process underpinning the narrative analysis below.
My approach below is informed by feminist approaches to narrative analysis, notably the post-structural position that the reader ‘has an active role in the construction of meaning’, allowing for a certain level of subjective interpretation.Footnote 85 Thus, the analysis is not an exercise in acquisition of ‘absolute knowledge’;Footnote 86 rather, my analytical effort is as a ‘researcher self’.Footnote 87
Both Wibben and Shepherd draw on Mieke Bal’s three layer narrative framework of text (medium), story (presentation), and fabula (content), and like Shepherd I limit my study to the text and fabula layers.Footnote 88 The text is the context ‘in which an agent or a subject conveys an addressee’.Footnote 89 Below I focus my analysis on the UNESCO constitution, the UNESCO and the Hague Conventions, and the UNESCO-endorsed military manual, while unpacking a select few other texts pertaining to heritage. The texts analysed provide the context for the fabulae developed in storytelling about heritage and heritage protection. A fabula, broadly speaking, is a ‘series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors, and the conjuring of connections between objects and subjects to marshal meaning’.Footnote 90 Drawing on Wibben, I recognise that the sequencing of events is but one aspect of the storytelling about heritage. A good deal of the content examined below centres not on the ordering of events but rather on characters as well as conceptions of global ethical obligation. Related to fabulae are plots – they help to answer how ethical messages, events, and actors are presented.Footnote 91 I recognise, in line with feminist narrative analysis, that stories often consist of multiple plots, depending on the features of the texts explored.Footnote 92 Below I identify the employment of several plots, not least those pertaining to how heritage protection is presented in the texts. In so doing I centre on the ethical, gendered, and colonial dynamics in the selected heritage texts, which, I argue, together form the morals of the wider narration of global heritage protection. I also identify a range of gendered and colonial silences, that is, voices and people that are not heard in the texts. I derive this silence from the western dominance in cultural protection, which in turn is rooted in western cosmopolitanism, expressed below, most notably in the privileging of international law as the main ethical plot.
I also consider the characters presented in the texts, with emphasis on UNESCO, state actors, and military staff. I unpack the characterisation of the central protagonists, rescuers, or victims in the texts and seek to identify what attributes and competences are ascribed to them. The analysis below proceeds in two stages: the first stage focuses on the mapping the wider storytelling that surround heritage, not least its cosmopolitan message and its silencing of coloniality and gender. The second part turns to the narration of military protection of heritage in armed conflict.
The first stage: The wider storytelling about heritage
Before I proceed, I should reiterate that I do not claim to produce ‘absolute knowledge’ about heritage in this part of the article,Footnote 93 instead providing a feminist-informed set of readings of heritage protection. Next, I unpack the fabulae (events, developments, and actors), the plot (how the contents are presented), and the characters employed in heritage storytelling, while staying attentive to the gendered and colonial dynamics and silences within such stories.
Here I focus on the UNESCO constitution and the UNESCO and the Hague Conventions, texts that I claim make up the morale of the dominant narrative that surrounds the global politics of heritage. UNESCO is a key character in that storytelling, characterised as one of the institutional vanguards of global peaceful coexistence post-World War II. The organisation was established in 1945 for the purpose of avoiding another world war. Unsurprisingly, then, WWII is a key fabula in the constitution, an event that still holds symbolic relevance globally. A third world war could only be avoided if the nations of the world work together in the spirit of ‘universal respect for justice, the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms…for the peoples of the world’ ‘regardless of race, sex, language or religion’.Footnote 94 As suggested above, these ideas are cosmopolitan in character, employing an ethical framework rooted in western ontology and philosophy. This emphasis means that the constitution is entirely silent on the destructive effects of pre-existing imperial and colonial practices that also shaped and defined the post-WWII order.
Yet, the UNESCO constitution builds on the idea that people need to shift their mindsets to deter them from previously held racist and discriminative attitudes as well as militarised aggression that defined the descent into WWII. The idea was that UNESCO and its founding members would steer the world’s peoples towards mutual cultural recognition, which in turn would ensure peaceful and respectful coexistence globally. Cooperation in the fields of education, science, and culture was seen as a central component in this process.
Despite this broad cosmopolitan peace logic, the UNESCO constitution employed distinctively gendered language, stating that ‘wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’. Furthermore, there was a sense that global peace would emerge the creation of an ‘intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind’.Footnote 95 This gendered representation of cosmopolitan togetherness and solidarity remains intact, given that the UNESCO constitution has never been amended to address its inherent gender-blindness. Men remain the key protagonists in the text and mankind still defines humanity at large. While the language in use, in part at least, is a reflection of the gendered hierarchies as well as the grand liberal cosmopolitan ethical ideas that dominated the post-WWII era, it is curious that the constitution has not been rearticulated to better reflect contemporary preferences for de-gendered language. As Kimberly Hutchings has noted, many forms of ethical enquiry remain premised ‘on a model of what it means to be a human that takes male bodies…as a norm’.Footnote 96 Nor has the UNESCO constitution been amended to include meaningful decolonial engagement with the harms and wars caused by colonialism and empire. Indeed, these plotlines continue to be absent from the text. Next, I turn to the UNESCO World Heritage (WH) Convention.
The UNESCO (WH) Convention, adopted in 1972, is defined by a pronouncedly liberal cosmopolitan content/fabula, rooted in a plot pertaining to international cooperation being the solution to the preservation of cultural heritage worldwide. Thus, it is ‘incumbent on the international community as a whole to participate in the protection of the cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value’, and as such it ‘is the duty of the international community as a whole to co-operate’ to this end.Footnote 97 Thus, the international community is a key character in this liberal cosmopolitan plotting, with little sensitivity to variations in states and other stakeholders’ ability to protect heritage being attended to. Mankind is employed in the narration, echoing the gendered characterisation of humanity employed in the UNESCO constitution, with humanity and heritage being narrated through the male gaze.Footnote 98 The convention notes that ‘parts of the cultural or natural heritage are of outstanding interest and therefore need to be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole’.Surprisingly, the World Heritage Convention has not been amended to reflect more gender-aware notion of humanity and heritage, rather echoing language use employed in the early postcolonial period.Footnote 99 Also revealing is the lack of attentiveness to decolonialisation in the text, a key development at the time of the establishment of the UNESCO convention. As a consequence, the damaging effects of colonialism and empire are entirely silenced in the convention. Thus, there are multiple ‘tensions around universal values of cosmopolitanism, discourses of citizenship, patterns of exclusion and the symbolic meanings attached to’ cultural sites and forms of property.Footnote 100
The fabula/contents underpinning the Hague Convention brought into being in 1954 and amended in 1999 through the addition of a second protocol on enhanced protection unsurprisingly centres on the imperative of protecting heritage in armed conflict. Key events in the sequencing of the storytelling put forth in the convention include WWII and the 1990s, with the latter period being defined by a series of genocidal wars. The main protagonists are UNESCO, states, and military personnel, all being charged with the protection of cultural property. Despite its amendment in 1999, the Hague Convention uses an abstract and gendered characterisation of humanity, with mankind being employed in the convention. It states that ‘damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world’.Footnote 101 Again, this signals that the protection of cultural property in armed conflict warfare is a male domain of ethical responsibility.Footnote 102 In keeping with the broader narration of heritage protection, as accounted for above, the Hague Convention entirely lacks self-reflection on colonialism. There is no effort to centre the fabula on colonialism or empire and their negative implications in the oppression of people’s cultural integrity and rights in the non-western world.
In sum, the foundational texts on the protection of heritage and cultural property are markedly informed by western cosmopolitan notions of ethical obligation and humanity, with little attention to the gendered and colonial assumptions that figure in the texts unpacked. To date the texts have not been amended so as to take account of their rootedness in both gendered and colonial power dynamics of global heritage politics. This matters because it produces dominant heritage narrations that are inconsistent with norms of decoloniality and gender awareness, that otherwise are gaining some ground in global institutions, and also within UNESCO.Footnote 103 As a consequence the embodied experiences and justice claims of civilians living near particular heritage sites under threat are absent from the three documents.Footnote 104 Rather, the texts are located within ‘the postcolonial landscape of much of Europe and, by implication, Europe’s former colonies’, which privilege a European ‘cosmopolitan vision of heritage that includes the cultural heritage found in European museums, sites identified by UNESCO and…heritage experts’.Footnote 105 Next, I unpack the specific narration of military protection in the UNESCO military manual.
The second stage: The narration of the UNESCO military manual
The UNESCO military manual was published in 2016, with The Sanremo International Institute of Humanitarian Law, having been commissioned by UNESCO to author it.Footnote 106 The authors of the manual include UK-based Professor of Humanitarian International Law and Heritage Roger O’Keefe; Camille Péron, a French defence official and lecturer on armed conflict; Tofig Musayev, a foreign policy official and now Deputy Permanent Representative of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the UN; and Gianluca Ferrari, an Italian Carabinieri TPS Operations. The manual is intended as a ‘practical guide to the implementation by military forces of the rules of international law for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict’, combining ‘a military-focused account of the relevant international legal obligations of states and individuals with suggestions as to best military practice at the different levels of command’.Footnote 107 Underpinning the manual is the recognition that contemporary practices of cultural cleaning in armed conflict demand ‘new approaches to protecting heritage’. These require armed forces to pay close attention to ‘the 1954 Hague Convention and its Second Protocol’ and incorporate protection strategies into their national security strategies.Footnote 108 From this we can infer that international humanitarian law is a key ethical plot in the manual, envisaged in broad cosmopolitan terms throughout, celebrated for its ability to guide forces in the protection of military protection of heritage. At no point is there any reflection on the location of international law within colonial power relations and imperialism as well as western ontologies. Rather, it is presented as universally and unproblematically applicable.Footnote 109 Nonetheless, there is some recognition that cultural identities are diverse, varying across contexts, with Irina Bokova, the former head of UNESCO, noting in the preamble that:
cultural property forms a vital part of the cultural identity of individuals, communities, peoples and all humanity. It is the tangible expression of the unchanging human condition and of the creative genius, diversity and memory of humankind. Its preservation is essential to human wellbeing and flourishing.Footnote 110
Militaries and military commanders are key protagonists here, ascribed the ability to ensure that cultural property and identities are protected from war and destruction. As former UNESCO Director-General of UNESCO Irina Bokova noted in the foreword to the military manual there is an expectation for such actors to ‘adapt and strengthen their tools, behaviours and skills to take into account the protection of heritage as an integral part of sustainable strategies’ for the purpose of promoting ‘peace and security’.Footnote 111 To do so, they need to ensure that international law at all times, that the laws of war, international criminal law, international human rights law, relevant UN Security Resolutions as well as the Hague and World Heritage Conventions, inform their efforts to protect cultural property in armed conflict. Military commanders are particularly encouraged to apply the laws of war and the Hague Convention in determining how armed force should be employed for the purpose of heritage protection. However, the manual does not provide much guidance on how to ethically apply the criteria of just war theory, that is, philosophical reasoning on when it is morally permissible to use brute force for the purpose saving lives, rather referencing a vast number of articles in international law. Yet, ‘military commanders at all levels bear operational responsibility for ensuring that military forces abide by the rule of Law of Armed Conflict and adopt best practices for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict’, and ‘the responsibilities of commanders are not just operational. They are also legal’.Footnote 112 Absent from this reasoning are the ethical embodied encounters that such individuals might have to deal with in encountering destruction of cultural property in times of war. The manual also states that commanders who fail to offer such protection could be ‘held criminally responsible under international law for war crimes’.Footnote 113
Military commanders, as central protagonists in the narration of the manual, also have to be able to translate complex legal arguments to ‘their subordinates’, ensuring that the latter know the ‘rules of engagement’.Footnote 114 This is no easy task, given that military training and instruction are highly complex practices, primarily centred on the fostering of ‘emotionally constrained, physically fit’Footnote 115 soldiers, with bodily strength and endurance being idealised. A concrete example here is the importance of raising awareness amongst subordinates that ‘all forms of theft, pillage or other misappropriation and of vandalism of cultural property are prohibited’,Footnote 116 prohibitions emerging from the Hague Convention. Yet, there is limited guidance on how to practically ensure that subordinates actively observe these prohibitions.Footnote 117 Rather, subordinates are passive protagonists in the manual, staying at the background, while expected to follow orders and listen attentively to their commanders. As such, they are obliged to avoid damage or angering ‘local populations, thereby posing a risk to those forces’ security’.Footnote 118 While most soldiers these days receive training in cultural protection prior to missions, they are not necessarily ‘trained to make decisions about the value of heritage’.Footnote 119
A key ethical question here, alluded to previously in this article, is whether commanding officers are ethically permitted to ask such individuals to put themselves at risk to save heritage from armed conflict. Though commanders are required to consider the risks of military operations, there is no real philosophical attempt to weigh up the lives of soldiers versus protecting cultural property from destruction. Meanwhile, the manual notes that ‘buildings and sites of historical, artistic or architectural significance’ must always be protected.Footnote 120 However, even if commanders are required to make judgement calls in relation to the value of the cultural property to be protected, it is doubtful whether they should be the ‘final arbiter of whether the loss of civilian life and property is reasonably proportionate to the attack’s military advantage’.Footnote 121
Thus far I have established that international law is a key feature in the manual, being plotted as a central component of cultural protection. I have also argued that commanding officers are key protagonists charged with the task of interpreting and translating relevant bodies of law. Here I uncover some silences and ethical dilemmas that prevail in the manual, in line with feminist attentiveness to what is not being said in any given text. Most notably, the manual gives no voice to civilians whose lives and cultural property are affected in armed conflict. As a consequence, the embodied harms incurred on civilian livesFootnote 122 are not addressed. Nor are the agency and expertise of ordinary civilians living near heritage sites considered in a meaningful way. Rather, they are presented as passive characters in the storytelling; like subordinates they figure in the background, in need of protection, but with little agency. There are some exceptions here; local heritage experts are upheld as important partners in military responses to heritage protection, for example figuring in the context of Libya. By and large, however, lived embodied experiences are silenced in the storytelling. Armed conflict, then, is presented as structural, rather than a lived subjective experience. As such, the manual does not engage with the question of whether civilians can afford to prioritise their cultural identity in times of ‘scarcity of relevant resources, such as money, time labour’.Footnote 123 Yet, the Hague Convention stipulates that forces need to cautiously ‘balance the protection of heritage against risks to both combatants and civilians’.Footnote 124 Drawing on the feminist reasoning put forth in the first parts of the article, I would suggest here that an ethical framework that is attentive to civilians’ actual care needs and ethical capabilities would go a long way in rearticulating the cosmopolitan western logic that underpins heritage more broadly. Next I consider protection, which I argue is a central fabula and plot in the narrative.
Protection
Protection figures 282 times, primarily envisaged as a key military practice (fabula) as well as a way of dealing with cultural destruction (plot). Drawing on my previous reasoning, I suggest here that protection is intimately linked to militarised masculinity. The depiction of protection in the military manual also resembles the ways in which the global responsibility to protect (R2P) norm is often defined in global politics. The R2P norm is premised on the broad idea that if states or governments are unable to protect their own people from harm and oppression, it falls upon other actors to offer such protection. In modern warfare this gendered responsibility often falls on intervening military forces, employed beyond borders to save strangers.Footnote 125 Similarly, the UNESCO manual assumes that some states and peoples are in need of external military assistance. As key protagonists, military commanders are charged with protecting such distant other communities, offering to shield their cultural heritage from destruction through masculinist protection. Here it is worth noting that though masculinist protection is not discursively employed in the manual to define the work by commanding officers, such individuals are ascribed key capabilities in line with Young’s definition of such protection.Footnote 126
Indeed, if we consider that women tend to be underrepresented in national militaries, it seems reasonable to infer that military commanders primarily are envisaged as male bodies in the manual. It is telling that women soldiers are only mentioned once in the overarching storytelling presented. Rather, the ideal commander is ascribed masculine qualities pertaining to bravery and chivalry, rather than aggression.Footnote 127 His masculinity is superior to uncontrollably violent forms of masculinity, often associated with insurgents and soldiers originating from the global south, as I will demonstrate below. To reiterate the words of Young, ‘central to the logic of masculinist protection is the subordinate relation of those in the protected position’.Footnote 128 The commander is also likely to be western, an observation reinforced by the fact that the majority of the best protection practices referenced in the manual are derived from western contexts. This logic is visible in the manual’s tendency to feminise some parts of the world, treating them as conflict-prone and chaotic spaces and therefore ill equipped to protect their own cultural heritage, while western states and their militaries are viewed as bestowers of cultural and military knowledge. For example, the Middle East and Africa primarily figure in the context of violent unresolved conflict, with an implied colonial undertone being employed in such representations. Iraq is mentioned no less than 35 times in the manual, creating the sense that it is not able protect its own cultural property from destruction and looting. Thus, it is assumed to be in need of masculinist protection, with the US and Italy, two important protagonists in the text, being upheld as dedicated protectors of Iraqi cultural heritage.Footnote 129 Libya, Yemen, Iraq or Syria, and Mali tend to be reduced to sites of insurgency and intra-warfare, rather than competent masculinist protectors of cultural property. Below, I further consider the privileging of western military practice and knowledge in the manual.
The privileging of western knowledge
Narratives are curated in ways that highlight some forms of knowledge while reducing the importance of others, with western policy practices being assumed to be universally applicable. The UNESCO military manual, for example, privileges the best protection practices of western militaries, drawing attention to their role in protecting heritage across a range of historical and contemporary settings. Western militaries are ascribed superior capabilities in the manual, reinforming the neocolonial undertones of the manual. The text presents a range of fabulae pertaining to historical events and wars derived from western contexts, with those fabulae contributing to the sequencing of the overall narrative and its morale. An example here is the reference to US General Eisenhower’s detailed instructions with respect to the military use and prevention of looting of historic buildings in the Italian campaign during WWII. His character is ascribed calmness and leadership, providing an example for others, not least his ability to command US and Allied officers to respect the cultural property of Italy.Footnote 130 Another such historical fabula is the American Roberts Commission during WWII, which ‘furnished the General Staff of the US Army with museums officials and art historians to be trained, commissioned as specialist officers, and attached to army staffs to advise commanding officers of the location of and care to be given to artistic and historic objects’. Notably, the manual narrates this event as one of the ‘best’ practices to date, offering little explanation why this is the case, in effect suggesting that there are few or no non-western practices that compare to this American example.Footnote 131 Here it is important to ask what role these historical US-led events play in the manual. Are they presumed to be transferrable to more contemporary non-western former colonial settings, despite emerging from a period defined by racialised oppression and colonialism? To answer these questions would require decolonial power analysis, which is lacking in the manual.
More recent military practices also are largely derived from western contexts, including joint western initiatives to protect heritage in armed conflict. For example, the US Department of Defense, the Government of the Netherlands and the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage, the Norwegian Armed Forces, and the Arts Council of Norway have produced a set of playing cards to enhance combatants’ knowledge of the cultural heritage sites under threat in the zones where they are posted.Footnote 132 Those cards contain ethical messages such as ‘cultural heritage is a universal value’.Footnote 133 Out of the examples provided in the manual this is the most practical one, seeking to disperse knowledge amongst military staff. Yet, the playing cards originate from a distinctively western setting, with no apparent input from non-western states and experts, adding to the idea that heritage protection is an inherently western domain of colonial politics, with the use of universalist messages reinforcing that positionality.
Other distinctively western examples referenced in the manual include Austria’s Directive for the Military Protection of Cultural Property and the Military Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage, Belgium’s course on protected places and property for advisors on the law of armed conflict, and France’s Handbook on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.Footnote 134 However, there is no effort to explain what these particular practices achieved on the ground and whether they are universally applicable across contexts.
Here it is useful to also reflect on the military planning that took place prior to the NATO-led military intervention ‘Operation Unified Protector’, mandated by the UN, in Libya in 2011. A no-strike list was prepared by civilian experts, intelligence staff, and a range of organisations, including the US Committee of the Blue Shield, with Libyan historians and archaeologists being consulted as well, for the purpose of protecting Libyan cultural property from the NATO-led airstrikes. A second list was submitted to NATO by UNESCO in which additional information about Libyan cultural property was included.Footnote 135 At no point does the manual critically engage with the question of whether the NATO-led military intervention itself was just, rather assuming that this was the case, again characterising western military protagonists as knowledgeable and rational and painting a picture of Libya as a defenceless and chaotic other in need of western masculinist protection in the shape of military intervention.
Nonetheless, the manual references some examples of non-western best protection practices, not least in relation to Mali. One noteworthy practice is the Mali government forces’ decision in 2013 to refrain from using airstrikes as a military response to insurgent fighters who hid in a house close to the world heritage awarded Djinguereber mosque in Timbuktu to protect that site. Instead the house was demolished using other military means. This example stands out in the narration in the manual, in that it recognises the ability of non-western militaries to exercise protection in a measured and rational fashion. El Salvador’s publication in 2000 of an instruction manual on the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict # is also upheld as a valuable non-western best practice.Footnote 136 However, there is no attempt to dissect the contents of the El Salvador manual. Rather, it is hastily mentioned in the overall narration of the manual, which reduces its perceived relevance.
Thus, while recognising that non-western practices have some relevance, there is a strong tendency to privilege western military knowledge and forms of protection in the storytelling projected. The prioritisation of western knowledge, however, is not paired with a power analysis of western states’ historical implication in racialised oppressions and colonialism worldwide, the legacies of which still impact on conflict and war worldwide. Also omitted from the narrative are western historical practices of extraction and the looting of colonised spaces, with the removal of cultural artefacts to faraway museum collections as a result. While the manual recognises the importance of taking account of the knowledge of local historians and archaeologists, there is a tendency to assign superior knowledge to western states, assuming that their protection practices are universally applicable. As such, the manual furthers paternalistic rather than dialogical care relations with regard to cultural protection. Such ‘paternalistic performances of care through institutionalized and state-based mechanisms’ … ‘are representative of the enduring afterlife of colonialism’.Footnote 137 Cultural protection in armed conflict is also an afterlife of a distinctively western racialised cosmopolitan project that privileges western heritage expertise and knowledge.
Concluding remarks
In this article I have drawn attention to the ethical, gendered, and colonial complexities and injustices that surround cultural protection. While the protection of cultural heritage is an inherently ethical practice and bundle of ethical norms, often articulated in cosmopolitan language, this is an ethical project rooted in a distinctively western universalist tradition that is inherently colonial and unreflective of past and present harms and oppression. It is also a distinctively gendered ethical project that employs binaries that assign superior protection qualities to western militaries and experts, and in this process reduce their counterparts in the non-western world to inferior heritage actors, with limited rationality and agency. By privileging western masculinised forms of militarised protection, peaceful, gender-sensitive, decolonial, and human security orientated approaches to the protection of cultural property are effectively silenced.Footnote 138
Feminist ethical interventions, I have proposed, can help us challenge such gendered and colonial assumptions by providing ways in which the cosmopolitan ethics underpinning heritage protection can be rearticulated so as to foster transnational solidarities that are dialogical and sensitive to embodied lived experiences. This involves staying attentive to the care needs and knowledge of civilians whose cultural heritage, ontological (in)security, and lives are being affected by cultural destruction. Indeed, often forgotten in the official storytelling about heritage and cultural property are the embodied war experiences of civilians and soldiers, with the UNESCO military manual visibly silencing their voices.Footnote 139
These concluding reflections point to the importance of further investigating the militarised, gendered, and colonial understandings and practices of the protection of cultural property in armed conflict. This requires thoroughgoing investigation of how the aforementioned power relations intersect and produce outcomes that often privilege knowledge and practices that are both gendered and for the most part western, rather than rooted in a plurality of approaches, in line with the ethos of critical heritage studies.Footnote 140 This involves conducting ethical analysis of the use of force for the purpose of saving cultural property and, in so doing, focusing on people’s intersectional embodied experiences, those of civilian and militaries. While this article is methodologically underpinned by a narrative approach and the uncovering of the plots and fabulae of the selection of heritage documents, as well as silences in such storytelling about protection, there is room for future research that is interview-based, getting closer to the actual lived experiences of heritage protection in times of armed conflict. A feminist ethical framework that is ethically dedicated to the actual care needs and justice claims of civilians and soldiers alike, rather than silencing them from the narration of protection, is a first step in this direction.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052510140X.
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank the reviewers of the article, the guest editors of the special issue, the editors of RIS as well as a selection of colleauges for useful comments.
Open access
