18. Saving Stones and Saving Lives: A Humanitarian Perspective on Protecting Cultural Heritage in War

This chapter examines the relationship between saving people and saving the things they love. The humanitarian imperative to save lives in war is rooted in high ideals and a long history of nuanced, moral reasoning.¹ This imperative, however, must operate in real-world settings of extreme risk, purposeful killing, and unspeakable cruelty. Both saints and generals have pondered this stark juxtaposition and struggled to craft humane but pragmatic principles that permit war while attempting to constrain its barbarity. After the horrors of World War II, a global consensus emerged in what these principles should express and the practical strategies that should be implemented to achieve these humanitarian goals.² A global legal and normative infrastructure consisting of the Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian law more broadly, and principles of humanitarian practice was created to give operational form to these humanitarian intentions. This infrastructure has provided both legal legitimacy and practical guidance to an array of international agencies and nongovernmental organizations dedicated to humanitarian protection and service provision in areas of violent conflict.³

In settings of violent conflict, cultural heritage, when valued, becomes vulnerable to attack. As is true for the protection of people, the protection of cultural heritage has drawn upon a long history of moral argument and practical experience to advocate for strong international protections.⁴ But mobilizing international action to protect cultural heritage––“saving stones”––has encountered greater ambivalence, and at times explicit resistance, than have humanitarian strategies directed at “saving people.” In response, advocates for heritage protection have argued that the protection of cultural heritage is in fact inseparable from the protection of people and, further, that protecting cultural heritage can result in saved lives.⁵ In essence, this logic attempts to transform the protection of heritage from a cultural obligation into a humanitarian imperative.

At its core, the argument that the protection of heritage can save lives is an empirical proposition. Is it true, and if so, how and when? While there are important theoretical issues to consider, in the end the practical utility of advancing heritage protection on humanitarian grounds will depend on empirical evidence and pragmatic experiences in actual war settings. This chapter provides an overview of the nature and scope of this evidence and outlines a basic framework for understanding the mechanisms by which the destruction of cultural heritage can potentially shape humanitarian outcomes in different war settings. This overview is based on a preliminary examination of available reports and databases on heritage destruction together with those that document conflict-related casualties and political violence around the world. The primary task involves the integration of data and insights from disciplines that have not adequately sought collaboration or shared understanding. Consequently, this discussion represents an effort to construct a kind of disciplinary bridge that appreciates the beauty and value of cultural heritage while respecting the humanitarian metrics of lives ruined and lost.

Linking Cultural Heritage and Humanitarian Protections: The Empirical Challenge

One in four countries are currently involved in violent conflict, with some seventy million people forcibly displaced, more than at any time since World War II. Civilian populations are being targeted by relentless aerial bombardment as well as ruthless ground assaults by national militaries and a proliferating number of armed nonstate actors. Hospitals and health workers have been targeted, with almost two hundred killed and a thousand injured in the last year. An estimated eight hundred million people go hungry, the majority in countries wracked by violent conflict. Sixty percent of the population is affected by acute hunger in Yemen, a country that has been plagued by the worst cholera epidemic in recorded history. These figures sketch only the broad outlines of the current humanitarian challenge, a challenge addressed by two general, humanitarian strategies: protecting noncombatants from attack and responding with care and succor to the needs of noncombatants when protection fails.

The destruction of human life through direct exposure to combat operations, from injuries generated by bombs and bullets, has long been the dominant humanitarian concern. However, war also generates death and illness through the destruction of the essentials of human survival, including shelter, food, water, sanitation, and healthcare. These indirect effects of war have existed whenever and wherever wars have been fought. Indeed, estimates of mortality associated with recent violent conflicts have revealed that deaths resulting from indirect effects almost always dwarf deaths due to direct effects.⁶

Among the earliest protections for cultural objects in war were provisions in the Lieber Code, developed by the former soldier and international lawyer Francis Lieber for use by Union forces during the American Civil War.⁷ A series of efforts to regulate the conduct of war during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included protections for a variety of valued cultural objects, including religious, charitable, and educational institutions, and historical monuments. However, these provisions were not justified on the basis of their relationship to saving lives. An explicit connection between heritage and humanitarian concerns was made by Raphael Lemkin, who first proposed the concept of “genocide.” As early as 1933, Lemkin included the destruction of culture as one of the eight dimensions of genocide, with each component “targeting a different aspect of a group’s existence.”⁸ After World War II, the global commitment to preventing genocide took legal form in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, while protections for cultural heritage were included at the drafting stage, they were ultimately rejected as formal provisions in the final convention. The reasons for the omission of cultural genocide as a criminalized act were complex but, in some measure, reflected the preoccupation with protecting lives and the dismissal of heritage’s relevance to this objective. The protection of cultural heritage was also omitted in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, again largely because it was not deemed as serious as other violations related to human life. Subsequent international agreements, including the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the two 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, explicitly provided for the protection of cultural heritage. While inconsistencies in their ratification and interpretation have somewhat undermined their effective implementation, it is significant that these agreements emphasize the universal value of cultural heritage and not any particular linkage to attacks on people.

More recently, the connection between humanitarian and cultural protections has been vigorously argued as a basis for “the adaptation of humanitarian norms and tools for heritage,” including the potential use of force as embodied in the responsibility to protect protocols adopted by the United Nations in 2005.⁹ These arguments have been resisted on the basis that this strategy would equate heritage with lives, and potentially put soldiers in harm’s way to protect “things.” More broadly, arguments for the application of humanitarian protections to heritage have utilized a complex mix of empirical study and metaphor, such as the adoption of “cultural cleansing” as a heritage counterpart to the crime of ethnic cleansing.¹⁰

The assertion that the destruction of cultural heritage can deepen the pain inflicted on a community undergoing violent attack is undeniable. However, arguments that justify more aggressive protections for cultural heritage have attempted to evade the “equating lives and things” refutation by contending that heritage protections will in fact save lives. There is much at stake if this contention is true, as it could help justify a cascade of aggressive heritage protections, including the use of force.

Mapping the Connection between Humanitarian and Heritage Protection

The complexity of the relationship between humanitarian and heritage protections may be best explored by examining the strategic and tactical utility of heritage destruction, how combatants employ “patterns of violence” in their struggle for power. This approach treats the destruction of cultural heritage within a broader security context, a perspective that recognizes the role of such destruction within an array, or “repertoire,” of violent strategies and tactics.¹¹

Prelude

On 9 November 1938, senior elements of the Nazi government unleashed a flood of violent attacks against what remained of Jewish life in Germany. Over the next forty-eight hours, members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (stormtrooper) paramilitary group and their police and civilian allies looted and destroyed more than one thousand synagogues and countless Jewish-owned shops in cities and towns across the country. This series of attacks, which came to be known as Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” was portrayed by Adolf Hitler’s government as a spontaneous outburst of resentment by the German people but was in reality a well-organized campaign designed to not only destroy but also desecrate cultural objects and architecture held dear by Jews throughout Germany.¹²

While Kristallnacht was in itself a calamitous assault on a vulnerable community, its enduring presence in the deliberation of heritage and war is related to its foreshadowing of the Holocaust. Indeed, Kristallnacht has been characterized as a rehearsal or at least a prelude to the Nazi extermination campaign against European Jewry, the “Final Solution” to be formally articulated at the Wannsee Conference in suburban Berlin in January 1942.¹³ In this manner, Kristallnacht has become the archetypal example of the predictive power of heritage destruction to foretell future violent assaults on specific communities of people. The portrayal of heritage destruction as a precursive indicator is perhaps best captured in the words of the German poet and writer Heinrich Heine (1797–1856): “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”¹⁴ Edward Luck underscored the importance of this relationship and turned explicitly to Raphael Lemkin, who shaped the modern understanding of genocide, as stating “physical and biological genocide are always preceded by cultural genocide or by an attack on the symbols of the group or by violent interference with religious or cultural activities.”¹⁵

The case that destroyed heritage serves as a critical prelude to destroyed people is, after all, an empirical argument, a proposition that has, somewhat surprisingly, received scant empirical analysis. While the Heine quote is often invoked as a definitive truth, it originates not from a careful historical analysis but from his play Almansor, the line uttered by a Muslim character lamenting Christian Spain’s burning of the Quran.¹⁶

There are actually three empirical questions embedded in the prelude humanitarian argument.¹⁷ First, the basic issue is whether the destruction of cultural heritage is in fact followed by attacks on people. This is the predictive value of the relationship. It is based on whether a destructive heritage event during some semblance of peace is indeed followed by large-scale, violent attacks on people. Prelude implies that violent attacks were not occurring simultaneously, or in parallel, with the destruction of heritage. Therefore, this predictive value can be considered as the portion of heritage destruction events that are in fact associated with subsequent violent attacks on people sometime in the future.

A preliminary analysis of available heritage destruction and conflict datasets suggests that prelude appears to be a relatively rare phenomenon. It should be noted that Kristallnacht, while an oft-cited example of prelude, did in fact include violent attacks on people. At least ninety-one Jews were killed, thousands beaten, and thirty thousand people were arrested and transported to concentration camps. Its characterization as prelude, however, rests on the catastrophic scale of violence and death that was to be unleashed over the following six and a half years. Interestingly, no one was prosecuted specifically for their role in perpetrating the violence of Kristallnacht.¹⁸

Second, it is not clear the extent to which attacks on people are commonly foreshadowed by attacks on heritage. This is the converse of the predictive argument as it relates to the attributable capability of the relationship, the portion of all attacks on people that are foreshadowed by attacks on heritage. This shifted conditional perspective is important for humanitarians. If the prelude relationship were quite rare among the dozens of current conflicts around the world, the arguments for heritage protection on humanitarian grounds would be weakened. In other words, the prelude linkage by itself may account for such a small portion of all the attacks on people that prelude is rendered a somewhat peripheral humanitarian issue. It should be noted in this context that none of the most prominent quantitative efforts to predict violent atrocities include the previous destruction of cultural heritage as a meaningful element in their models.

Third, it also is unclear whether protecting heritage in conflict would result in a substantially reduced risk to people. This is the preventive, as opposed to the predictive, capability of the prelude argument, which faces a challenging empirical requirement as it implies that the destruction of cultural heritage contributes causally rather than serving only as an indicator of subsequent attacks on people. It also suggests that even if the linkage is causal, it must be sufficiently causal to reduce attacks on people if interrupted. More fundamentally, it is a difficult proposition to prove as the counterfactual (for example would the Holocaust have not occurred if Kristallnacht had been prevented) is not amenable to empirical analysis.

Provocation

Cultural heritage can be attacked as a way to provoke violence against people. Both intended and unintended (collateral) damage to an important cultural object may result in violent opposition to the party responsible for the attack. Standard counterinsurgency doctrine recognizes this relationship and cautions against the use of force in proximity to important cultural objects. Heritage can also be attacked to undermine the legitimacy of a government or other party claiming jurisdiction over the cultural objects or site. These attacks can also be used to intensify tensions between political or ethnic groups and generate retributive violence in an effort to instigate civil discord and even civil war. The 2006 attack on the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, a revered Shia shrine, was likely carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq or another radical Sunni group in order to incite a cycle of violence.¹⁹ Indeed, the attack was immediately followed by days of retributive violence against Sunni communities and mosques. One source reported that 168 Sunni mosques were attacked, and ten Sunni imams were killed in the forty-eight hours after the al-Askari bombing. Over the next two weeks, sectarian violence flared dramatically across the country, deepening political divisions and undermining the central government’s ability to govern. Similarly, in 1992, Hindu nationalists demolished the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India, an attack that appeared to be designed to intensify sectarian tensions and was in fact followed by weeks of intercommunal violence.²⁰

Parallelism

Heritage destruction as prelude is far less common than heritage destruction occurring simultaneously or in parallel with assaults on people. The following provide a brief sample of the hundreds of instances of the deliberate destruction of heritage during active attacks on people. The Stari Most (Old Bridge), which stood over the Neretva River in the Bosnian city of Mostar for 427 years, was targeted and destroyed by Croat paramilitary forces in 1993.²¹ The Great Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo, dating back to the eighth century and the purported resting place of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was seriously damaged during fighting between Syrian government forces and rebel groups in 2013. Although responsibility for the destruction remains contested, there is substantial evidence that the mosque’s towering minaret was demolished deliberately during the government’s assault on the city. And the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, famous for its leaning minaret, was destroyed intentionally during the Battle of Mosul, Iraq in 2017, one of the largest urban battles since Stalingrad.

These parallel assaults often occur as part of sieges, such as in Mostar or Sarajevo, where sites of cultural importance were targeted to undermine the will of city inhabitants to resist. In other settings the destruction of cultural heritage can occur after a belligerent party has recently captured territory previously held by a victimized ethnic group. Some of the most notorious attacks conducted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as ISIL or Da’esh) on heritage sites in Iraq and Syria, including in Mosul and Palmyra, occurred soon after it seized control, but not in the midst of active combat. There was nothing precursive or foreshadowing about these events; they were merely one component of the ISIS portfolio of violence, propaganda, and social control.²²

Even in the context of explicit genocidal or ethnic cleansing strategies, the linkage of heritage destruction and attacks on people is most commonly parallel in nature. In 2014, ISIS drove government security forces from much of northern Iraq, including Sinjar, the traditional home of the Yezidi minority. Almost immediately, thousands of Yezidis were killed while tens of thousands fled, many seeking refuge on the upper plateau of Mount Sinjar. Without adequate shelter, food, or water, hundreds of Yezidis would perish before humanitarian provisions were airdropped and a supply corridor opened by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. As the attacks on Yezidi villages progressed, ISIS purposefully destroyed at least twenty-six holy sites, including the shrines of Sheikh Hassan, Malak Fakhraddin, and Sheikh Abdul Qader.²³ In one instance, ISIS killed fourteen Yezidi elders inside the shrine of Sheikh Mand in the foothills of Mount Sinjar and then demolished the shrine, burying the remains of the elders in the rubble. A recent review of the destruction of Rohingya communities and heritage in Myanmar’s Rakhine State concluded that these attacks were also largely parallel in nature.²⁴

During the ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Bosnian War (1992–95), Serb forces and paramilitaries committed grievous violence against Bosnian Muslims and Croats, including the killing of civilians, rape, torture, and the destruction of civilian, public, and cultural property.²⁵ However, most of the destruction of Bosniak mosques and other heritage sites occurred in areas that had recently come under Serb control but were somewhat distant from the frontlines. These attacks against heritage were not prelude but rather a component of ongoing Serb efforts to eradicate Bosniak communities and erase any trace of their historical presence.²⁶ Again, as was the case for much of the heritage destruction in Iraq and Syria, the linkage between heritage destruction and humanitarian atrocity in Bosnia was profound but was not based on any precursive association. Rather, it was due to a simultaneous onslaught targeting both a people and their culture.

Protraction

A community’s vulnerability to conflict is shaped not only by the intensity of the violence but also how long it lasts. Some of the deadliest wars in human history have been those that have been prolonged over many years. This has been primarily due to indirect effects, resulting from the destruction of the essentials of life, including shelter, food, healthcare, and the unraveling of community-based social protections.

Wars require financing. Prolonged conflict will extend the need for resources and therefore the threat to any objects with monetary value. Consequently, the protection of valuable cultural objects could reduce the resource base of warring parties, which, in turn, could reduce the threat to people. Luck labeled this protective stance the “counterterrorism” lens for heritage protection.²⁷ However, this concern extends beyond counterterrorism: both state militaries and armed nonstate actors engage heavily in a range of these illicit economies and benefit substantially from prolonged conflict.²⁸ Indeed, in many conflicts, greed becomes a more important motivation than political grievance. In these circumstances, the effective protection of heritage could be a meaningful way to diminish the incentives for continued fighting, thereby resulting in a reduced threat to people and their way of life.

Propaganda

The destruction of cultural heritage can target norms as well as communities of people. Humanitarian protections have depended on an infrastructure of international norms and legal frameworks that were largely constructed after World War II and backed by Western power.²⁹ While attacks on cultural heritage have most often targeted specific ethnicities or other selected groups, some can be directed at the broad global conventions and institutions that support this humanitarian infrastructure. These types of attacks are directed at a global audience and are usually staged as a kind of perverse political theater. They often exploit new forms of dissemination technologies, including social media.³⁰ The intentional destruction of the two monumental Buddha statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001, while part of a larger Taliban campaign of heritage destruction, was videotaped and displayed globally. The destruction of heritage sites in Palmyra by ISIL was purposefully portrayed in social media over several months in 2015.³¹

These highly public acts of “symbolic terrorism” or “iconoclastic” propaganda are generally strategic in nature and intended to breach long-held international humanitarian norms. These norms have been essential to the construction of a global framework for protecting noncombatants since World War II, rooted in an array of legal conventions and multilateral institutions.³² The implementation of international humanitarian law and the safe provision of humanitarian services in areas of conflict have relied on these norms and collective global order, and any assault on them can undermine essential protections for populations under threat.

Universalist arguments for protecting major sites of cultural heritage have turned on heritage’s “intrinsic value and importance to humanity” and not on any alleged relationship to lost lives. But it is precisely the universal value attached to specific cultural heritage sites that makes them attractive targets for spectacular, public destruction. A hunger for antinormative statements can, therefore, make inseparable the destruction of cultural heritage inseparable from that of people. The relationship is not one of prelude, provocation, or protraction but one of propaganda. The greater the universal value of the targeted heritage, the greater its value in the language of iconoclastic challenge—a challenge to international norms essential to the protection of both heritage and lives.

Implications

This discussion does not question the value of cultural heritage nor the importance of protecting it in war. Indeed, the destruction of cultural heritage warrants condemnation regardless of its ultimate linkage to violent attacks on people. This discussion’s focus on the utility of greater empirical evidence is also not blind to the profound human cost of cultural loss nor morally agnostic to its intentional destruction. Rather, the discussion merely demands more from the argument that cultural heritage should be protected on humanitarian grounds. The justifications for protecting such heritage from violence are varied and have evolved over time. Of concern here is only one of these justifications: that protecting cultural heritage will result in saved human lives. This is fundamentally a humanitarian argument, which, to date, has been based on the interpretation of history, the detailed analysis of selected case studies, and the construction of a humane logic. However, this chapter has underscored the complexity of this humanitarian argument and the urgent need to provide greater empirical insight into its nature and mechanisms of action.

The relationship between the destruction of cultural heritage and the destruction of people is as complex as is the meaning of culture and the tragedy of violent death. Consequently, this relationship can take different forms, a heterogeneity that deserves greater respect in crafting humanitarian justifications for aggressive heritage protection. Heritage destruction as prelude has served as the archetypal motif for protective advocacy and under certain circumstances could provide a potential opportunity to prevent subsequent attacks on people. However, prelude appears to be a relatively rare phenomenon and while always an important concern, does not appear to be an appropriate basis for a broad, general policy of enhanced heritage protection.

Provocation attacks on cultural heritage can also provide humanitarian grounds for protecting heritage sites and objects. These kinds of attacks are explicitly intended to generate violence against targeted communities, and therefore should provoke strong preventive action in certain security settings. The precise nature of these settings warrants urgent, empirical examination, however, as not all or even most conflict environments provide the conditions for meaningful preventive intervention based on provocation concerns. Nevertheless, in conflict situations characterized by sharp ethnic or sectarian divisions, heritage sites strongly affiliated with one of the groups could be particularly vulnerable to attack. Under such conditions, strong heritage protections could diminish the risk for provocative attacks, which, consequently, could save lives.

It appears that the most common risk to cultural heritage in war is the simultaneous, parallel assault on people and their culture, but here again there can be some diversity in how this parallel character can play out. In some settings, such as urban sieges, heritage sites can be targeted for their cultural significance while surrounding residential neighborhoods are being bombarded. Heritage sites that fall within recently captured territory can also be extremely vulnerable even if simultaneous attacks on people are occurring some distance away. This parallel pattern of assault tends to characterize the linkage of ethnic and cultural cleansing. The intent is not just the forced dispossession of territory through killing and intimidation, but the erasure of any vestige of presence through the systematic destruction of beloved heritage and cultural identity.³³ Parallel patterns of assault can also make difficult the attribution of responsibility, much less intent, of attacks on cultural heritage. In addition, arguments for the active protection of heritage, particularly involving the use of force, should take note of the central importance of parallel threats, as they do not easily justify a specific focus on heritage protection for humanitarian protection. Rather, parallelism recognizes that the threat to heritage is commonly intertwined with the threat to people, a reality that underscores the pragmatic linkage of heritage protection to international humanitarian law and intervention protocols directed at saving people. This linked posture conforms to some moral arguments as well as providing a basis for a common protective framework and advocacy.³⁴

Human health is not only defined by biology but also by social engagement. Indeed, assaults on the fabric of social life and the perception of injustice can affect both physical and mental health. This recognition calls into question the traditional tendency to confine the humanitarian relevance of heritage destruction to direct, violent attacks on people. Rather, it suggests that the destruction of cultural heritage, if this heritage is truly valued enough, could have indirect effects expressed in patterns of human health and disease. In fact, the relationship between social engagement and health outcomes has been one of the most active arenas of recent medical research. Issues of identity, stress, and social networks have been linked to a variety of medical conditions, including mental health, chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and adverse health behaviors and addictions. Humiliation has long been recognized by both psychologists and political scientists as a powerful driver of mental health as well as of rebellion.³⁵ Dignity has evolved from a largely religious or philosophical concept to what has become a central social and political process that defines both human rights and human health.³⁶ Resilience, while traditionally defined by individual health and personality characteristics, has more recently been tied to social relations and community-based engagement.³⁷ This growing body of evidence has documented the complex processes by which physical health is influenced by a person’s sense of belonging, being part of a defined community, and the practical ability to participate in community activities and rituals. Community engagement does not only convey meaning to one’s life, it can also alter the physiology and ultimately the length of one’s life.

The recognition that the destruction of cultural heritage can alter the social determinants of health blurs some traditional distinctions that have been employed to assess the legitimacy of heritage protection. In their cogent, moral dissection of arguments advocating the use of force to protect cultural heritage, Helen Frowe and Derek Matravers distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic justifications for defending cultural heritage.³⁸ Extrinsic arguments are based on protecting heritage for some instrumental purpose, such as saving lives. Intrinsic justifications hold that heritage should be protected because of its essential value to people and community life regardless of any subsequent effects. While helpful in distinguishing different moral characteristics, this dichotomy is blurred if one recognizes that these “intrinsic” elements can be expressed extrinsically as human illness and preventable death. This epidemiology underscores the importance of protecting cultural heritage on humanitarian grounds, as both extrinsic and intrinsic justifications become instrumental in nature. What distinguishes them pragmatically are the nature and timing of their impact, what humanitarians label the direct and indirect effects of conflict, both of which are ultimately articulated in human health and well-being.

There is an urgent need to strengthen the justifications for heritage protection through purposeful empirical analysis, a mandate that requires both new analytic strategies and new kinds of data. At its most basic level, an understanding of the linkage between heritage destruction and the health of people entails the documentation of a temporal relationship, namely how the two phenomena are situated in time. It also requires an understanding of a spatial relationship—how the phenomena are related geographically. This implies a commitment to seek data regarding not only violent assault and homicide but also on the full spectrum of outcomes, including morbidity and mortality from nonviolent causes.

These considerations must be addressed by sufficiently comprehensive datasets or combinations of datasets to permit intensely cross-disciplinary analysis. There exist datasets with information on the destruction of cultural heritage in certain conflict areas, as well as ones that track violent assaults on groups of people. The task is to technically integrate them in a manner that respects the distinct disciplinary assumptions and variable limitations that always shape empirical data collection. At a more fundamental level, this task requires intense transdisciplinary engagement, a requirement that has never come easily to the examination of cultural heritage protections in war.

Any empirical analysis of the relationship between the destruction of cultural heritage and war’s effects on people must overcome the longstanding disciplinary boundaries between those who study heritage and those who study humanitarian effects. This implies an integrative task that requires the development of a community of collaborators from diverse fields, a community committed to crafting new, shared methodologies and a common, creole, analytic language. This integrative challenge will also require the engagement of those responsible for the pragmatic implementation of both heritage and humanitarian protections in real conflict environments.

The primary conclusion of this discussion is that the humanitarian justifications for protecting cultural heritage in war are real but complicated. Some complications can alter the legitimacy of humanitarian claims for heritage protection in areas of violent conflict. Consequently, traditional advocacy for heritage protection must evolve in two ways. First, far greater empirical detail is needed to identify under what political and security conditions heritage protection would actually reduce humanitarian need. This analytic challenge will not easily be met by a traditional reliance on heritage expertise alone. Rather, it will require new forms of transdisciplinary collaboration involving security, political, health, and humanitarian disciplines. Second, a strong transdisciplinary approach would also lay a more coherent foundation for engaging the heritage protection and humanitarian communities in a unified public advocacy dedicated to saving both stones and lives.