Cultural Heritage and Conservation and Insecurity Paradigms: International Law in the Pursuit of Social Cohesion

Cultural heritage is integral to social cohesion and plays a key role in preventing or at least ameliorating the effects of massive change such as conflict, disasters, and mass migration, including contributing to the recovery, resilience and reconciliation of affected communities. The connection between cultural heritage and human suffering has been repeatedly highlighted in recent decades, including in the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia, in the genocide in Cambodia, during contemporary armed conflicts in Syria and Mali, and following earthquakes in New Zealand, Italy, and Nepal. While legal frameworks that aim to protect cultural heritage do exist, they tend to focus on cultural heritage only in ‘normal’ times or during conflict. Conversely, norms of international law having to do with other forms of insecurity such as disasters and displacement tend not to consider cultural heritage at all. This contribution will focus on these divisions between a paradigm of insecurity that focuses on heritage as a secondary concern and legal frameworks that apply a paradigm of conservation and prioritise the protection of heritage separate from affected communities. In mapping these dissonances, we can identify significant gaps in our legal response to cultural heritage and call attention to the way in which international legal frameworks condition and shape the social cohesion that is essential to overcoming insecurity. We argue that both paradigms need to be extricated from our legal responses to harm to heritage and that heritage is better integrated into our overall responses to insecurity, using international criminal law as a case study of how to potentially bridge these two paradigms.