How did global heritage become the new battlespace for 21st-century warfare? Nations and non-state actors alike increasingly use the ruins of the past to leverage legal, political and territorial competition.
Professor Lynn Meskell’s talk examines the roles of two intersecting international organizations that seek to combat the fallout from ruin warfare and their respective aspirations for mission success. The first, UNESCO, established after the Second World War and dedicated to world peace through culture and co-operation, has inherited a ruinous legacy of war and destruction. The other is NATO, a Cold War military alliance that must now confront cultural heritage in both its protective and punitive missions. Within the international order, along a spectrum of peace and war, both are struggling to contain the conflictual status of cultural heritage.
Meskell reveals how the past is progressively militarized, securitized, and legalized across an array of formal settings from UNESCO to NATO. Heritage, she argues, has become the ultimate force multiplier. Whether in outsized claims for fostering world peace and resilience on one hand or ensuring maximum devastation and intergenerational trauma on the other, deploying the past is decisive.
Protecting heritage is now considered vital for multilateral agencies and governments alike to combat illicit trafficking, terror financing, cultural cleansing, and crimes against humanity. At the same time, the past, particularly the heritage of wars past, is alternatively weaponized by governments to reify and enflame conflict anew. Termed ‘cultural heritage exploitation,’ or CHX, such hostile threats to security now constitute the subject of intensifying legal regimes of accountability and claims of cultural cleansing and genocide.
Bringing us full circle, those same sites of trauma are recursively celebrated at UNESCO on its register of international heritage inscriptions. Heritage assets, once positioned as global goods throughout the 20th century, are being transformed into the weapons of war in the 21st. Charting these developments, she asks, how have the celebrated sites of humanity’s collective past been instrumentalized into a new future of risk and ruin?
Speaker: Professor Lynn Meskell
Lynn Meskell is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor (PIK) and Richard Green Professor of Anthropology, a Professor in Historic Preservation, and a Curator at the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. She is currently A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (2019–2025). She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Rome and Bergen and holds Honorary Professorships at Oxford University and Liverpool University in the UK, Shiv Nadar University, India and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Previously, Meskell was the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Over the past twenty five years she has been awarded grants and fellowships including those from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the American Academy in Rome, the School of American Research, Oxford University and Cambridge University. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Meskell has broad theoretical interests, including socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. Her earlier books and publications examined natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, the archaeology of figurines and burial in Neolithic Turkey and daily life in New Kingdom Egypt.
Since 2011 Lynn has conducted an institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage, tracing the politics of governance and sovereignty and the subsequent implications for multilateral diplomacy, international conservation, and heritage rights. Her award-winning book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (OUP, 2018) reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. Building on this research, she has examined the entwined histories of colonialism, internationalism, espionage in the Middle East and undertaken a largescale survey project in Syria and Iraq to assess public opinion on heritage destruction and reconstruction. Her other fieldwork explores monumental regimes of preservation in India, analysing conflict and co-operation in more than 1200 World Heritage sites, and the rise of heritage warfare and securitization from UNESCO to NATO.
Date: 07 May 2025
Time: 6 pm Amman
Venue: CBRL Amman Institute
This lecture will be in-person only.
Limited seats. Free entry, but registration is required.
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