« Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have….. targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats! ”.
In this tweet (on the social network renamed Israeli-American meeting of February 28, 2026. He justified his remarks during a press interview the next day by mobilizing the argument of response: if Iran targets American nationals and soldiers, why not attack its cultural heritage in response?
Although it did not materialize, the threat of a targeted attack against Iranian cultural property referred to a whole series of historical precedents, the most striking of which in the recent period is undoubtedly the archaeological site of Palmyra in Syria, destroyed by the Islamic State (IS) in 2015. Note also that since 2022, Ukrainian heritage has been the subject of repeated attacks by Russian forces. In Iran, historical and cultural sites are currently suffering significant damage.
This article uses a double definition of the notion of material cultural heritage. The latter covers two cumulative dimensions. It firstly designates a collective representation of the heritage of the past, essentially material and monumental, that is to say architectural monuments, archaeological sites, works of art, manuscripts, scientists, as well as the buildings intended for their conservation (museums, libraries, archives), identified in the lists established by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and codified by the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954). also a sociological dimension: it is the practices and interests that a group of individuals project onto these objects which give them their status, their value and their interest. to approach objects and sites in a distinct and differentiated way, without presupposing their uniformity, while remaining faithful to the terms of the 1954 Convention.
Donald Trump’s declaration invites us to question the place of cultural heritage in military operations: to what extent does its integration into contemporary armed operations shed light on the relationship between heritage and security?
This article proposes to explore the role of material cultural heritage in times of armed conflict, by combining the contributions of strategic studies with the instruments of international law and the elements of French and NATO military doctrine (of which the provisions on the protection of cultural heritage constitute a reference particularly developed).
A series of international texts govern the protection of cultural heritage, the first being the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Articles 53 of the First Additional Protocol of 1977 and 16 of the Second Additional Protocol affirm the prohibition of “committing any act of hostility directed against historic monuments, works “The 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Times of Armed Conflict and its two additional protocols (1954 and 1999) are central to the protection of heritage and its place in war. been heavily damaged, the objective was to protect precious cultural property in the face of the violence of the means deployed. The Convention provides that cultural property can only be attacked on the basis of “military necessity. “imperative”. The second additional protocol introduces a “special protection” system granting immunity for certain cultural property in danger. Finally, under Article 15, specialized personnel must be respected and continue to exercise their functions even if they are. captured. The text introduces an extension of the scope of the convention which now applies to international armed conflicts as well as to those which do not have an international character.
Under this legal framework, it is the responsibility of armed forces (state and non-state) to preserve cultural heritage. Consequently, the destruction of cultural property is exceptional and/or unintentional.
We find the translation of these principles in the military doctrine of the national armed forces. In French military doctrine, cultural heritage is mainly considered as bringing together sites to be protected and avoided in the conduct of operations. Of the no-strike lists are developed ahead of a military operation. Destructions result from collateral damage, that is to say “unintentional or accidental damage that may be suffered by civilian installations or equipment whose destruction or neutralization, because of their nature, their use or their location, does not offer a military advantage.” The exceptional principle governing the possibility of damaging cultural property is that of imperative military necessity. The latter is defined by Article 6 of the 1999 Additional Protocol to the 1954 Convention: for a military necessity clause to be lawfully invoked, the cultural property must have been transformed into a military objective, on the one hand, and there must be no another practically possible solution to obtain an equivalent military advantage, on the other hand.
This heritage protection regime is the result of two main principles relating to the definition of the link between cultural heritage and armed conflict.
Destroying heritage does not contribute to the success of a military operation
Theories of just war developed since Roman antiquity forge the argument that cultural heritage must be spared because its destruction would not contribute to the success of a military operation. It is based on a double observation: the illegitimacy of the attacks made against it and their uselessness for the outcome of military operations.
Thus, one of the main authors, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) opposed the idea that war can be waged by sovereign states for any reason without restriction. Grotius proposes a series of regulations for violence and develops a justification for restraint in the case where the destruction of cultural property did not contribute to victory. He then describes these acts as “vile”, “insolent”, “madness” and “crimes” to the extent that the destruction does not weaken the enemy and does not benefit the author of the attacks. It goes further and calls for the preservation of buildings whose maintenance would not constitute any danger. The wording is important: the question is not only whether military gains can result from the destruction of cultural property, but whether danger arises from not destroying it.
Largely inspired by Grotius, the Swiss jurist and theorist of public international law Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) proposed the principle of protection of cultural property in times of war. According to him, their destruction would bring no benefit to its author, it would not influence the outcome of the war and it does not contribute to strengthening one party to the conflict. Vattel places attacks on cultural property in the register of inhumanity and emotion.
Heritage as an instrument of peace
In addition to being excluded from the conduct of war, cultural heritage is constructed as a tool for pacification, notably through the action of UNESCO from the 1950s. The debates during the creation of the organization in the aftermath of the Second World War particularly emphasize the promotion of peace through the vectors that are education, science and culture. Interest in peace goes beyond the institutional framework and leads UN actors to invest in the scientific field. By writing the history of security studies, Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen show the influence of UNESCO in the academic field on security studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and more particularly the organization’s participation in financing and the development of research on peace. From this perspective, peace is not defined in a negative way as the absence of war, but in a positive sense, developed by Johan Galtung. Research on peace is then intended to work on the structural transformation of the conditions of violence within a society.
In this field of study, material cultural heritage is theorized as a vector for the restoration of peace and social relations based on living together. That is to say, the role of heritage in a conflict is no longer defined in the negative as sites or objects to be avoided: on the contrary, cultural goods play an active role as a peacemaker, making it possible to overcome the divisions produced or fueled by the conflict.
In French military doctrine, cultural heritage is associated with peace because it falls within the civil domain and not the military. Its consideration mainly occurs in the post-conflict stabilization phase, that is to say from a peace-building perspective. The preservation of heritage is integrated into French doctrine within the framework of civil-military cooperation (CIMIC), that is to say it aims to support the transition from a conflictual context to a peaceful and sustainable environment; in other words, the transition from military authorities to political authorities. Thus, in 2018, France deployed a military heritage curator as a liaison officer between, on the one hand, the French military detachment and, on the other, international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Bangui in the Central African Republic.
The discourse of international organizations also contributes to strengthening the idea of heritage as a tool for pacification and reconciliation. Let’s take the context of the destruction in Iraq and Syria carried out by ISIS. Since 2014, the Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, has regularly put forward the idea of protecting cultural heritage in order to prepare for future peace on the basis of social cohesion and thus outlines a link between cultural heritage and the reestablishment of security through the reduction of violence. Likewise, the project Reviving the Spirit of Mosul (Iraq) was launched in February 2018 by UNESCO with the aim of reconstructing cultural property destroyed following the occupation of the city by ISIS. He proposes to “mobilize education and culture as levers of resilience, reconciliation and lasting peace” and heritage makes it possible to “help social recovery by putting an end to the exclusionary and sectarian policies imposed by ISIL/Daesh”. The project contributes to establishing a link between cultural heritage and the vocabulary of peace based on dialogue, exchanges and the integration of communities. In this perspective, heritage is intermediary with a collective memory and social groups victims of war.
The convergence of two theoretical fields, on the one hand, security studies and, on the other hand, heritage studies highlights the connection between heritage and respect for individuals and fundamental human rights in the context of armed conflicts.
First of all, the end of the Cold War contributes to renewing the security landscape. The notion of security is extended beyond its strictly military dimension. The notion of human security is developed by security studies to take into account these changes in the character of war. The referent is no longer the State, but the human being. It makes it possible to shift the focus towards the protection of the individual, in the face of threats coming both from outside and from within States. Human security therefore places emphasis on the promotion of human rights and the protection of individuals whose physical security and well-being are threatened. At the same time, interstate conflicts are decreasing in favor of intrastate wars where civilians find themselves at the heart of hostilities, with belligerents resorting to violence against them in a deliberate and strategic manner.
Furthermore, the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s provide an opportunity to take stock of the cultural destruction that took place in the former Yugoslavia. Political and scientific attention is focused on the policy of destruction implemented by Serbian and Croatian troops against Bosnian cultural property. The analysis highlights the use of attacks against heritage as a tool for redefining the identity of the territory. In Bosnia, Croatian forces attacked markers of political and cultural diversity, by attacking symbols of coexistence. The destruction of the Mostar bridge illustrates this logic, targeted after several months of intensive bombing targeting Muslim refugees settled on the eastern bank of the city, the bridge was destroyed on November 9, 1993 by Catholic Croatian forces. identities, aiming to permanently separate the two sides of the city. The destruction thus symbolizes the rejection of a shared and heterogeneous identity, in favor of the construction of a new national order based on exclusion. Attacks on heritage then become a means of imposing an official memory by remodeling cultural identity. of the territory.
The expression “cultural cleansing” was adopted in the aftermath of the conflicts of the 1990s by social science researchers to designate the destruction of cultural property with the aim of erasing, on an identified territory, traces of the identities and memories of the targeted groups by targeting both people and their property. This formulation designates acts of destruction carried out in a generalized manner (and not isolated incidents), and places them within a broader objective of redefining social and geographical space according to (ethno)cultural criteria.
This theoretical development finds an echo in the legal field. Cultural heritage is closely linked to the living conditions of human populations, which gradually leads to its protection being assimilated to that of fundamental human rights. Recent work shows that the protection of cultural heritage in times of armed conflict cannot be dissociated from the defense of human rights. By highlighting this connection, this research reinforces the idea that preserving heritage also amounts to protecting populations and their living conditions, thus placing the preservation of heritage within a broader framework of respect and promotion of human rights. Several legal decisions confirm this theoretical change. Thus, based on Article 53 of the First Additional Protocol of 1977 and Article 16 of the Second Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is gradually establishing a link between attacks on cultural heritage and war crimes, crimes against humanity even crimes of genocide, by the distinction between two types of targeted property: monuments linked to the culture, education, and religion of the enemy, and symbols of peaceful coexistence between different identity groups such as the Sarajevo library and the Mostar bridge.
The value given to heritage is no longer just the result of its intrinsic characteristics (as was the case in the 1954 Convention), but because human groups are attached to it. Heritage reflects the expression of identity, creativity and diversity of populations and, by extension, of humanity (which is reinforced by the adoption of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage). Thus, in times of armed conflict, attacking cultural property amounts to attacking the way of life of human communities, or even their very existence.
NATO doctrine oscillates between two traditions, the heritage is part of both the logistical sector of environmental protection inherited from American doctrine and the strategic sector of civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) influenced by the European armies. However, civilians are placed at the center of this diagram. Heritage is integrated into civil-military operations which manage relations between armed forces and civil organizations with the aim of reducing internal tensions and against the intervening armed forces. Furthermore, NATO relies on an ethical argument according to which the armed forces have the obligation to protect material heritage, because it is part of the “identity of peoples” (local) and constitutes an “irreparable societal memory in the event of appropriation or destruction”. “. Finally, heritage is integrated into NATO’s approach to human security to the extent that its protection is identified as one of the organization’s five priority areas of action in this area.
Drawing lessons from the deterioration of security on the Iraqi ground after the 2003 intervention, cultural heritage is gradually being taken into account as an element of the American counter-insurgency strategy, with the aim of not arousing resentment among local populations, which could fuel the rebellion. An article in the NATO legal gazette notes the increase in attacks against American troops deployed in Afghanistan after the destruction of cultural property by them. The article establishes a direct link between attacks on cultural heritage and the intensification of armed hostilities. According to data collected in Afghan villages between 2004 and 2009, damage to a local cultural site led to a 33% increase in insurgent attacks in the following three months. Feedback from people deployed in Iraq from 2003 and whose missions concerned cultural heritage point in the same direction. Thus, Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, also deputy district attorney in Manhattan, is investigating the looting of the national museum located in Baghdad starting in 2003. Laurie Rush, archaeologist and head of cultural resources at Fort Drum, was deployed in 2009 as liaison officer on the project of the Mesopotamian city of Ur in 2009. Both put forward the idea of heritage protection as a means of acceptance by local populations and therefore of easing tensions, which contributes to the legitimization and success of operation “Iraqi Freedom” (from the point of view American).
Taking heritage into account within the framework of a military operation therefore corresponded to a strategy of acceptance of the troops through respect for local culture. However, these RETEX also indicate the idea that cultural heritage influences the dynamics of armed conflict, because it can be a factor in armed violence.
This doctrinal evolution finds an echo in the political science literature, which identifies a transition that began in the 2010s. Cultural heritage, until then mainly theorized as the material expression of collective memories, is then formulated as a tactical issue, of terrorism and escalation of conflict. In this new perspective, attacks perpetrated by non-state armed groups do not only aim to destroy human communities associated with the targeted heritage, but are part of a determined war strategy. More precisely, the attacks are analyzed in the light of the strategic and tactical objectives of the belligerents. Thus, the destruction of churches in the Khabour region (Syria) by ISIS in February 2015 came a few months after the formation of a Christian militia within the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), whose members were from the same region. The attack against the sites therefore appears to be a direct response to the military commitment of this community.
The idea of the patrimoine-security continuum (heritage-security nexus) developed by Frederik Rosén provides an additional element of conceptualization which makes it possible to analyze the exploitation of cultural heritage with the aim of demonstrating moral superiority, instilling fear, provoking, destabilizing communities and nations, leading to an escalation of tensions and conflicts, or even in a defensive strategy. The heritage-security nexus is part of the family of continuum concepts, used to describe cross-cutting issues and the management of “problems” by security actors, such as climate, development or migration. For example, legal instruments for the protection of cultural heritage, initially designed to combat looting and illicit trafficking, are now integrated into policies to combat the financing of terrorist groups, thus contributing to international security.
This theoretical evolution finds resonance in doctrine, notably that of NATO, which presents the theme of cultural heritage with the use of a military lexical field. In this regard, Irene FellÃn (Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security to the Secretary General of NATO) states: “Due to its importance in the eyes of a given community and humanity as a whole, the destruction of cultural property is a strategic and tactical value for belligerents during campaigns and military operations. It aims to demoralize and destroy the identity of a community. » (Emphasis added by the author.)
Even more, cultural heritage is gradually associated with reflection on contemporary modes of warfare. It is integrated into the reflection on hybrid wars, from the angle of the interweaving of informational, symbolic and memorial issues in the dynamics of conflict and territorial conquest. Note that the mobilization of cultural heritage in the service of propaganda strategies is not a recent phenomenon; the controversies surrounding the bombing of Reims Cathedral in 1914 are only one example. However, the association between heritage and military strategy constitutes a subject of particularly intensive research since the mid-2010s.
Cultural heritage is part of three dimensions of hybrid threats. First of all, the physical domain, as a material object or place structuring the daily, cultural and identity life of social groups, and whose attack can have multiplied effects (local disorganization, amplification of violence, instrumentalization in terrorist recruitment). Then, the digital domain, because social networks and globalized information programs massively broadcast images of destruction, activating emotional reactions on an international scale. Finally, the area of conflict, where an attack on cultural heritage, even unintentional, can produce tactical and strategic effects due to its emotional charge, unlike collateral damage inflicted on an infrastructure devoid of cultural significance. The ongoing Ukrainian conflict contributes to deepening reflection on modes of warfare and cultural heritage, as evidenced by a forthcoming publication from the Military Academy at West Point (United States) on high-intensity warfare and heritage.
International law establishes the strategic dimension of cultural heritage with the adoption of Resolution 2347 by the UN Security Council in March 2017. The Council then affirms the link between destruction of cultural heritage and international security: “Emphasisizing that the illegal destruction of cultural heritage, pillaging and smuggling of cultural property in the event of armed conflicts, notably by terrorist groups, and attempts to deny historical roots and cultural diversity in this context, can fuel and exacerbate conflicts and hinder national reconciliation after conflicts, thus compromising security, stabilitygovernance and social, economic and cultural development of the affected states. » (Emphasis added by the author.)
From this third perspective, cultural heritage therefore appears as a strategic resource. The use of force against heritage aims to achieve political, strategic and tactical objectives of the belligerents, it is not a question of collateral or involuntary damage. From the example of recent conflicts such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Mali and Ukraine, it appears that attacks against cultural heritage are linked to logistical, defensive, or even offensive issues and are integrated into operations of the order of attack, response and coercion, allowing for a belligerent to gain the advantage over his opponent.
*
*Â Â Â Â Â Â *
If a temporal evolution is observable, the three dimensions are not exclusive of each other and sometimes find concomitant application. This superposition of issues testifies to a progressive theorization of cultural heritage in times of armed conflict, sometimes following armed conflicts in real time. Thinking about the place of heritage in war directly refers to the evolution of debates in strategic studies, and allows us to question the extent of the concept of strategy.
The theme of cultural heritage in times of armed conflict also questions the scope of action of the military field. It is then appropriate to study the management of heritage by the armies and the modalities according to which military actors take up the subject. Understanding cultural heritage from a strategic angle means not only broadening the operational spectrum of armies, but also deeply reconsidering their role and their posture (defensive or offensive) in a conflict, their doctrines, as well as their relationship to politics and civilian populations.
Crédit photo : Vyacheslav Argenberg
