Description
UNESCO was established to ‘contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture’ and to further ‘universal respect for justice, the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms … for the peoples of the world’, irrespective of ‘race, sex, language or religion”. Key to this ambition is the protection of the world’s cultural property (CP) and world heritage (WH) from armed conflict and destruction. Several international conventions have been put in place to protect tangible and intangible cultural property and heritage from militarism and war. Yet, the convention texts tend to construct notions of humanity within masculinist language, and, as such, exclude women from discursive constructions of entitlement and responsibility. Such texts also are inattentive to the legacies of colonialism and empire and their continuous implication in war and conflict, and, by extension, the destruction of cultural property and heritage. A key position in this article is that these gendered and colonial silences have led to the privileging of typically western, militarized and masculinist approaches to the protection of cultural property and world heritage. As I demonstrate through a detailed discursive analysis of key documents this involves treating some states, often located in the global North, but not always, as highly masculinized, civilized, rational, and as such able to preserve and protect their national heritage from destruction, while others are feminized and viewed as irrational, and, therefore incapable of offering protection. While there exists prolific scholarship on the colonial assumptions that undergird WH, there is limited research on the gendered dynamics that also inform heritage and cultural property policies and practices. Inspired by Iris Marion Young’s work (2003, 2007), this article explores the masculinist and militarized protection logic that undergirds the sheltering of WH and CP from armed conflict.
