Picking up the pieces: Transitional justice responses to destruction of tangible cultural heritage

1. INTRODUCTION

A fundamental principle of human rights, be they civil and political, socio-economic or cultural, is that they are indivisible and interdependent. One set of rights cannot be enjoyed fully without the others. It is assumed that progress in one set of rights makes it easier to exercise other types. Transitional justice (TJ) has traditionally had a liberal-legalist orientation towards civil and political rights, though in the last ten years this has been consciously balanced by an increased attention to socio-economic rights. ¹ However, TJ ‘has generally and systematically ignored claims of culture,’ and by extension, cultural rights. ² This article explores how and why TJ has been relatively slow to address cultural rights deprivation, making the argument that without attending to these abuses, key identity-based grievances in the conflict end up being marginalised in comparison to political and distributive injustices, thereby undermining the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights. This is demonstrated in the context of intentional damage to tangible cultural heritage.

Intentional damage of cultural heritage is ‘seemingly now the norm’ in contemporary conflict. ³ Since the end of the Cold War, displays of destroyed or damaged tangible culture heritage are among the most iconic images of war. Few descriptions of the Bosnian war fail to mention the collapse of the Stari Most bridge caused by shelling in Mostar. Al Qaeda's bombing of one of the holiest mosques in Shia Islam, namely the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, and the partial destruction by the Tamil Tigers of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth in Kandy were key inflection points in the Iraqi and Sri Lankan civil conflicts. Ansar Al Dine's attacks on the mausoleums of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu and the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas were broadcast for the world to see. The Islamic State's explosions of Nimrud and the temples at Palmyra, to say nothing to the obliterated carvings at Hatra, were aspects of the Syrian civil war that became seared into the global consciousness. At the time of writing, damage to almost 200 cultural heritage sites in Ukraine has been observed since the Russian invasion started in February 2022. ⁴

Less attention is paid to destruction of libraries, sites of worship, archives or monuments that do not have what the UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage calls ‘outstanding universal value.’ ⁵ Examples include damage to, or destruction of, 207 (out of approximately 609) mosques and about 70 Serbian orthodox sites during the Kosovo conflict, ⁶ the Islamic State's systematic destruction of hundreds of Yezidi shrines, temples, statues and cemeteries in the Sinjar region of Iraq, ⁷ and the ongoing destruction of sites of Muslim worship in Myanmar's Rakhine State as part of the government's campaign to invalidate the Rohingya as a legitimate national ethnic group. ⁸ Rare manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and archaeological findings were also intentionally ruined. This heritage has immense social, symbolic and/or spiritual significance, and these ostensibly lower-key campaigns against cultural heritage are no less significant an aspect of broader attacks on cultural identity and coexistence. Sometimes atrocities are perpetrated by the State, with or without indifference or passive support by society, which raises obvious questions of accountability and repair. When perpetrated by non-State actors they testify to the State's failure to prevent or mitigate such harms.

It is surprising, therefore, that intentional destruction of tangible cultural heritage has traditionally been treated as largely beyond the conceptual apparatus of TJ. In general terms, cultural violence, though invariably manifest in the form of dehumanisation and systemic vulnerability, ‘has remained a peripheral focus’ in the field. ⁹ Even scholars who acknowledge its importance eschew detailed treatment on the reasonable grounds that ‘its meaning has not been fully developed under international law.’ ¹⁰ Beyond a compelling recent study of the role of reparations (albeit one exploring both tangible and intangible cultural heritage), ¹¹ international criminal law represents the main area where physical wreckage of important sites has been addressed. The ICTY's treatment of cultural destruction in the Strugar, Prlić et al and Jokić cases has attracted considerable academic attention. ¹² So too has the ICC's seminal judgment in the Al Mahdi trial relating to Timbuktu's tombs, which was the first time the principle charge in a case was the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime. ¹³ Because of their necessarily international and narrow legal focus, these treatments pay scant attention to the broader issues of social change, restoration, and reform that animate TJ. However, the main avenues where TJ attends to these issues, namely truth commissions and reparation programmes, have not addressed destruction of tangible cultural heritage. The authors reviewed the terms of reference for a sample of 33 truth commissions found in the United States Institute of Peace's Truth Commission Digital Collection ¹⁴ and a sample of 25 reparations programmes identified in Queens University Belfast's Reparations Database ¹⁵ to establish the prevalence of mechanisms dealing specifically with tangible heritage destruction in TJ processes. We could not identify a single mechanism explicitly or implicitly charged with documenting or redressing the removal, obliteration or harm of tangible cultural heritage.

This lacuna is increasingly recognised by contemporary domestic and international heritage professionals, who have begun to acknowledge that their technical endeavours in identifying, managing, and monitoring heritage post-conflict have been divorced from concerns about social recovery. Attention to buildings and monuments that historically characterised the heritage ‘industry’ now extends to the communities that use them. The primary rationale has shifted from protecting heritage as a scientific or managerial endeavour towards understanding it as a cultural practice of symbolic, ritualistic or social importance to communities and collective groups. ¹⁶ Whereas links between heritage and rights were once non-existent, it is now accepted that the post-conflict protection and enhancement of cultural heritage can be framed from a human rights perspective, especially insofar as it addresses the power differentials that prevent meaningful participation by communities in their heritage. ¹⁷ In particular, practitioners have been drawing on TJ-adjacent language in realigning their approaches to post-conflict heritage to take into account the broader political, social, and economic context. Psychosocial recovery premised on discursive mechanisms that recognise core beliefs of antagonistic communities about their material surroundings are a feature of contemporary practice. ¹⁸ Heritage is seen as having a latent potential ‘as a medium for social healing’ and bridge-building through greater awareness of shared traditions. ¹⁹ Some heritage scholars now argue that TJ represents a potential means to ‘reframe’ the legacies of past physical devastation of heritage. ²⁰ These developments may explain why Farida Shaheed, the former UN Special Rapporteur for cultural rights, argued that ‘a cultural rights-based approach to transitional justice and reconciliation strategies is not rendered the attention it deserves.’ ²¹ Lostal and Cunliffe, as well as Gottlieb, tentatively suggest cultural destruction could be factored into reparations and truth-seeking mechanisms. ²² The incorporation of cultural destruction can improve TJ praxis by giving full effect to the indivisibility of human rights – civil-political, socio-economic and cultural – while addressing the hitherto neglected issues of heritage and identity as concepts with a latent potential for both healing and disharmony in post-conflict communities.

This article sketches some ways TJ can meaningfully engage with cultural destruction in typical contemporary post-conflict States in the context of negative peaces or frozen conflicts. These are ecologies where recurrence cannot be excluded but where some measure of peacebuilding is being attempted and a critical mass of domestic actors are genuinely committed to confront, negotiate or manage pre-conflict divisions. It is during these periods that heritage as a ‘site of contestation’ is most apparent and States are most likely to consciously rework or mediate the foundational narratives of different collective cultural identities that underpin heritage destruction. ²³ It builds upon an emerging sense in the field that TJ has an underappreciated potential to engage with those issues of collective identity that lie at the root of conflict and also those other disciples (like heritage studies) that address issues of identity and reconciliation. ²⁴ Identity-based grievances can, after all, leave post-conflict States ‘overwhelmed, to the point of paralysis’ ²⁵ Antagonistic identities and belief systems motivate most cultural destruction. Aiken, among others, argues that TJ can help to redefine these identities or reinterpret the social realities that became polarised in conflict. ²⁶ Even if it falls short of this aspiration, forms of TJ explored in this article can provide recognition of cultural destruction and thus promote civic trust and some degree of social integration, if not reconciliation. ²⁷ The failure to take cultural destruction seriously has left a yawning gap in TJ practice. If we take seriously the idea that TJ might ‘reinforce impunity by what it ignores,’ this unaddressed injustice calls into question its suitability as a tool for rebuilding social meaning and collective belonging. ²⁸

Before outlining the shape of this article, our decision to focus on intentional destruction of tangible cultural heritage needs brief justification. By intentional destruction, we omit other violations like looting, in which the motivation is pecuniary, as well as collateral damage motivated by military objectives. This allows us to concentrate on premeditated assaults on communal identity through destruction, though these distinctions are admittedly not always clear-cut. The focus on tangible cultural objects excludes intangible practices, rituals, oral traditions, values, and performative arts that permit transmission of culture from one generation to the next. To some extent, the distinction is artificial as tangible heritage is usually dependent on intangible beliefs, memory, and interpretations, and many world cultures draw no distinction between the two. ²⁹ Our focus on the tangible reflects the reality that heritage embodied in inanimate objects is different from intangible heritage as practiced by peoples. They are destroyed and reconstructed in different ways, particularly because intangible aspects of culture attach less concern with maintaining a changeless essence. ³⁰ Because intangible heritage is such a broad concept and most international agreements on cultural heritage deal primarily with the tangible, ³¹ ‘consensus and action are more feasible’ for the more narrowly defined material manifestations of culture. ³² Nothing in this materialist focus should suggest that intangible heritage is considered less important than tangible heritage by the authors.

Section 2 outlines some reasons the destruction of cultural heritage has gone unaddressed in TJ practice and advocacy, which demonstrates the field's failure to give effect to the indivisibility of rights. It then goes on to argue that TJ is equally if not better suited to breaches of cultural rights than the types of bodily integrity and economic rights deprivations the field usually addresses. Section 3 outlines the link between cultural rights and identity, explores how destruction of heritage attempts to sunder it, and outlines how TJ can find innovative ways of dealing with issues of accountability and repair raised by identity-based violations. Section 4 explores promising ways TJ can respond to cultural destruction both by incorporating it within one of its standard mechanisms (truth commissions) and, as suggested above, by informing the parallel work of heritage professionals in changing educational curricula and physical reconstruction of monuments and buildings.

The method adopted in this article is primarily desk research involving (a) a bibliographic scan of the English language literature on transitional justice and cultural destruction, and (b) collating existing data and theory to identify the policy environment, key themes, and gaps. As noted previously, the terms of reference for a sample of truth commissions and reparations programmes were reviewed to establish the prevalence of mechanisms dealing specifically with tangible heritage destruction in TJ processes, or lack thereof. To the extent that international human rights instruments like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) are drawn on, rather than a juristic or doctrinal analysis the research method is socio-legal, empirical, and social-theoretical in nature, and is oriented towards examination of the operation of the law in post-conflict contexts.

2. CULTURAL DESTRUCTION AS AN ASSAULT ON IDENTITY

While greed and grievance-related theories based on denials of economic and political rights remain predominant, cultural issues reflected in identity are now acknowledged as among ‘the most normatively significant and behaviourally consequential aspects of politics.’ ³³ Every society sustains a vision of its collective self-identity, which is best understood as a form of socially constructed perception or sense of belonging made manifest in narrative and social practices. Ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other communities sustain this vision through socially constructed criteria of membership that revolve around physical attributes, beliefs, and moral commitments that are understood to represent who the community is. ³⁴ Because identity is socially constructed, it is ‘fluid, transversal and movable’ – actors and communities can and do switch between plural affiliations. ³⁵ Nevertheless, the core of identity can become ‘perceived by group members as relatively stable “truths” or “social facts”‘ defining what is typical of the in-group. ³⁶ It is this identity that underpins varying demands for positive discrimination or majoritarianism, regional autonomy or national chauvinism, and participation or exclusion.

The discourse surrounding artefacts, monuments, and buildings (or how values are projected onto them) can be central to how the identities of nations and subnational groups are shaped, either within groups who share a common sense of unity, or between distinctly different collectivities. ³⁷ As the 2003 UNESCO Declaration concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage confirms, cultural heritage ‘is an important component of the cultural identity of communities, groups and individuals, and of social cohesion.’ ³⁸ The transgenerational memory on which identity is based often requires physical locations in what Nora describes as lieux de memoire, or sites of memory. ³⁹ These places and things form ‘a key signifier of belonging and difference’, ⁴⁰ ‘enact culture and the people themselves,’ ⁴¹ and ‘affirm the right to space through their presence across time.’ ⁴² This inherently relational conception of communities as constructed groups necessarily implies constructed ‘others’. This symbolic power means tangible cultural heritage can be politicised to serve wider agendas in constructing collective memory and identities. Certain monuments, buildings or sites are valorised by the State to represent hegemonic national narratives of a cultural majority embedded through funding, education and exclusivist forms of conservation. In contrast, Subnational groups might consider their communal heritage just as valid and use it as an ideological foundation on which antagonistic territorial or political ideologies might be based.

Socially and historically situated clashes over the status, significance and/or interpretation can be subsumed within broader political struggles related to denials of political and economic rights. Most conflict ecologies where cultural destruction takes place experienced prior patterns of intercommunal division that permeate social, economic, and political life manifesting in decades- or centuries-long histories of exclusion or domination. This creates fertile ground for polarising communal mythologies of difference and victimisation, domination, and defiance. In such a context, culturally meaningful symbols ‘emphasize differences between communities, contain negative images of other communities, or evoke strong opposite reactions from each community.’ ⁴³ The built or monumental environment can express deep divisions, becoming the everyday loci of animosity that embody forms of hegemony and resistance.

These outward signs of the ‘other’ community can be emphasised by conflict entrepreneurs once conflict commences. Though unjustified by any military necessity and often occurring significant distances from the conflict frontlines, many reasons for intentional cultural destruction have been proffered. Perhaps most prosaically, it undermines opposition morale by attacking places that represent communities’ expectations of normalcy and safety, ‘shatter[ing] the community's faith they were protected’ by the State. ⁴⁴ As an aspect of psychological warfare, the obliteration of heritage both removes any evidence that a community was present in an area and removes any motivation to return. ⁴⁵ To the extent the State or region was multicultural, destruction is intended to distort prior mentalities of co-existence. ⁴⁶ For instance, the Mostar bridge attack notoriously ‘was an attack on the very concept of multiethnicity and the co-joined communities it was intended to embody.’ ⁴⁷

Ba extends this argument by contending that that destruction of Sufi mausoleums in Mali was a core aspect of a broader project of gouvernement oriented towards administering a reformed political community, pointing to the Islamic fundamentalism that rejected the cultural practice of Timbuktu residents to pray on tombs. ⁴⁸ Likewise, ISIS destroyed the Mosul museum as part of a conscious effort to redirect loyalties from secular nationalism towards a more theocratic identity. ⁴⁹ In Myanmar, the government's attacks on Karen, Mon, and Rohingya heritage publicly affirmed the authority of the majority Bamar ethnic group. ⁵⁰ In the midst of conflict, the motivation may be more nihilistic than governmental, where cultural cleansing is pursued not merely as a form of erasure of memory, ⁵¹ but to shatter the victim community's very sense of who they are and where they come from. ⁵² The psychological impact of cultural destruction is well-attested. Isakhan and Meskell's survey of local reaction to the destruction of Mosul's Nebi Yunus mosque is typical: ‘When I heard of this destruction, it was like trauma for me […] Every time I am going and seeing this destroyed mosque, I feel like something has been destroyed in my life or inside me’ ⁵³ For observant Yezidis ‘they think it is now the end of the faith. If you don't have shrines […] the children are growing up in the last three years knowing nothing about their religion, their heritage, their culture.’ ⁵⁴

3. EXPLAINING THE MARGINALISATION OF CULTURAL DESTRUCTION IN TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

If Hartley's claim that violations of cultural heritage can serve as an ‘indicator of the level of intended dominance via destruction of the social and economic status of an adversary with an assigned identity’ ⁵⁵ is correct, we might expect demands for cultural reform alongside more familiar political and economic claims in antebellum ecologies. In the aftermath of conflict, there is generally a significant demand for recognition of the cultural legitimacy of communities in the face of the dominant cultures in which (i) they are unequally integrated and/or (ii) they saw their heritage go unprotected. However, as Lixinski notes, cultural heritage has been neglected in the TJ literature notwithstanding an evident potential to shape memory. ⁵⁶ Explanations might be sought in the rhetoric of human rights, where lip-service to indivisibility and interdependence is seldom matched by parity of attention. The marginalisation of cultural destruction may therefore reflect what Carranza called the field's implicit ‘hierarchy of egregiousness’ where bodily integrity abuses rank above socio-economic crimes and, by extension, abuses of cultural heritage. ⁵⁷ There is an understandable anthropocentricity that ranks crimes against things below crimes against people, which is perhaps most evident in the ICC Trial Chamber's view in the aforementioned Al-Mahdi case that ‘even if inherently grave, crimes against property are generally of lesser gravity than crimes against persons.’ ⁵⁸ While the shrines in Timbuktu were being attacked, city residents were having limbs cut off for crimes against social order, ISIS's genocidal campaigns against minorities and use of sexual slavery exceeded their iconoclastic destruction in terms of gravity, and famine-related deaths in Yemen clearly outweighs the bombardment of the ruins of ancient Marib in abhorrence. ⁵⁹

A similar moral queasiness applies when comparing economic rights violations. It is far from self-evident why cultural heritage should be prioritised in conditions where the population lack means of survival like food, water, shelter or employment. ⁶⁰ The ‘root cause’ argument that is employed to justify attention to economic rights violations is also less applicable to cultural destruction. Unlike issues such as lack of access to land or inequalities, war is not fought over cultural differences, though these are invoked in drawing conflict dividing-lines. The discomfort with asserting the importance of cultural heritage in times of conflict is also a perennial feature of the ‘saving lives versus saving stones’ discourse that surrounds heritage practitioners. ⁶¹ Cultural heritage is ‘perceived and treated as a luxury that cannot be afforded by societies coping with multiple over-riding priorities’ to be broached only towards the latest stages of transition once ‘harder’ security and political goals are met. ⁶² These arguments, however, are no longer tenable. At the macro-level of the State's political imagination or national narrative, the targeting of cultural heritage testifies to the salience of identity-based divisions, leaving a significant need for redress on the level of public perception. ⁶³ At the micro-level, it is clear that recovery in the everyday depends on cultural resilience. Communities will often attempt to restore or demand the restoration of war-damaged heritage and traditions ‘to answer to a strong psychosocial need to re-establish the familiar and the cherished following a phase of violent disruption of normal life.’ ⁶⁴ As a former Director-General of UNESCO puts it, heritage is attacked to:

deprive communities of their identity and anchors. They do not choose between human lives and heritage – they destroy both to install fear and chaos. We should not choose either, striving instead to defend both heritage and human lives at the same time. ⁶⁵

The fact that heritage receives such a marginal degree of attention seems to reflect the diminished status of cultural rights. There is little question that destruction of tangible cultural heritage and other forms of cultural cleansing violate the guarantees in Article 15(1)(a) ICESCR and Article 27(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ‘enjoy’, ‘take part’, and ‘freely to participate in the life of the community’, to say nothing of ICESCR Article 1's right to self-determination wherein all peoples have the right to freely determine their social and cultural development. The UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has also explicitly confirmed that such destruction is a violation of human rights. ⁶⁶ Rights ancillary to participation like rights to cultural identity, cultural survival, and culturally appropriate education are also breached. ⁶⁷ As Blake notes, ‘it is its role in the construction of cultural identity which is the element being protected when cultural heritage is treated as an element within human rights.’ ⁶⁸ These articles entail a negative duty on States to abstain from any conduct that destroys, modifies or desecrates tangible cultural heritage and a positive duty to take steps to protect against violations. The obligation to respect and protect cultural heritage means there should be no regressive measures taken in relation to cultural heritage both in peacetime and during armed conflict. ⁶⁹

Despite this, cultural rights survive mostly as a neglected element of human rights, attracting comparatively little academic attention and a perceived lack of normative weight relative to civil-political and socio-economic rights. ⁷⁰ This is even the case in TJ literature which criticises the field's traditional concern with civil and political rights violations to the exclusion of rights outside the liberal-legalist paradigm. To a certain extent, the ‘constructed invisibility’ of socio-economic rights ⁷¹ is being addressed in this last decade. However, while the indivisibility of rights is often invoked by those who wish to orient TJ towards structural concerns, this seldom extends beyond socio-economic rights like food, health, housing, and education. ⁷² This is highly regrettable. As the survey of cultural destruction in Section 2 revealed, socio-economic, civil-political, and cultural violations are mutually reinforcing forms of abuse and any compartmentalisation or omission will inevitably ‘oversimplify the relationship between those unredressed legacies.’ ⁷³ Insofar as cultural destruction is inherently connected to group membership and perpetrated on the grounds of a collective identity, it has often served as a proxy for attacks on people or an ‘early warning system’ for genocide or other forms of bodily integrity violation premised on similar intent to eliminate diversity. ⁷⁴ Indeed, the Myanmarese government's campaign against Rohingya heritage can be understood as a core element of a genocidal policy. ⁷⁵ Likewise, cultural destruction and socio-economic rights abuses are deeply co-imbricated. The systemic vulnerability that has compelled TJ's economic turn is usually just as visible in cultural violence as in the structural violence that supports unequal distribution of resources and agency. ⁷⁶ As Galtung argues, the symbolic violence of cultural dehumanisation ‘makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right – or at least not wrong.’ ⁷⁷ On the flip side, the validation of cultural identity can positively impact parallel struggles for resources and equity. ⁷⁸ It is only with the incorporation of cultural rights violations in addition to socio-economic abuses that TJ's rhetoric of indivisibility can become meaningful.

Another possible explanation for the marginalisation of cultural destruction is conscious or subconscious gate-keeping by policy-makers and scholars. After thirty years as a field of practice, TJ is losing its effective power, by becoming somewhat banalised, persistently advocated and expanded without ever being comprehensively implemented. ⁷⁹ As Andrieu notes, our sense that a grievance should be addressed always rubs up against the question of whether existing mechanisms are functionally adequate to deal with it. The rise of a transitional justice and (gender, art, climate change, race) literature reflects a ‘tendency to overextend’ TJ. ⁸⁰ The risk that TJ's limited resources might be spread too thinly is valid. ⁸¹ It is inseparable from the worry that we burden TJ with expectations it cannot possibly fulfil, particularly in relation to socio-economic structures that are historically deeply imbricated.

However, cultural destruction represents a grievance where TJ could channel its limited means towards achievable objectives to a greater degree than economically transformative iterations. While attention to structural injustice and poverty is welcome, significant doubt has been cast on traditional TJ mechanisms applicability to socio-economic rights ⁸² and strong political resistance in post-conflict environments creates challenges for thoroughgoing transformation. ⁸³ Even strong early advocates of addressing economic violence urge better management of initial expectations of success. ⁸⁴ Paige Arthur, acknowledging that TJ cannot deal directly with resource distribution or competition in post-conflict States, argues that TJ is better suited to address certain aspects of contemporary conflict over others, most notably those related to identity. ⁸⁵ While social transformation is ‘too high a goal’ for TJ, it can achieve significant success in challenging systematic marginalisation on the basis of identity by addressing the dehumanising myths and narratives that underpin, amongst other violations, cultural destruction. ⁸⁶ A willingness to de-mythologise antagonistic identities or mutually respect the integrity of cultural heritage may make this a more achievable goal than either the liberal-legalist aspiration of right-based democratisation or surmounting what Andrieu identifies as the immense technical and conceptual difficulties of addressing the complex degrees of causality and responsibility that attach to economic violence. ⁸⁷

While attention to structural violence requires TJ to affect State-wide socio-economic policies directed towards entire categories of the population, identity-based violations like tangible cultural destruction distil the focus on to specific artefacts and sites. This narrower spotlight may supply the ‘close fit between the problem and the solution’ that many post-conflict aspirations for TJ lack. ⁸⁸ Gottlieb, for example, argues that ‘[d]istinct from more amorphous projects aimed at uniting the people or dealing comprehensively with the past’, reparative work like reconstruction of buildings or monuments ‘can be well-planned in advance and are relatively easily and timely executed by the government.’ ⁸⁹ How TJ can channel its limited means towards achievable objectives in bringing communities into a more just relationship by addressing cultural destruction is explored in the next section.

4. SOCIAL LEARNING FROM CULTURAL DESTRUCTION

In the aftermath of conflict, the social fabric of communities breaks down and resilience can become diminished, while polarised identities harden in contexts where deeply divided groups must learn to co-exist in a single polity. In such circumstances, the damage to heritage can itself become iconic as an embodiment of discourse surrounding the conflict such that continued ruin or reconstruction becomes hugely symbolic. Failure to repudiate the message of perpetrators of damage can embitter communities, and so the protection, repair and memorialisation of heritage have become important peacebuilding activities. ⁹⁰ Where the prime conflict antagonists are neutralised, fear may endure that heritage remains vulnerable to subsequent waves of violence. Even after a peace agreement is finalised, further disputes over the meaning and control of heritage prolong violence at a symbolic and ideological level. ⁹¹

While we might be sceptical that TJ can meaningfully foster liberal democracy or redistribute wealth or opportunity, it can have a more easily demonstrable sociocultural effect in signifying normative change by ‘reconstitut[ing] the collective—across potentially divisive racial, ethnic, and religious lines.’ ⁹² In the aftermath of atrocity, TJ can provide some reassurance insofar as it recreates expectations of ‘shared normative commitments’ between communities. ⁹³ Aiken argues that TJ is most effective in this regard by challenging those animosities linked to collective identity. It can mitigate antagonistic identifications through processes of social learning where ‘former enemies come to reassess the hostile perceptions and negative beliefs they once held about one another’ through contact, dialogue, truth, and reparation. ⁹⁴ While social learning can form the basis for reconciliation in the long-term, in the short term it can alter antagonistic perceptions of group identity by ‘developing a broader sense of collective identification’ that does not eliminate existing cultural loyalties but instead fosters more inclusive superordinate identities or commitments. ⁹⁵ This has obvious relevance to the aftermath of cultural heritage violations. There is a near consensus among post-conflict heritage scholars that a starting point for psychosocial recovery from such destruction requires the articulation of a shared vision ‘understanding and synchronising myriad perceptions of cultural heritage held by various groups’ sensitively built through open communication of priorities and necessary compromises. ⁹⁶ The idea here is not that identities are transformed or reconciliation follows, but rather that fundamentalist ideologies which lead to destruction can be mitigated through education about heritage and diversity. ⁹⁷ Respect and recognition for different group identities can come from developing local and national awareness of a shared heritage (or, failing this, awareness of the need to protect non-shared heritage) by co-creating new ‘infrastructures of interpretation.’ ⁹⁸

The rest of this section explores how TJ can form or assist this process of re-interpretation or social learning vis-à-vis heritage through (a) physical reconstruction, (b) reform of educational curricula, and (c) incorporation of cultural destruction within the remit of truth commissions. This is not an exhaustive list of TJ's potential role; memorials, museums and guarantees of non-repetition can also be employed to respond to damage of tangible artefacts or sites, but considerations of space preclude examination. Within a wider context of socio-political upheaval, the survival of complex cultural environments requires a sustaining economic system and political tolerance for other ways of life, to say nothing of a threshold public commitment to peaceful co-existence amongst former antagonists.

5. CONCLUSION

This article has explored how the deliberate destruction of tangible cultural heritage in the pursuit of terror or forced homogenisation makes diversity a victim of contemporary conflict. The damage is both material and symbolic. After conflict, the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion must adapt and the cultural politics of identity must be renegotiated. Heritage, as a core manifestation of a people's dignity, is a key means by which identity is mediated, provided there is some measure of redress. TJ has a role to play in countering harmful foundational narratives of difference and recognising the legitimacy of cultural variance. Policymakers and scholars must therefore acknowledge the importance of materiality and meaningfully affirm the valence of cultural rights to pay due regard to the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights.

While the expansion of TJ to socio-economic rights and structural inequalities is widely perceived to involve a paradigm shift, ¹⁶⁹ the accent on the symbolic and particular means existing mechanisms are applicable without significant revision. Heritage reconstruction can serve as a means of reparation, but even where reparation is not the motivation TJ values can guide contentious discussion. History education and curriculum revision can serve as a form of TJ that counter the mythmaking of those who aggressed or stood aside. Truth commissions can incorporate destruction of cultural heritage, acknowledging damage but elaborating narratives and policies that can reconfigure institutional treatment of heritage and affirm a new baseline for cultural engagement going forward. Identity is contingent, evolving, and mutable. In responding to destruction of cultural heritage, TJ can prove itself contingent, evolving, and mutable as well.