Urban Warfare and Cultural Heritage Current Challenges and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Urbanization is a relentless trend: while cities grow and expand, armed conflicts spill into urban areas, making cities the battlefields of our time. This has warranted the creation of new warfare tactics, which challenge the basic principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), and cause devastating consequences to civilian population, hospitals, schools, infrastructures, and cultural heritage.

After having secured a thorough definition of “urban warfare”, still lacking in international law, this paper will explore the legal and political consequences that this phenomenon entails, paying particular attention to the protection of urban cultural heritage.

During urban warfare, cultural sites are often destroyed as specific military targets, especially by Armed Non-State Actors (i.e. Palmyra) or transformed into battlefields (i.e. Aleppo and the Damascus Citadels). Moreover, urban cultural heritage is increasingly suffering the reverberating effects of armed attacks, as shown in Sana’a, Mosul, Raqqa, Gaza, Sabratha, Lubumbashi and Donetsk.

To contrast this scenario, a reassessment of local, national, and international regulations is required. The 1954 Hague Convention and its Protocols, together with the 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, oblige States to guarantee the protection of cultural heritage but lack any specific provision concerning urban warfare, where it is actually more threatened.

Guaranteeing accountability for perpetrators of violations is also crucial. With reference to the destruction of mausoleums in Timbuktu in 2012, the International Criminal Court referred to armed attacks against urban cultural heritage as a war crime for the first time. No other judgments like this were made by the ICC though, regardless of the letter of intent signed with UNESCO (2018), still poorly implemented to date.

This paper sets out to outline innovative and concrete solutions to guarantee the protection of urban cultural heritage, particularly through a better implementation and/or a revision of the relevant local, national, and international regulations. It will also explore effective ways to strengthen accountability mechanisms, thereby guaranteeing deterrent effects to future violations. Lastly, the role of international and regional organizations will be analyzed, with a view to propose pioneering practices, such as the establishment of a permanent annual forum for cooperation.