Art Under Fire: Cultural Destruction as a Weapon of War

In the eighty years since the end of World War II, it has become a principle of both international law and the rules of war that belligerents in armed conflict must avoid attacks on art and monuments. And yet, from Syria to Ukraine, this has been flouted repeatedly. Worse, international efforts to enforce the prohibition tend to evoke Western elites privileging World Heritage Sites above human life. What has been lost in this false choice, argues Hugh Eakin, is the extent to which culture itself has become a central domain of contemporary warfare. If we recognize that assaults on cultural heritage often serve as harbingers of, or surrogates for, atrocities against human populations, we can also see that protecting it can be a potent form of preventing conflict – and brokering peace.

Hugh Eakin is Editor at Large of Foreign Affairs, where he commissions
and edits essays and analysis on geopolitics, economics, law, and
international politics, and has helped shape the magazine’s coverage of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Eakin’s essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, among others.

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