 Welcome, welcome, everyone. I'm really thrilled to be introducing the day, and more importantly, introducing Professor Jorge Otero Pailos, the new director of our Historic Preservation Program. Jorge's certainly turning preservation as the most exciting field, as a form of knowledge and practice on the leading edge of every possible contemporary issue as it relates to the built environment. Sociopolitical, economical, formal, aesthetic, cultural, technological, and with the most global reach and relevance today, as well as historically and for the future, in light of forces such as global urbanization and climate change. Preservation and War as the title of this conference would be one of those most urgent lenses through which to look at architecture and the built environment today. At first, it seems obvious, right? What could be worse than war and conflict? And what could be better and more good than preservation? While this conference may not undo these two poles, the outstanding speakers gathered here will certainly complicate this relationship. If not inverted, then at least demonstrate the intrinsic intertwining of preservation and war. Historically, wars have shaped where and when preservation happens. Military codes of conduct have constituted the basis for national and international preservation laws. And yet, more than ever, we are reminded in these times that declaring a World Heritage Site may be exactly the invitation to see it violently demolished in a media spectacle that intensifies exponentially the material loss of the destruction. This loss is always experienced as significantly more than material. It's the loss of histories and forms of knowledge of a sense of shared humanity, of hybrid identities, of complex and diverse and often conflicting narratives that we see flattened. To not be able to retrieve a people's sense of a collective past may make it impossible, in fact, to project a new shared future. But preservation itself also carries what wars start and is often an act of destruction in itself, what layers, objects, buildings, and memories are preserved, and which ones are edited out and erased. It seems, and with some reason, that there is no more urgent, passion-provoking, and mobilizing matter than the question of cultural heritage today. So much so that cultural heritage at war has just recently been declared, quote, an imperative to humanity. But whose heritage are we preserving and whose humanity? Preservation and cultural heritage can often intensify the ratio of wars of identity politics and produces similar flattening to that resulting from conflict. Heritage is more than ever today enlisted for statecraft and nation building, for constructing identities at the exclusion of others, a form of war waging on perceived contaminated identities, and a willful erasing of more complex histories. Even in times of peace, preservation often starts with fragmenting, with editing, and with careful redesign. And so today, preservation's intertwining with war is no more clear than in the technological and material advances it is enlisting, the drone mapping of layers, the 3D virtual reconstructions, the VR, the engineered material experiments, the scanning, the infrared images, the heat maps, et cetera, et cetera. There is no doubt that preservation is leading architecture across scales as discourse and as practice. All architecture today is made infinitely more interesting and relevant when framed as preservation. This conference explores one of the many complex frames through which preservation is claiming centrality today as a form of knowledge and engagement with the built environment. And it makes tangible the critical and increasingly urgent role it needs to play, not only in the understanding of the past, but in the possibility of opening up and projecting many possible futures. So please join me in welcoming the brain behind the day for her oteropilus. Thank you, Dean Andraus. And thank you for your support of the conference. Welcome all of you to the 2016 Fitch Colloquium, which honors the memory of James Marston Fitch, our founder over 50 years ago, founder of this historic preservation program, the first in the country. Today's colloquium will explore the relationship of preservation and war. And these two words, preservation and war, are often invoked as opposites. It's certainly in the press. In the crucible of today's conflagrations in the Middle East and elsewhere, we read of the need to deploy preservation in order to resist, quote unquote, the ravages of war. But this very idea that preservation can be a form of resistance to war already casts preservation as a form of war by other means, a critical part of the logic and logistics of war, as Dean Andraus just pointed out. And that's something external to it. With that in mind, we're here to inquire into the way in which war shapes how we practice and understand preservation, and vice versa, how preservation shapes how we practice and think of war. We've asked a distinguished group of preservationists, architects, artists, archaeologists, historians, theorists, planners, lawyers, members of the military, all working in preservation to reflect on this relationship. Now a sign of the importance of this question is the number of conferences that have been held already in the 21st century around the topic of the destruction of heritage. Some of them involving some of our leading politicians like John Kerry, François Hollande who recently came to the Met also to speak on this issue. Many of these conferences present preservation as a moral imperative, a call to duty, even a call to action to intervene in current wars. These conferences are attempts to respond to current events, to answer the question of what do we do? What can we do? Now over the years, this historic preservation program has organized a number of these conferences. 14 years ago, the 2002 Fitch Colloquium, held right after the attacks of 9-11, was titled Target Architecture. And it dealt precisely with the question of what happens when architecture is taken up in the crosshairs of war. Last year, we organized a one-day symposium called Culture and Heritage After Palmyra, held in the presidential aula magna of low Rotunda, right after ISIS blew up the ancient Roman site and assassinated Khaled al-Assad, the 81-year-old Syrian archaeologist who served 40 years as the head of antiquities for Palmyra. Now while these sorts of conferences and responses to current events are important, we also realize that by focusing too narrowly on current events, they often miss the larger historical patterns. So we decided that this year's Fitch Colloquium should be a different sort of conference, one that attempted to take a step back from the immediacy of the present and take a wider view of the relationship between preservation and war. Without losing sight of the present, we will be looking deep into the past and deep into the future to explore the patterns and stakes of this relationship. Now breaking through the limits that the present imposes on us, both at the level of action and thought, is quite hard, as we all know. But this is what we aim to do in academia. When we say that Columbia's Historic Preservation Program has its mission to advance knowledge and preservation, we mean that both at the level of a single mind of a student that comes in with a certain level of knowledge who needs to get to a different level of knowledge. But we also mean that at the level of the discipline. And to learn to advance knowledge of preservation requires a different set of skills than to train in preservation. While remaining deeply engaged in the present, while we carry out our projects in the field, sometimes in the battlefield, it is our detachment from the present, what we may call a historical perspective that enables us to remain critical of the very things we are called to do and are involved in doing, to ask the tough questions, to speak truth to power, to ask, why not? And what if we try things a little differently? When we ask these questions, we're beginning to push the limits of knowledge through a sort of experimentation. And since Fitch founded Columbia's Historic Preservation Program, this critical and experimental approach to the practice of preservation has been one of our distinguishing traits. In this conference, follows in that tradition, offering us a critical and experimental approach to thinking about the relationship between preservation and war. And we're going to see a number of examples of projects of actual engagement in the monuments, of testing the monuments, of working on the monuments as a way to expand our knowledge of preservation. Now, one cannot rush into critical and experimental work and we in the program have been doing a lot of work to prepare for this conference. Tim Winter, who's one of our speakers for the day, edited a special issue, a few trans here that I hope all of you have in your hands. It's freely available for anyone that registered for the conference on preservation and diplomacy. The work that comes in and around preservation and war as it means to avoid war. It's a fantastic issue and it was an issue that involved students in the editing process as a way to really begin to understand the larger issues at work in this relationship. More recently, David Gisson, who's another one of our panelists and there he is, has been leading a course here at Columbia called the Rites of Monuments that has been preparing students for this conference. Now, through this preparatory work, we began to unpack the long history of this relationship between preservation and war. We found that the destruction of heritage has at least since the Enlightenment been considered a threshold beyond which military action becomes unjust and even criminal. Now, interestingly, centuries before preservation laws, it was military jurists like Améric de Vattel who helped establish the notion that governments at war had a legal duty to protect heritage, including that of their conquered armies. And so the regulation of modern warfare in many ways proceeded and shaped the regulation that we are familiar with in modern preservation. Military codes of conduct, such as the pioneering 1863 US Libre Code, about which we will hear more today, became the basis and inspiration for national and international preservation laws. But the Libre Code was also the enabling element for radical experiments in preservation. And I'm thinking here of the Robert E. Lee House, which as you know, the minute that Virginia seceded from the Union, Lee was offered command of the Union but resigned instead to join the Confederate state army and had to flee his house. US Union troops immediately occupied the house in its ground. And the question became, how do we then deal with this house, which is clearly the house of the enemy, but which we must protect? There were different ideas for this. Edwin, different experiments. The Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, determined that the Lee family should never again occupy the house. And he placed a hospital on the site in a village of African-American freed enslaved, right on it. And he had a tax levied on the house that required the owner to pay it in person. He asked Lee to come and pay the tax in person. The estate was put up for public sale in 1864. And the government paid itself $26,800 for the purchase of the house. But this was not considered enough. And the threat was always that the Lee family was going to come back. And so an experiment ensued as to what to do with this house in order to prevent it from ever becoming the residents of the Lee family. And General Miggs of the War Department came up with a great idea to start putting graves around the house, graves of soldiers that had fallen during the war. All those graves became what is now known as Arlington National Cemetery, and they surround the house. It's quite an interesting experiment to turn a house into a cemetery, but certainly one that in terms of preservation we must take very seriously. Now the experience of World War II and now the famous work of the Monuments Men was a powerful catalyst for the creation of preservation institutions during peace time from the National Trust of Historic Preservation, which famously had at its helm admirals and generals for a very long time until it was changed, but also to other organizations like UNESCO. The reign was not so much to abolish war, something that seemed impossible, something that seemed to be part of human nature to go to war, but rather to fight more just wars in the future, to correct the moral transgressions of the past, to fight more modern wars. So preservation, in other words, is not conceptually outside of war, but very much embedded in it, where it can more effectively monitor, report on influence in limit Bellicose action. Military thinking is second hand to preservation. We organize, as one would in army sometimes, around notions of readiness for battle, of the defensibility of our assets, of planned campaigns, of managing the trauma of loss, and of reconstruction. What is the range of acceptable preservation actions and nonactions in the face of today's war when spectacles are made of the dynamiting of monuments and the killing of preservationists? To what degree, we may ask, is preservation thinkable outside of militarization and its pre-war, war, and post-war continuum? It's with this question in mind that today's colloquium is organized in three sessions under the rubrics of pre-war, war, and post-war. Now we're aware that we're following here the categories of medieval just war theory, which considered the right to go to war, just at Bellum, the right of the right conduct in war, just in Bello. But we've also incorporated a more recent category, which have been proposed by theories of war in the late 20th and early 20th century, and with the category of just post-Bellum, concerning justice after war, so the post-war. Now each of these three panels will be chaired by different colleagues. Erica Avrami will chair the pre-war session. Erica Avrami is the James Marston Fitch Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation here at Columbia. Having joined the faculty in 2014, formerly the Director of Research and Education for World Monuments Fund and a Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute, Professor Avrami has worked on a global stage looking at heritage issues from different perspectives and broadly ranging social, economic, and environmental conditions by bringing international perspectives to her courses and developing studios beyond New York of Avrami challenges students to enhance their critical thinking skills and position their understanding of preservation theory and practice in a global context. Will Reynolds will chair the war session. Professor Reynolds is a junct Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation here at Columbia. He works primarily on architectural and archeological conservation projects and environments where fluctuation in the urban fabric is especially rapid and applied legal protection is scarce. He's chiefly interested in low cost and readily deployable techniques to collect reliable geospatial condition information of historic sites, enabling local authorities, concerned citizens, and everyone in between to safeguard what they can with tightly constrained resources. He's worked in the Middle East and North Africa and is a member of the Oberlin archeological mission in Libya. Before and after the 2011 revolution, he's worked closely with the members of the Libyan Department of Antiquities to build capacity in documenting, inventorying, and protecting historic sites. Rosalind Morris will chair the post war session. Professor Morris focuses her field work in two main areas, South Africa and mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. Her earlier scholarship focused on the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of mass media in its development, particularly in the encounter between old and new forms of mediation. More recently, she has been writing in ethnography of South Africa's mining communities. Traversing these fields of inquiry, her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence, aesthetics in the political, the sexualization of power and desire, and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her formerly wide ranging writings on all these issues, she attends specifically to the problem of language and the matter of representation. We are very fortunate and honored to have such distinguished chairs and distinguished group of speakers here today. None of them would be here if it wasn't for some really special people that made this all possible. And I wanna take a moment to thank them. Paul Amitai, who's our director of events. Laila Catelier, also in the events office. And Tina Koy in the events office. Stefan Boddaker in the communications office. Also with Jesse Seeger in the communications offer. And particularly our students, coordinators of the lecture series of which the Fitch Colloquium is a part. Andrea Sforza, Laura Weinstein, and Chi Zhang. Each of the session chairs will be introducing each of the speakers individually today. Starting with Erica Avrami, who will introduce the first session. And so please join me in welcoming all the speakers to today's Fitch Colloquium. Thank you very much Jorge, Dean Andreas, and everyone here today for your interest in this compelling topic. Just very quickly, on a matter of housekeeping, we are the first panel this morning. We are densely packed and have two panels following us. So we will be rigorous in terms of timing to make sure we get through each session in a way that allows us to have interesting and interactive dialogue about the issues. Very quickly, I will just make a few opening remarks. And then I will introduce each panelist just before their presentation. I'll give very few comments about each of them because you have full biographies in the program. So today, the pre-war panel. Through historical, theoretical, and policy lenses, the five panelists in this pre-war session will compel us to consider heritage preservation not only as a reaction to war. By examining heritage preservation's role and potentially contributing to, exacerbating, and mitigating conflict, we will consider the affirmative obligation we have as preservationists to use the heritage enterprise to confront the contemporary challenges of violence and social injustice. Without further ado, I'd like to invite our first panelist, Tim Winter. Tim is a research professor at the Alfred Deacon Institute at Deacon University in Melbourne and has published widely on heritage development, urban conservation, and the international politics of heritage. He will be speaking today on the diplomatics of preservation and future wars. Thanks, Robert. Good morning, everybody. I'd just like to start as well by thanking the organizers, particularly Jorge and the Paul and Erika and Lila who all jointly put together a fantastic day of papers and discussion, I think. I think it was going to be a very stimulating day, so it's a real honor and privilege to be here. Being allocated to the pre-war session raised some intriguing questions for me given that I'm working around the theme of heritage diplomacy as Jorge has already identified. And what I've entered into is a risky space of predicting some futures. I want to point to some important trends that I think are happening in East Asia and the Middle East today and how preservation will relate to some possible or even likely future conflicts in both those regions. As we know, the Middle East is likely to remain in conflict for medium to long term. With deep-seated tensions that are likely to remain unsolved. East Asia, however, has also been described as one of the most volatile regions of the world. I'm sure you're aware of the South China Sea disputes, the nuclear test by North Korea, US-China tensions in the region, and so on and so forth. And what that's doing is leading to increasing escalating militarization. So to understand those futures and how preservation speaks to those and foregrounding the language of international relations or the lens of international relations, geopolitics and diplomacy, I think that's particularly important. To examine the ways in which preservation of memory and material culture relates to both hostilities and diplomatic tensions, but also can create the basis for new forms of international cooperation. So the US has been one of the key players in the response to the destruction of heritage by IS or ISIS, creating emergency structures and dealing with illicit trafficking of items. And I'm sure we're gonna hear various presentations on the WMF, Smithsonian and so on and so forth today. That's formed very much part of an international effort, which you see a slide here, the United Four Heritage Project, driven by UNESCO. And this slide represents the so-called international community. I'd like us to dwell on that for a few seconds. And I think that expression blinds us to the complexities of today's international relations landscapes and the geopolitics of the Middle East. What we see here is an entirely Western coalition. But if we're gonna look towards the future, I would suggest that some wider coalitions are needed, some new players that need to be integrated and incorporated. I'm particularly looking to non-Western countries, most notably China, that I think will have an increasing influence in the region. It's been confirmed that Palmyra, in the British pronunciation of Palmyra, has suffered a number of, it's been one of those sites that suffered attacks that have come from rushing Russian planes that have destroyed a number of archeological sites across Syria. But in July 2016, we saw what might be referred to as a form of orchestrated diplomacy by Russia. The performance by the Mowensky Orchestra attempted to claim some moral high ground in the conflict. It demonstrated to the world that Russia is not on the same side of the barbaric side of cultural destruction as IS. The event enabled the Russian state to associate itself with antiquities, classical music, and claim to be the guardians of high culture for the whole world. This image also speaks to some intriguing and complex futures regarding preservation, vis-a-vis the wider political economies of aid and foreign policy in that region. And most notably here, Palmyra is one of the sites, one of the Middle Eastern sites, on the Silk Road. In 2013, Xi Jinping traveled to Kazakhstan to launch the One Belt, One Road initiative. This is an extraordinarily ambitious project for re-activating and re-energising the Silk Roads, both overland and maritime, for the 21st century. It's being funded by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was set up and established at the beginning of this year, to the tune of $100 billion, with $50 billion being allocated to the Silk Road Fund. In July, in 2015, a vision strategy was announced, which created six corridors of development. As you can see on that slide. There are five key priorities of core areas to the One Belt, One Road project, policy, facilities, trade, financial integration, and people-to-people contacts. To understand some of the senses, significance of this project, I'll point you towards Para-Kana's recent book on connectography, whereby he argues that, in the 21st century, geopolitical power and strength will be coming from infrastructures across boundaries, transnational, transregional infrastructures, rather than territorial acquisition. So in terms of One Belt, One Road, this slide here, I've been tracking the projects that have commenced under the project, under the umbrella of One Belt, One Road in the last two years, two and a half years or so, and these have all been either completed or initiated in the last two and a half years or so. Particular corridors of development, that Pakistan corridor through to Iran, and down somewhere like Kenya, and countries like Sri Lanka. This is a 30-year project for integrating the pipeline. So it's for energy security, gas and oil pipelines for China. For joining up the infrastructure to Southern Europe, China's been taking out long leases, 99-year leases for ports in Sri Lanka, in Greece, and so on and so forth, all across the Indian Ocean. It's about building airports, deep water ports, special economic trading zones, so on and so forth, as you can see there. It's also creating an extraordinary arena for cultural cooperation, and that's one of the five pillars I identified a second ago, being the culture to culture. People-to-people bonds is about inter-civilization and inter-cultural dialogue. One of the first instances we've seen of that was the nomination of these 33 properties to the World Heritage List in 2014 in Doha as a collaboration between China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. This is the first Silk Road World Heritage property. The ECMOS has identified a further 220 or so properties that are on the tentative lists of countries in the region that can also be listed as Silk Road sites. There are further 80 or so that are already on the World Heritage List, but ECMOS is suggesting that they could be reinscribed as Silk Road sites. Palmyra is in the middle of that somewhere, and so what we're seeing there is a very, very extensive elaborate forum through which heritage diplomacy will be happening in the coming future, and if you overlay the corridors, you can see a direct correlation, and there's a parallel on the Maracan Silk Road as well. So what this suggests is a vast arena of heritage diplomacy creating bilateral relations and new inter-governmental forum. The Silk Road Forum is one of the many networks. The Silk Road Think Tank Network, these are all new forums through which, I'll come to this slide in a second, I'll jump ahead of myself actually, these are all new forums through which heritage and cultural heritage preservation could be embedded into the One Vote One project. So what I'm getting at at a more optimistic level is that Silk Road cultural heritage, its protection, and its preservation is now being activated as a resource for building diplomatic relations across the region, because this is being activated and identified as a shared heritage for all the countries involved, and there's other slides I can present to demonstrate that to you. This is undoubtedly a complex future, but one that I think represents some real opportunities for more effective programs than we've seen to date, such as the UNESCO one. Well, this slide points towards, however, is also a start of a worrying future. This is a slide of Xi'an, and there's another reason why I think there's an urgent need to engage with these potential pathways. And this speaks to the rise of the new cultural elite and the middle class in China. Xi'an is presenting itself as a gateway to the Silk Road, with the Silk Road Museum City, which you see there being constructed, with pavilions for 22 countries of the One Belt, One Road partnership. It's the first part of a development of a new Silk Road tourism industry. This forms part of a rapid expansion of the museum sector in the past decade or so, whereby, and I allow for your imagination to take its pathway at will, where museums need to build collections. Silk Road history and heritage is being promoted now in China as part of a new Chinese form of citizenry and cultural nationalism. There's a new state television channel, CCTV4, dedicated just to the Silk Road and its history. What this is also doing is triggering a new appreciation of antiquities and antiques. So, to date, the markets for illicitly trafficked items from the Middle East, in Syria and Iraq most notably, that's been Europe and North America. But my fear is the future of looting antiquities in the Middle East will be towards the Chinese market. China already has the largest concentration of millionaires in the world, and they are rapidly growing at taste for antiquities. What we see here is the infrastructure and the corridor through which that will be taking place over the coming decades. To turn to East Asia, there are also signs that I think are particularly worrying. Here's an example of the Hiroshima site in Japan, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, and this is another shared history in Asia which gives us reason to be concerned, and that's World War II. Victim nationalism has been a big part of the war commemoration in Asia, and particularly East Asia for all the countries involved. Japan has presented itself and understood itself as a victim of the atomic bomb, and other countries have been victims of Japanese aggression. So China, Korea, and Taiwan share deep irritations that Japan's unwittingness to acknowledge its acts of aggression and violence from the war. And this means that commemorations and the heritage preservation of World War II is causing major diplomatic tensions in the region, I'm sure you've heard about the Yasukuni Shrine and others, and here you see pictures of the Kamikaze Pilots Museum, which has been narrated as a peace museum. It's also been widespread anti-Japanese protests in the region and in cities like San Francisco around the comfort women that the Japanese used across the region during the Second World War, and these are happening outside Japanese embassies, and it's become very much a transnational social movement. The things have escalated dramatically in the last couple of years. The two leaders, the right-wing Shenzhou Abbey and the strong nationalist Xi Jinping, have changed the political climate between the two countries. In the last one to two years, there's been a distinct escalation in how the preservation and memory of war is contributing to tension and the militarization of the region. And that's largely because China's been pursuing a quite different narrative and used in the preservation sector to do that. It's shifting away from being a victim of Japanese aggression to a language of triumphalist victory, and it's a narrative that now fits with the idea of a strong and powerful China today. This is a major shift in the politics of memory for the region. A number of museums are advancing that language within China today, so the slides I have now are just from a few weeks ago, I was in Nanjing three weeks ago, and this is a memorial museum to the Nanjing massacre, whereby China was set that 300 victims died at the beginning of World War II at the hands of the Japanese. It's been presented as a peace museum, but it's always been somewhat provocative in the way it does that, as you can see from some of the slides here. The second one, the caption at the top, is the Japanese killing Chinese for pleasure. So it's always been a very strong anti-Japanese museum, but couched within a language of struggle, resilience, and overcoming a stronger opponent to its east. But in December last year, an enormous new museum extension opened to this one, which changes that narrative in very distinct ways. It's putting China on the right side of history, as you can see on the right-hand side of that slide, and part of the formation of an anti-fascist war, and struggle that took place in the Second World War. And what you're seeing in these slides, and I have to rush through them, but China's placing itself along with the west, and this is a very distinct shift that China's doing here. So you can see here, there's an alliance between Canada, China, and Australia. The US also appears extensively in the museum. And also the acknowledgement of how Asian countries were part of the international overcoming of the, during the end of the Second World War. And what's explicitly being done here is lumping Japan, I can't think of a better word, but lumping Japan on the wrong side of history with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. As you see here, a conflation of the different theaters of war during the Second World War. And a movement in towards the post-war period, where the idea of developing a language of Japanese humiliation, and again identifying it with international processes of tribunals that took place during that post-war period. This has nothing to do with an managing massacre. It's important to remember that 99% of the visitors here will be Chinese, and this is very much about a anti-Japanese message that's being pushed today. For those who work on Asia and East Asia, you understand the accumulation of walking or even touching the head. You can see there are some very, very distinct and aggressive visual statements being offered there. It also puts China, as I say, on the right side of the post-war period. There's absolutely no mention of China's humiliation at the hands of Stalin in the Second World War, and you see why that's important in the second, and its annexing of Mongolia. And what this is also being framed with is in a late 20th century peace movement. So you see here this museum's being linked to peace museums around the world, but excluding all the Japanese peace museums, non-surprisingly. And the final message also today, and there are many, many slides I could show you with this, is that it's also fit within a strong, contemporary, powerful China today. Japanese humiliation is at the center of this museum and where that, and as I say, in the context of a very, very strong rising China. Let's go back to the Comfort Women movement. This year there was a new museum, which is a complex history within China, of the Comfort Women, the sex slaves during World War II. China's rarely spoken about these for the last 70 years, because they were linked to prostitution and the shameful histories of that. So this is a very distinct new move that China's adopted in commemorating these, and preservation is being very much drawn into these new histories, and these are city center sites that are being preserved to commemorate these Comfort Women. It's also using the UN system, just to read those lines, the memory of the World Programme that UNESCO has put forward, that China is now identifying some documents from the Comfort Women stations being put forward to the UNESCO system as a counter to the letters that the Japanese have been put forward to the memory of World Programme that came from the kamikaze pilots to their families. 2015 saw the anniversary of the end of World War II, and as you can see there, this is raising interesting differences and developments in the ways in which China's also remembering its military powers and strength during the Second World War. So this is a museum to aviation that's also in Nanjing. It celebrates China's cooperation, and it's historically celebrated as cooperation with the Allied Forces, and you see here the US flying tigers. And here's a memorial that sits outside the museum, and you can see all the stones at the top of that, or the center of that picture, but at the top of the museum, the top of the staircases. But in 2015, for the first time ever, there was a recognition of the Russian pilots who were also stationed in the region during the Second World War, and they're now being called the Russian flying tigers. And they're new inscriptions being made to all the pilots that serve in the region, and this is a brand new form of commemoration. It also comes at a particular time whereby there were the celebrations of military parades in both Beijing and Moscow, whereby Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin exchanged visits to mark those 70th anniversaries. So we see some particular diplomatic relations that are being enabled through these events. And why that's particularly significant, I would argue, is also because China and Russia are also undertaking some naval exercises in the South China Sea. We get, I think, where I'm going in terms of where this takes us. So what we're seeing here, therefore, in the case of East Asia, is an appropriation of the International Peace Discourse, the United Nations, UNESCO, the Memory of World Programs, and so on and so forth, and World Heritage, being appropriated with increasingly strident and aggressive nationalisms. War commemoration is being shaped by the geopolitics of the region, whereby previously forgotten histories, whether it's the Comfort Women or the Russian Flying Tigers, are now being mobilized within a war preservation and commemoration industry, designed to antagonize and seed hostilities in a region that's becoming increasingly volatile, both militarily and politically. So to conclude, I've argued for an analytical frame that pivots around heritage diplomacy and the diplomatic tensions of preservation. In looking to some possible futures, and possible future wars, in two of the most volatile regions of the world are making a couple of arguments. One, that to understand the future of conflict and post-conflict preservation scenarios, we need to look to international relations, diplomatic ties, and geopolitics as key drivers of preservation. Foregrounding the diplomatics of heritage enables us to ask them critically important questions and understand how, where, and why particular forms of preservation cooperation happen or occur in the aftermath of war. But we also need to understand how preservation is being deployed to antagonize. We need to ask, is preservation seeding future wars? And the second point is that shifts in the world economy raises important questions concerning how we approach the preservation of artifacts and the memories of war. I suggest that there are some new transnational political structures that are on the horizon, most notably this enormous One Belt One Road project that could develop some potentially very productive forms of preservation diplomacy. It's a future that demands we question our assumptions of the international community and potentially make those more inclusive. China and other countries in Central Asia may end up building a far more effective arena of heritage diplomacy than we've seen to date. But I've also highlighted One Belt One Road as an international landscape of heritage diplomacy that is taking us towards some heritage futures concerning the aesthetic appreciation for and the consumption of antiquities in China and elsewhere in Asia. This means that we need to develop the critical lenses to understand and anticipate how this will create a whole new market for conflict looting, perhaps to a scale that we've never seen before. And most worrying I think is a situation that will create a vast financial windfall for the terrorist organizations such as IS, IS in the coming decades. So my final question I think to leave you with is a degree to which and in what ways the US can respond and contribute to these complex and challenging futures. Thank you. Thank you very much to Professor Winter. Just so you understand the format for the day, we will be going through all the panelists hearing their presentations and then we will have a collective session at the end for discussion, dialogue and questions. Our next speaker is Lori Rush. Dr. Rush is an anthropologist and an archeologist. She served as a military liaison for the return of or to the Iraqi people and has represented the US Department of Defense for Heritage Issues in Kabul and across the Middle East. Today she will be discussing how we find common ground for preservation versus performance destruction, cultural property protection in modern conflict. Thank you very, very much. Thank you to all of the organizers. It's a wonderful honor to be here to speak with you today. I come from the domestic side of archeological stewardship and preservation within the United States Department of Defense. But clearly in 2003 and 2004, it became painfully obvious that our soldiers were deploying to some of the most archeologically rich areas of the world. And as an archeologist who works in support of the 10th Mountain Division, one of if not the most deployed division of the United States Army, it also became immediately clear to me and my staff that our soldiers needed the opportunity to learn much more about the cultural property in the areas where they were headed. And actually my education in terms of the forward issues has been from working directly with the soldiers themselves. The first time I stood up in front of a group of 10th Mountain battle-hardened and weary soldiers to talk very naively about the importance of cultural property, I showed them a picture of an Iraqi cemetery. And I said, this cemetery appears to be abandoned, but it is still critical to respect it. The soldier raised his hand and said, no ma'am, that's a shot-up cemetery. And then another soldier said, so ma'am, when they're shooting at us from the headstones, is it okay to shoot back? And I was so surprised that I said, oh yes. And a third soldier said, ma'am, you're our kind of archeologist. And I went back and suddenly realized that this is an issue in terms of mission success and our soldiers coming home safe and sound. Since then, it's been my privilege to work on these issues for over 10 years. And I've also had the opportunity to work with young soldiers who've never deployed before. I use this example. Anybody in this room know what is that feature? It is the horn of the dragon slain by Hazrat Ali to make the Bamiin Valley safe for the Hazara people. And when I'm working with young personnel and leaders, I say, so what would happen if your soldier's back to Humvee into that pointed rock? Would they come out with weapons and attack you? Probably. Would you have any idea what you did to infuriate that local population? No. Would that incident be caught in our military lessons learned system? No. Because not knowing what you don't know is a very, very dangerous place for our soldiers to be. We also, so when I talk about ladies and gentlemen, I might be able to help you save your life. I have their full attention. If I go in as a preservationist and say, golly, it would be really nice if you could be careful about this old structure. Would I have their attention? No. But the common ground is all about the knowledge and understanding of the battlefield. I have the other example here of the Karees. It's not just iconic structures. Sometimes it's the ancient water systems. And we had a very painful lesson learned at Ford Operating Base Wolverine when our imagery analysts, which did not include an archeologist, failed to recognize the very, very clear signature of the tunnels that bring the water to the Afghan villages. So when expanding the base, we cut off the water for the five villages that we were hoping to support. And clearly that was a mission problem. So once you have their attention and you've got that common ground, then it's really critical for members of the academy to work in partnership with the military to make sure that this information is gathered and disseminated. And as you can see in my examples above, for the military, in my opinion, the preservation and the importance of cultural property happens at the very local level. What matters to the people in the village where you happen to be? But you do need to begin with some certain basic elements. First, you want a really aware group of soldiers. This was an opportunity we had to take military participants in the Bright Star War games in Egypt, just a car in 2009. And I can tell you, you can be with the most hardened combat soldiers in the world and you take them to a place like Sakara and the archeology does all the teaching for you. But we also need to be making lists and this is representation of lists that ROTC cadets working with me developed in preparation for upcoming NATO exercises in the Baltic nations. What else do we teach? We teach that it's the law as all of you are probably aware. We now have the African gentleman who is going to go to jail for seven years for damaging cultural property in Timbuktu. I shouldn't call him a gentleman, perhaps. But in any case, we also have Pavel Strugar who was convicted to the International Criminal Court at the Hague. And so we make it very clear to our leaders that it is the law and that people have been prosecuted. But I want you to notice down in the bottom of the list of rules, we have now brand new policies coming out of the lessons we did learn. And one of them is our new overseas basing policy and that requires our base planners to evaluate for historic preservation prior to expanding or locating new bases overseas. One of the clear aspects that sometimes people don't realize is that when the US is operating overseas, the damage resulting from our operations is far greater from infrastructure and basing. It is not from the combat. And one of those reasons is implementation of no-strike listing. When you work with military personnel and you are providing guidelines, it's also really important to tell them how to do it and to give them tools to use. This is a page out of the, again, new Central Command Environmental Regulation 200-2 and we made just a very, very simple flowchart for all of you to follow. As scholars, you're probably just groaning at this simplicity, but for a military engineer, the feedback has been, yes, Dr. Rush, this is a useful tool for me to use. In terms of building the academic partnerships and working together, one important organization is the US Committee of the Blue Shields Full Disclosure. I am a board member, but it's also the committee that is designed out of the treaty, which is in this top of the list, which is the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. And one of the protocols actually points out the idea and importance of having national committees that work to support military education training, planning, preparation for protection of cultural property. Also in the US, our Blue Shield Committee was instrumental in getting Hague ratified in 2009. So I'd like to give you some examples of how the military uses information provided by academics. And one of our prized victories was despairing of antiquities in Libya during Operation Unified Protector by NATO. Often people forget that the bad guys put military assets in immediate association or on top of ancient sites. This is Ross Almagreb, the Roman fortification in Libya where Maumar Gaddafi thought he could protect his radar installation by sticking it on top of the fort. NATO forces were able to actually use a precision weapon to destroy the radar and leave the structure intact. And I think we also have Will Reynolds and his team to thank for the Libyan information that was used so effectively. Another very recent example was a meeting that it was my privilege to attend at the State Department where we have a wonderful agent ambassador working on the issue of projecting religious property in Iraq and Syria. The Yazidis came with real concerns about checkpoints being put in the immediate vicinity of mass graves after the atrocities of Daesh. And we were able then to immediately forward this information to our 10th Mountain aid and assist mission in that area. So sometimes with the right connections, our motto is get the right information to the right people at the right time. What does educational support look like? Just as Professor Winter pointed out that the brand new Silk Road is going to be falling in right on top of the ancient Silk Road, we need to remember that ancient defensive positions are going to be very good defensive positions today. As a result, our soldiers are going to end up on top of ancient archeological properties, often is a given. What do we do at Fort Drum? We transform actual archeological properties that I'm responsible for into opportunities to train on an actual archeological site. So this is the historic village of Stirlingville. That was the general store in 1941 when Fort Drum took the land. That was the general store when I got ahold of it in 2003. And this is the general store now opened as an historic area training opportunity so that our soldiers have the practice occupying an historic place without damaging it. And since then, we've had over 10,000 soldiers a year using these properties with actually better stewardship and preservation than when it was just abandoned in the woods. We also make fake sites and give them the opportunity to train on them in any way they see fit. During the early Iraq operations, we found the booby trapped quite often. We work on making educational materials, and I want to point out that our colleagues at Penn in the Smithsonian have just published a Mosul passport for the upcoming operations there, very similar to UNESCO's Mali passport, very graphic visual educational material for military personnel entering that important city. So I also want to point out to you what we're asking of the force when we incorporate considerations for cultural property into the battlefield space. And this is an example recently out of Timbuktu, where, again, in typical fashion, the insurgents put a position inside one of these houses in the immediate vicinity of this mosque, which is listed on the World Heritage List. So the invading force had the opportunity to just attempt to drop a bomb on that house, which could have been done with minimal risk to the air crew. However, because of the importance of this mosque, the military planners chose instead to bring this 122-millimeter howitzer into the immediate vicinity and just blow the house up, which actually resulted in no damage to the mosque, but think about the risk to this artillery personnel because you'll notice there's not a lot of cover, no places to hide as you're moving in down that street to attack the house filled with insurgents. So, yes, there's careful consideration in the US. These decisions are made at the very high level, but ultimately the historic property was saved and with mission success. We also need to keep in mind what we're saving and why we are saving it. These are pictures from a trip that I was privileged to make to Ephesus, and I was really struck in visiting the House of Mary, which I think is probably adjacent to the maybe one of the very early temple podium of Artemis, but again, my archaeology specialty is Native Americans of the Northeast, so if I'm all wrong, forgive me. But you'll notice that all these Turkish women are praying here at the House of Mary, and what they're praying for is a boyfriend. It's all about the ancient essence of religious spirituality and what happens in these spaces as you're praying in this case to a goddess of fertility. And what's very interesting is that we have a report out of territory currently controlled by a dash where a similar kind of shrine has been destroyed and the young ladies are going to the empty space and continuing to pray. So we have extraordinary perseverance in the face of extraordinary odds and courage as well. Another example of courage is the saving of a library in Sarajevo. And in this case, this was a much smaller library than the National Library, but the librarians packed the entire collection into banana boxes and carried it all over the city, and this map is of all the different locations that library went to be saved in total. But I also included a picture of the bridge because they had to cross that bridge with a sniper shooting at them from those hills. And also the banana box was risky because this was a starving population and actually one of the biggest dangers to the books was when they were attacked by hungry people who dumped the books out thinking they had somehow had a box of bananas. So it's those kinds of acts of courage that give me hope, but also remind me how important this preservation mission is. And now sadly, as again, Professor Winter has so clearly pointed out in terms of the use of cultural property as a form of communication in the military, and I've been accused in the past of flat-shelling government speak, but in any case, it's called strap comms, strategic communications. And what we are seeing sadly, of course, is this question of using the World Heritage List as a target list. And it becomes even worse as we have social media to ignite and really make it spread and adds to what the adversary would be considering as an advantage of performance destruction. And so one, another example is the destruction of Mar-Olai Monastery, the complete eradication of it in just outside of Mosul. And one pattern, and I think it's really important to drill down into the original motives, but one pattern we saw early on is that some of these acts of performance happened almost immediately after a military setback experienced by these people. You've already mentioned the Russian performance. Again, talk about the height of use of strategic communications. Again, the military term that we're using is hybrid warfare, and I am hoping that our intelligence folks are following your recommendations very seriously in terms of looking at the patterns of the use of heritage because I think you've raised some really important clues. We also need to be thinking about the politics and the Europeans have raised very serious questions about how did Dash get the opportunity to get into Palmyra so easily in the beginning? What is the role of UNESCO? And what are the ultimate goals of these kinds of behaviors? So messaging and efforts in response, I'm proud to say I'm a co-director of the NATO Project Developing Cultural Property Protection Policy Doctrine and Best Practices for the Alliance. We're getting enormous support from the experienced military leaders in the Alliance. The Smithsonian American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Penn Museum are coordinating to actually research exactly what damage is going on, especially back at the very local level and helping us gain a much more nuanced understanding of the patterns of behaviors over time for some of these organizations. We also have the Carabinieri Tutelo Patrimonio Culturali and the Italian Overtures to UNESCO to train the blue helmets for peace as in my last meeting with those folks in August, they're ready, they've already trained their first cadre and have people ready to go. And my final example of strategic communication, of course, is this Archive Triumph recently erected here in New York City and essentially the deputy mayor has articulated the goal in terms of placing this replicated monument in your city. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Dr. Rush. Our next speaker is Layla Aminadola. Layla is an attorney and law professor at Fordham, St. John's and New York University. She's also the founder of Aminadola and Associates where she specializes in art, cultural heritage and intellectual property law. Good morning, I'd like to thank Jorge and the rest of the university staff for inviting me to speak here today. I'm also going to be addressing some of the same issues that Dr. Rush and Dr. Winter had already briefly discussed. I'm going to be addressing the legal tools used to avoid destruction before and during conflict and in order to do so, I will begin with a brief description, a very, very brief discussion about some of the famous cultural heritage destruction events that have happened in the past to millennia. Looting has occurred for millennia, dating back to prerecorded history. Ancient art bears proof of the spandalism, providing us with knowledge that ancient civilizations used destruction to exert power in symbolically destroyed enemies. From the raising of Persepolis by Alexander the Great, something that the leader had regretted shortly afterwards to the looting of Sicily by a Roman governor, cultural plunder has occurred over the centuries. Today's region of upheaval in the Middle East has endured many destructive periods. In ancient Rome, art memorialized and even celebrated plunder, as can be seen from the carvings on the Arch of Titus, which commemorated the booty that was taken from ancient Jerusalem. But perhaps Rome's greatest monument to looting is the towering Trajan's column, which pays homage to the woeful destruction of Dacia. The massive monument celebrated Emperor Trajan's second century defeat of the Dacian army and the nation's incorporation into the Roman empire. In fact, the defeat was so brutal that Rome wiped Dacia off the map. More recently, other leaders have laid claim to art and culture. Napoleon attempted to create a new Rome in Paris. Some say that he was the model for Hitler in regards to art theft. He established the first military division for seizing and shipping captured artworks back to another nation. However, cultural heritage destruction is not a thing of the past. The past 100 years has led witness to shocking crimes. There was wide-scale destruction during the Second World War, from obliteration of cities, bombing of sites, and raising of historic buildings. During the Nazi regime, Hitler pushed forward his agenda for culture. Hitler was a failed artist, and when he came to power, he tried to impose his ideals on the art world. He used art and culture as a weapon, a way to degrade people, a way to legitimize the expansion of the Third Reich, and as a propaganda tool. The Nazis used art as a way to display power, degrade demographic groups, raise funds for a growing military force, and propagate their ideology. Cultural vandalism is a powerful propaganda tool because it instills fear. As destruction degrades the enemies and suppresses opposition, this object becomes symbols in the ways in which a persecuted group can and will be destroyed. The objects come to symbolize the irrelevance of the past or the weakness of an enemy. Displays of destruction are powerful images that reverberate in society's collective consciousness. Moreover, destruction is a means of punishment and a way to eradicate the past. Sadly, the 21st century has also been affected by cultural destruction. In 2001, the Taliban shocked the world by wiping out the Bamiyan Buddhists in Afghanistan. The giant six-century statues had survived centuries of war and attack, but were destroyed by dynamite in 2001 for being idols. The Taliban claimed that their motives were purely religious and not vengeful. In April 2003, the world was shocked to learn of the raiding of the National Museum of Iraq, perhaps the most important depository of art from ancient Sumeria and other periods of Mesopotamian history. After fighting broke out on the museum grounds, employees left the building. According to local authorities, the museum was plundered for about 48 hours. It's believed that 15,000 pieces went lost or were destroyed. Destructive acts are still occurring around the world today in places like Syria and Iraq. With the use of social media, destruction has been more widely observed and knowledge of its occurrence has spread globally, allowing terrorist organizations to create global fear within an instant. There have been attempts made by other ruling parties to annihilate the past, but the use of media to publicize these atrocities sets these crimes apart. In early 2015, ISIS obliterated the... I forgot I had other images to share of destruction. Very pleasant images. In early 2015, ISIS obliterated the remains of Hatra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Iraq. The city had become a symbol of multiculturalism, with a blend of Roman, Hellenistic, and Arabic architecture. Then, in the winter of 2015, the world watched in horror as ISIS distributed a dramatic video of destruction of ancient works in the Mosul Museum. That summer, ISIS militants damaged significant structures in Palmyra, a site of outstanding universal value, a crossroads of civilizations where East met West. When the site was uncovered in the 17th and 18th centuries, it helped to spark the revival of classical architecture in the West. Due to its history, Palmyra is archeologically rich with temples, an aqueduct, and collinated streets. ISIS entered the city last year, used it as a base, and destroyed many of the structures there. Possibly most heartbreaking was the destruction of the Temple of Bell, a structure recognized as an architectural treasure as significant as the Parthenon and the Pantheon. The destruction of sites within the pearl of the desert hit the archeological community heavily. ISIS attempts to rewrite history by destroying the past. The acts of destruction are symbolic as ISIS forcefully tries to convince the world of its legitimacy as a powerful caliphate requiring conversion or death. Laws have addressed art and heritage and destruction in attempts of avoiding it during conflict. Surprisingly, the first military code to address art in charitable institutions was drafted in the United States. The Libra Code was penned during the American Civil War to prevent damaging acts during conflict. The code of April 24th, 1863 was an instruction signed by President Abraham Lincoln to the Union forces that dictated how soldiers should conduct themselves during war. One of the rules established in the code was the prohibition of destruction of cultural sites unless it was imperative to the war effort. Article 34 of the code provides for the protection of immovable and movable cultural objects. It established that the buildings associated with culture were charitable or humanitarian missions should not be destroyed by a hostile party. The code established a framework for the protection of cultural property requiring soldiers involved in armed conflict a conflict to respect and protect cultural treasures. The objective is a compulsory protection associated with the preservation of historical, archaeological, scientific, ethnological and aesthetic value of cultural property. The need to safeguard heritage is intensified during military conflicts as the risk of destruction is heightened during those times. As it was one of the earliest texts of modern humanitarian law, the Libra Code served as a model for subsequent legal instruments and contributed to the development of cultural heritage preservation, influencing subsequent codes, legal instruments and treaties. The Libra Code influenced legal theorists and shaped the 1874 Brussels Declaration on the Law of War and other legal treaties related to military conduct. All these efforts to codify the Law of War were on the basis for the first major international meeting in the Hague, whose outcome was a series of texts known as the Hague Conventions. The conventions are a series of international treaties and declarations. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the Law of War and war crimes in the realm of international law. Unfortunately though, these conventions were not honored during the First World War. Since then, the Hague Conventions have been updated and superseded by other treaties. Military conventions unfortunately have limited effectiveness of movable and immovable heritage. However, human rights doctrines also aim to preserve heritage for groups around the world. Access to cultural heritage is a human right. This right has not always been explicitly stated, where preservation of heritage is crucial to a community's sense of importance and respect. Current ideology about human rights traces its origins to 1948 when the United Nations motivated by the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27 of that declaration asserts that culture is a human right, stating, everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in the scientific advancements and its benefits. More recently, the significance of cultural heritage was expressed in UNESCO's 2003 Declaration Concerning the International Destruction of Cultural Heritage. Asserting that heritage is linked to human dignity and identity. And access to and enjoyment of cultural heritage has a strong legal basis in human rights norms, stating that cultural heritage is an important component of the cultural identity of communities. In fact, the relationship between human rights and heritage preservation is so strong that the Greek Ministry of Culture worked with high-profile International Human Rights Attorney, Amal Clooney, who was also here at Columbia University. They hired her in efforts to demand restitution of the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece. Treating cultural destruction as a war crime is fraught with challenges. The UN Secretary General, aptly stated, the deliberate destruction of our common cultural heritage constitutes a war crime and represents an act on humanity as a whole. The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the event of armed conflict prohibits using monuments and sites for military purposes and harming or misappropriating cultural property in any way. The stated purpose of the 1954 Hague Convention is to safeguard heritage by establishing an agreement among state parties to respect cultural property in their own territory as well as that of other state parties. The parties consent to abstain from exposing cultural property to damage, except in the case of military necessity. And this is a loophole that has unfortunately allowed destruction of significant sites but was necessary to include due to security interests of state parties. The state parties also consent to prohibit theft or vandalism, including those actions by domestic and foreign military forces. The Convention prohibits nationals from any form of theft, pillage or misappropriation of and any acts of vandalism directed against cultural property. Just as the 1954 Hague Convention was prompted by destruction and looting during the Second World War, nations convened in 1991 partly due to damage during the late 1980s and early 90s in the Balkans. The second protocol to the Hague Convention, which was adopted in 1999, further expounds the provisions of the Hague Convention relating to the safeguarding of and respect for cultural property during conflict. The protocol requires general provisions for protection that includes preparatory measures in times of peace and nurturing respect for culture through education. Importantly, it defines individual criminal responsibility and jurisdictional procedures in the event of violations of respect to cultural property. The Convention states that individuals may be criminally responsible and that this culpability extends to persons other than individuals who directly commit acts and defiance of the Convention. State parties are also responsible for protecting their own domestic heritage during conflict. In the case that nations cannot properly address these issues, international bodies may pursue vandals. The UN may find it appropriate to seek and prosecute individuals responsible for vandalism and looting as crimes against humanity. The ICC, the International Criminal Court, considers the destruction of cultural property a war crime. This summer, the International Criminal Court, the ICC and the Hague charged a member of Ansardin, an al-Qaeda-linked allied group. He was charged with intentional destruction of heritage, an example of ways in which international law aspires to halt destruction and deter vandalism. The West African nation of Mali has been targeted for its cultural richness. Islamic rebels destroyed Timbuktu's storied 16th century mausoleums due to religious motivations. And like with the destruction of the library of Alexandria, written heritage in its depositories, libraries, have been targeted. Mosul's public library which contained 8,000 rare antique books and manuscripts was destroyed by ISIS in February, as was Mosul's university. And Islamic rebels also destroyed the valuable 15th and 16th century manuscripts in Timbuktu. One of the people involved in the destruction in Timbuktu was Al-Madi, who faced war crimes charged under Article 25 of the Rome Statute. This is the first time that ICC has attempted to prosecute the destruction of buildings dedicated to religion and historical monuments as a war crime. In August, the trial against Al-Madi opened before Trial Chamber 8 at the ICC. Mr. Al-Madi, a Malia national, admitted guilt to the war crime consisting in the destruction of historical and religious monuments in Timbuktu in 2012. He exercised joint control over the attacks by planning, leading, and participating in them, supplying pickaxes and, in one case, a bulldozer. Al-Madi expressed remorse for his involvement in the destruction of 10 mausoleums and religious sites in Timbuktu during Mali's dating back to Mali's 14th century golden age as a trading hub and a center for Sufi Islam, a branch of the religion seen as idolatrous by Islamic Muslim, Muslim groups. It was the first international trial focusing on the destruction of religious monuments, and the first ICC case where the defendant made an admission of guilt. Until now, destruction of culture was seen as a low-risk crime without penalty, but now we see it treated as a more serious crime that will be prosecuted. Al-Madi faced a 30-year prison sentence. During trial, he said that he hoped that my time in prison will be a source of purging the evil spirits that have taken over me. On Tuesday of this week, a prison sentence was handed down by the ICC. Al-Madi was given nine years in prison for his crimes. And handing down a nine-year sentence rather than the maximum of 30 years, the judges stated that they took into account Al-Madi's genuine remorse, deep regret and deep pain, and his plea on other Muslims not to make the same mistakes that he had made. The hope amongst heritage professionals is that Al-Madi's case in the ICC will serve as a deterrent to a kind of devastation that continues to be a future of global conflicts, yet have gone largely unpunished. The director general of UNESCO, Irina Bakova, held the case for breaking new ground for the protection of humanity's shared cultural heritage and values. UNESCO released the following statement. This case reminds us all of how heritage protection has become a major security issue, which cannot be delinked from the protection of human lives. Deliberate attacks on culture have become weapons of war and a global strategy of cultural cleansing, seeking to destroy people as well as the monuments bearing their identities, institutions of knowledge and free thought. As the UN acknowledges in its statement, protecting heritage is more important, not only for a shared legacy than our fight against terror. During war, heritage was long viewed as collateral damage. However, there is now a harsh awareness that culture is a direct target, an integral part of a terror strategy. Destruction has been used as propaganda for millennia, a way to legitimize terror groups and military forces, to raise fear globally, and to recruit others into crime syndicates. For these reasons, it's essential to protect cultural heritage against criminal activities. International treaties and national laws have aimed to protect heritage sites, however they have not been, they have been somewhat ineffective. Hopefully the risk of imprisonment will deter other terrorists from destructive acts and protect valuable sites around the world. Thank you. Thank you very much Layla. Our next speaker is Lucia LA. She's an assistant professor at Princeton University. She's an historian and theorist whose work addresses the intersection of architecture, preservation, politics and technology in the modern period with a particular focus on international institutions and global practices. She'll be speaking about sandbags, perimeters, and the humanization of war. Thank you. And thank you Jorge for continually and thoughtfully pushing against the segmentation of architecture into different disciplines. It's really very gratifying to be able to speak among the panelists that we have today and to see such continuities with what I've been working on. I brought too much material so I'll just get right to it. Over the past 12 months two initiatives have been closely watched by international heritage advocates as you've just heard. The Almaty case in the International Criminal Court and the Italian, Jordanian, UN International Cultural Property Initiative. In Nosmo Park I would argue because they attempt to reconcile two notions, heritage and humanity that have been bifurcated in the international landscape since at least 100 years. World War I was the first conflict where nations competed and cooperated to protect each other's monuments. Giving rise to many of the protective techniques still in use today. Among these the use of sandbags and other screens. The displacement of art from its native context and its corollary the use of restitution photography so I'm showing you an Italian painting being either repatriated or stolen depending on your point of view from Vienna. Either way, photographed. And also the publication of manuals publicizing these technological and political inventions for future use. It was precisely because these early protective efforts were so effective and so effectively used for propaganda that post-war critics argued for an absolute incommensurability of art objects in human life during war. The fact that technology was so widely applied to art and architectural protection, the argument went showed that states were more concerned with their art or their monuments than with their citizens. The fear was that humans and things might have to compete for protection. In contrast the recent ICC judgment moves past a hierarchy between human lives and inanimate objects. In fact there is no such thing as a human rights or a human rights project noting that crimes against property are generally of less gravity than crimes against persons, that's a quote. But still arguing that protection was about more than just stones and buildings and that Almighty's crime was amplified by its consequences for human rights. Similarly, the one year UN Interpol initiative argues that trafficking looted artifacts quote generates income for terrorist groups and encourages thinking of culture as a resource and a locus of human rights in and of itself. In this both initiatives move past the classical conception of humanity which defined the human in contradiction to the not human. As Panofsky reminded us in 1938 traditionally humanity was defined in contrast to what it was not and more specifically in contrast to the less than human such as a barbarian or an animal or indeed an inanimate object and also in contrast to the more than human such as a god. The ICC specifically stated that the tinbook to mosques were more than religious objects and the UN presents humanity not only as something on behalf of which you protect but that humanity is itself an imperative a project to be built in part through monument protection. Today I'd like to argue that what is at stake in these initiatives is a possible reconfiguration of the relationship between heritage and humanity where their relation is not one of opposition but of proximity. Historical, philosophical and spatial. My understanding of humanity and heritage as proximate notions is informed by Hannah Arendt here having a proximate moment with Carl Jaspers. Arendt argued that the possibility of nuclear annihilation, she was writing in the 50s, had thrown into questions the very ideals of the enlightenment especially the hope that international solidarity could be based on a common history or a shared future. It is true that peoples on earth have a common present every country on earth has been the immediate neighbor of every other country she wrote but if mankind had become an urgent reality it was solely because solidarity of mankind is entirely negative, fueled by the fear of destruction. So I've been at work for a long time on a book that argues that the notion of heritage codified in the 20th century and especially in the 1972 World Heritage Convention was also worked out negatively in reaction to scenarios of destruction through a phenomenon I call monument survival. Far from a tabula rasa the landscapes of destruction that increasingly patched the globe beginning with World War I were shaped around architectural objects that had been designated for survival or single that reconstruction or both. So if a unified humanity arose per Arendt as threatened by disappearance so too did buildings that survived the crescendo of destruction acquire a whole new status in the middle of the 20th century as cultural remainders on an endangered globe. So I just want to tell the story today from the early part of this narrative when the global threat was met with more incremental disperse gestures as heritage was increasingly caught up in a debate between two international movements. A movement for moral disarmament which reached a peak in 1932 and a movement for the humanization of war which began to gather momentum in 1934. These were competing camps the first sought to make war illegal altogether while the latter sought to impose limits for example by banning certain weapons to humanize it. This story reveals the origins of many of the protective gestures that are ubiquitous in the war zones of today in which were first introduced in this period as a quote material turn in protection. It also offers us an alternative genealogy for thinking of heritage and humanity as proximate concepts by looking at the way that nearness, perimeter and distance were theorized and actualized to manage location of heritage and also its visibility. So war time protection first entered the modern international organization in the early 1930s through a number of committees of the League of Nations, the committee for intellectual cooperation in Geneva, the Roving Arts and Letters Committee and the museum's office in Paris. Here's a timeline of the back and forth that went on to them. The OIM, the bottom group put war time legislation of monuments on its agenda in 1930 and was immediately rebuked by Geneva. The secretary of the committee arguing that during times of war whatever the military wants destroyed will be destroyed. It's perfectly useless to humanize war. In 1931 the Geneva repeated this rebuke that if one has the wisdom to spare monuments of art and architecture during war one should have begun by having the wisdom of not waging war at all. In 1933 a separate initiative for war time protection, the Roerich Pact began to gather steam and even earn the endorsement of the Pan-American conference. This prompted the museum office again to grow hopeful that this development surely changed the point of view of the institute has expressed in the past but in 1934 the institute wrote that the Roerich Pact was unrealizable. The Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936. By September the League had begun to change its rhetoric. The secretary of the committee, the same Spaniard who once ranted about the futility of humanizing war now launched an appeal to both the Council of the League and the International Red Cross. Soon after the General Assembly asked the Spanish government to account for its art in October the CSE chairman admitted that circumstances had changed. I still have slight hesitation about the suitability of the League considering the laws of war. The League's business is to prevent war, not regulate it. However, that is a theoretical question and for the present our business is to save the works of art as well as we can. At its 1936 meeting the League committed to helping Spain in three ways. By publishing information about art protection in Spain by drafting the legal convention and by offering Geneva as a potential refuge for art. By November the line between war and peace was being blurred. One of the essential tasks of the office is to contribute to the salvage of monuments and works of art threatened by destruction in all circumstances. Certainly the nature of the Spanish Civil War brought lessons about the new spectrum of circumstances in which protection was needed and one of these lessons was about the power of mobilization from below. Civilian organizations on the ground turned out to be surprisingly good at keeping track of destruction. Here's a plan of where exactly bombs hit the Prado Museum drawn by the Junta del Desor artístico the National Council for Artistic Treasures a group of architects, curators and artists. By 1938 the Junta had organized the encasement of much of Spain's outdoor statuary the padding of many of its architectural facades and the removal of all public collections to remote shelters. Spain's medieval architecture experienced an unlikely second life as a network of art repositories. Its ceilings and floors reinforced to carry the weight of the whole Prado collection. The cultural diplomats of the league closely watched the work of the Junta as it invented not only architectural techniques but also put moral arguments to the test. I'm showing you a poster designed by the Junta that reads, don't see in this a religious object more than art, preserve it for the national treasure. By telling us what to see the flyer placed a moral frame around its material protection. So in 1938 the league published new protective guidelines in a combined technical and legal manual, which became reference point well into the post-war. International lawyer Charles de Bichers introduced it as the first step in a turn towards what he called material protection. Material protection was defined in three ways. First a one-to-one correspondence between means of destruction and modes of protection. The only possible way to protect monuments of art and architecture we wrote is to meet the destructive effects of war with defensive measures equally as effective. To protect was to stand at the interface between building and unbuilding. Secondly material protection was an international obligation but it was exercised nationally and in fact the very double structure of this manual was kind of separated into the legal part and the technical part reflects the two-fold nature of material protection as both a legal obligation from above and a set of practices from below. And finally undermining the pacifist idealism of the early 1930s, moral and educative initiatives would be supplemental, a parallel channel of action rather than entirely opposed to them. For the league, this manual appeared to be the result of a complete reversal in cultural policy. But in fact both the legal and the architectural techniques described in this book, adapted and transformed standards that have been developing throughout the 1930s and not only in Spain. So in the time I had left I wanted to highlight some of these continuities and identify a line of thinking that is actually common to this apparent duality between the legal and the technical, a thread of thinking that I will call perimeter thinking. So please bear with me as I go through a lot of legal not two thousand years of history but a lot of legal material and not very much time. The legal component of the 1938 manual so this is a timeline that's what we're explicating and these are all the precedents. Laws about civilians at war and laws about monuments at war. Or not laws but proposed laws. In the history of international humanitarian law the 1938 draft belongs in a continuum of efforts to revise the Hague convention of 1897 1907 particularly new ways to create civilians. The Hague convention still made a distinction between defended and undefended towns, places where you could find soldiers and places where you could not. But aerial warfare had rendered obsolete this place-based rationale obeying instead the doctrine of the military objective where any object on a map can potentially become a target. The so-called Monica movement then was composed of physicists and physicians who looked for new perimeters to temper this ubiquity. Their landmark event was in 1934 conference establishing sanitary towns. The 1934 conference began by noting that ambulances and hospitals in war were considered neutral and exempt from bombing and proposing to extend this footprint outward. The idea that presides over the establishment of sanitary towns is that of an extension within a certain radius of the immunity that is granted to hospitals and ambulances. And there of course many historical precedents of sanitary zones in urban planning but here no appeal was made for example to the idea of quarantine. Instead in an astonishing turn of rhetoric the lawyers made an analogy to the way historic monuments and their architecture had been given a surrounding zone. The idea of the extension of humanity within a certain perimeter around the surface that is formed by a direct object was first tested in an entire procedure allowing states to ensure a more effective protection for monuments. In other words the humanization movement proposed to take a thinly perimeter and make it a human one. The precedent in question was a 1918 document authored by the Netherlands Archaeological Society which had proposed that monuments should be immune from bombing and imagine that the concentration of such monuments would neutralize entire cities. Examples of such cities of art were Bruges, Oxford, Venice, Rome, Paris, Florence and Nuremberg. Five years later a new draft of the laws of air war said that a monument was surrounded by an outer zone not exceeding 500 meters in width measured from the circumference of the said area. So the Monica conference combined these two precedents and switched to a language of periphery. The area of protection was defined as a surrounding zone not to exceed 500 meters from the periphery of the space occupied by the monuments and then the conference applied this rule to multiple adjacent monuments whose peripheries bed into one another. In cities where historic monuments are very numerous it is the entire city from perimeter to perimeter that is ultimately protected. And all of this talk of perimeter can be visualized by using 1920s maps of these so-called cities of art where it would have taken only a few monuments to achieve total urban immunization. It was only after having painted this picture of monuments protection that the Monica conference returned to the problem of civilians. If this is so in the case of respective works of art how could one hesitate to proceed in the same manner when it comes to the protection of human life. The conference said the protection of the life of human combatants is at least as worthy of consideration. Again the solution for protecting civilians was found by protecting inert objects. So to return to our timeline by 1939 one commentator described that the concept of military objective could take two exceptions security zones for civilians protective perimeters for monuments. Monuments had been defined as anti-targets objects that created around themselves a perimeter of the exception. Here's a map produced in 1935 by the keeper of the Schacht Cathedral to protest the fact that new airport had been built near the cathedral and who showed the cathedral the train station in the airport radiating with power whereas the cathedral was a mute object anchored to the plan. The difference between a civilian zone and a monumental perimeter can be understood through the emphasis in all of these legal documents on the use of an emblem. In order to solve the problem of making visible the perimeter of a protected zone most international lawyers suggested the use of a flag. So the top one is a warwick pack the 1923 air roles had this kind of diagonal and the 1938 draft of the league proposed the triangle. These marks were essential to the lost functioning. They were descendants of the Spanish flyer that tells the republican fire what to see. In fact visual emblems were one aspect of the legal framework for monuments protection that was based on aerial warfare but on naval warfare the kind of battle defined not by territoriality but by linearity proximity encirclement. As for the material half the technical half of the manual it also captured a protective zeitgeist that was already active in European monuments administration already in 1935. To meet the destructive effects of war with defensive measures architectural monumentality have already been rethought in primitive terms by paying attention to weapons diameters, bomb poundage and targeting deaths. Air power theorists conceptualized the airplane as a scanning device that imposed a radial system onto every surface of the earth. Civil defense was a branch of architecture that preempted this concentricity at multiple scales. At the urban scale the concentric circle were radii of dispersal for daytime shelter, overnight evacuation and long-term relocation. So that's for civilians. But at the architectural scale these concentric circles were not pure plan geometry. They had a section a space heavy with matter waiting to be displaced. If the bullseye was a system for delivering parcels of destruction civil defense delivered volumes of protection. Cutting a section through this drawing revealed that bomb and civilians shared the space at the center of the circle. Throughout the literature on civil defense, bomb and human were paired as mutual scale figures. Bomb and craters were scaled with human figure standing precisely at the point of impact. This pairing of bomb and human continued amazingly in dynamic curves where a scale figure literally accompanied a bomb as it was flung from the airplane crashed onto the ground and inflicted moralized damage onto an apartment building according to others the building was made of wood, brick or concrete. Human victim and destroyed thing combined it together along parallel paths. Also visible here is the signature V shaped envelope of aerial destruction. It was as if a crater shaped template had been used to stamp out portions of the cityscape reducing it to rubble. The rubble itself was drawn in section as a pyramidal pile, the optimal shape for a protective shelter, the same shape replicated in the international symbol for civil defense. Nor was the materiality of space limited to heavy rubble and masonry. Air itself was a dangerous substance. Most of the damage from bombing was inflicted not by a direct hit but by the blow delivered by the air in a perimeter around the point of impact. So how did this architectural vocabulary translate into rules for monument protection? Through the use of the sandbag. Against weaponry that delivered parcels of destruction sandbags delivered parcels of protection and they obeyed a similar logic of material quantification giving a bomb something to destroy. This preemptive padding where architectural objects were modified through the addition of a structure whose massing was equivalent to that of their destroyed selves operated a formal simplification of these objects. Consider the elaborate protective structure that was built around the Sabilis fountain in 1937. According to the caption, this is the bottom one. The fountain was completely hidden under a cover of brick and sandbags but the protected monument was hardly invisible. It was widely witnessed and frequently photographed as a walkable mound. As one American expatriate put it in 1937, I saw the fountain in the post office square being buried while I was there. Being buried did not stop the fountain from being a monument. We might even say that it became more monumental as a fortified pile than it had been as a delicate burrowed sculpture trapped in a traffic circle. Historians working on the history of monument protection in the Spanish Civil War of which several have uncovered the modernist origins of this striking protective outfit arguing that the architects who designed it were also intending to give an image of an architecture to come. So this was actually a modernist monument in its own rights. Here, too, perimeter logic was a mode of protection concerned both with intangibility and visibility. Certainly material protection employed technologies of media. It was important not only to cover monuments but also to photograph them covered and to disseminate this imagery. In this sense, the League of Nations worked for monument protection at war, continued an ongoing intervention it had made in transnational visual culture. Let me just make a very quick detour. The museum's office had been very active in promoting a wave of museum reform which is to say a decluttering of galleries and a de-densification of the visual field. The Journal of the OIM offered a steady stream of case studies about the disencumberment, thinning out and reorganization of museums through pairs of before and after photographs, a cluttered museum at the top oops, there it is and a spaced-out redesign at the bottom. At a 1934 conference in Madrid, one Dutch reformer even said that the goal was for the work of art to give the impression of being a mass that is carried by the open space that surrounds it. This early work for disencumberment is connected to the later work for humanization of war in two ways. First of all, art needed a place to go once it was removed from the public view. So museum designers and architects developed spaces for art storage. Sorry, I'm missing my slide. The disencumbered visual field required densely packed reserve. So one of the reasons that Spanish museums were able to pack their art so quickly is that they had spent the 1920s and 30s effectively practicing for the packing way of storage. Secondly, the architecture of museum reform was especially dangerous for the physical survival of art. All of the material with which the art had been surrounded to be enhanced, breakable vitraines, flammable fabrics, electrical lighting, and most importantly all of that air were now dangerous factors that made destruction practically certain. The museum's office recommended covering the physical surfaces of paintings as closely as possible for packing material. The open space that was once said to carry the art would now need to be stuffed solid. But monuments could not be evacuated to the countryside. There the architectural interface between destruction and protection was composed of three layers. On the inside a protective scaffold to sit as close as possible to the architectural surface without touching it. Then there was to be an inhabitable space and then a sandbag pile. Wherever there was a sandbag there was a space for a human body. Sandbags were recommended not only because they were breathable but also for the art but also because they were a cheaper system considering the fact that there was all this human labor available already surrounding the monuments. The fact that they were usually monuments keepers doing the work of filling the bags and maintaining the sandbag structures. In fact, in the example of France that I showed you earlier the French government recommended that the sand to fill the bags so the French government sends sandbags to all the monuments conservators in 1930s in 1935 and in the past recommends that the sand be filled by building by digging a trench around the monuments and then once the sandbags are up then the monument conservator can spend the war in the trench nearby the monuments. So we can read these sandbag structures as architecture. They are a protective form derived from an existing perimeter offsetting the outer surface of the monuments by a dimension of roughly one human body. The outer layer has a deliberate shape that hides and also reveals something about the monument within educating our perception just like the poster telling us what to see. They are in a sense reproductions of the monuments albeit ones with a very crude medium of the sandbag. So to conclude here are some photographs of sandbag monuments during World War II. We can read these as architecture and we can also identify a kind of sandbag regionalism an architectural communication device. The Spanish junta as already told you was composed of avant-garde architects designing prismatic forms. The Italian practice in contrast stuck more closely to the monuments leaving gaps in the bags exposing the scaffolding. Arcuated portugos were filled with modern, I'm sorry, with brick pillars that gave shape to the negative space. The Arch of Constantine became a modernist slab. In Tuscan cities where Germans during World War II had jurisdiction individual objects were encased entirely in brick, smooth and smooth over forms. And then there's also in the Tuscany. This diversity demonstrates the moral dimension of material protection. The coding of the technoscientific pragmatism with communicative power. I'm almost done. So let me just conclude by returning one last time to my initial premise of the relationship between humanity and heritage. The material turn in protection shows us an alternate genealogy for this relationship. One that both acknowledges the gap between the sing and the human but also advocates a kind of proximity at a distance. And if this phrase proximity at a distance sounds familiar to you it's because I'm borrowing it from Walter Benjamin who defined aura as the unique apparition of a distance however near it may be. Aura of course is what Benjamin thought would be destroyed by modern technology. And aura is also what a vandal is after when he or she loots or destroys an object that has been called irreplaceable to the world community. My proposal is that the protective practices of the last century finds an erratic substitution a human practice of inhabiting this proximity at a distance. And so to make this point I leave you with Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas for the Spaniards who organized the conference. A painting that appeared twice in the International Museum's office literature. The first time in 1934 the painting was shown on display at the Prado Museum cordoned off from the viewing public against a draped wall to illustrate that quote, the work of art has been isolated for aesthetic enhancement. For its second appearance in 1937 after the Prado had been bombed the canvas has been removed to the Collegio della Patriarca in Valencia where it leans against the wall unframed and closely flanked by a team of local guards and international envoys. This second photograph serves a documentary function to show how the work of art has escaped unharmed from an ongoing civil war The whole apparatus of architectural isolation has disappeared wooden frame, pedestal, fabric, lighting and rope. But it's been replaced by a human security detail humans who stand so close to Las Meninas that they appear to be posing for a portrait alongside the Baroque Royal entourage depicted by Velazquez. This pair of images aptly visualizes a spatial kinship between moral action and material protection. At peace physical distance protects the painting from unsuitable modes of aesthetic consumption especially from physical contact. At war, proximity of humans is protection. Thank you. Thank you very much Professor Leigh. Our last speaker of the panel is David Gissen He's a professor of architecture and visual and critical studies at the California College of the Arts where he teaches in the areas of architecture urban and landscape history and theory. Thank you. I also want to thank Jorge and Erika for inviting me to this event today and also for convincing me that I could speak on the subject of the pre-war. So most of the historical writing that I've published about architecture preservation in war really explores the histories of monuments that occur after their destruction during war. That is how citizens within various cities have experienced and documented the piles of rubble and debris that these artifacts often become after warfare. It's only very recently that I've explored the implications of this research within a framework that explores what happens and the possibilities before violence. So today I want to talk to you about a seven-day writing workshop that I led this past week here at Columbia's program in historic preservation titled The Rights of Monuments that produced the document that you see here among other things. My students, I actually only have one slide, so we get a little wristbite from these very emotive images of violence and warfare, so enjoy it while it lasts. My students, I've been reading acts and charters, many of which have been described already from the late 18th century to the present that attempt to either grant or negotiate protections and ethical obligations towards historical monuments. This includes charters and laws that protect monuments from wartime destruction, international agreements that govern the movement of monuments and artifacts across national borders, and other agreements that govern things such as copyright and the reproduction of monuments. So many of the documents we explored relate to the concerns examined today, such as statues, treaties, and legal frameworks, including the Lieber Code that was already discussed, the Charter that's been mentioned several times from UNESCO in 1954, and all of which offer a framework for considering the physical protection of a nation or people's heritage from wartime violence, dispossession, and displacement. So other acts and agreements that we read, such as Henry Cole's convention promoting the reproductions of works of art from 1867 or even the Berne Convention, and its variants open up a space for considering the copyrights of monuments, something that is becoming important again in light of contemporary interest in digitally reproducing endangered architectural heritage. So the goals of the workshop included introducing students to a type of rhetoric that surrounds the monument that several of our panelists today have already discussed, and it also negotiates a kind of relationship between language, writing, international law, human rights, neglect, violence, and the meaning and aesthetics of heritage. And perhaps most provocatively as a kind of writing experiment, a writing workshop, it also included our own activity in reconsidering the rights of monuments by critically responding, rethinking, and rewriting declarative statements from the historical literature along with the remanations. And one thing that preservationists do, in addition to working on actual buildings and proposals, is be involved in the writing of many of the documents that we've seen today. So our ideas regarding the future considerations of the rights of the monuments are projected here. I'm going to explain the ideas behind this with some qualification. They're also created by the participants in the workshop. But in the brief time that I have I want to discuss some of the conceptual and theoretical reflections that move through this thinking and rethinking of the rights of monuments, and that I think are useful for thinking about monuments relative to the crises of the present. So all the accent charters we read emerged in specific contexts and outlined the rights of people and nations to their monuments safety and continuity. That is many of the protections of monuments have largely been articulated as they relate to or analogize human rights or as an extension of human and national rights, rights to property and placement to be free of harm. And many of the historical documents, or I should say, within the some of these historical documents, we also see a metacritical definition of the monument emerge. Should we state what I just said, the monument becomes a human created artifact that is endowed with a right that often functions as an analogous form of the monument discussed by Lucia. By the Mexico City document of 1982, the historic monument is abstracted to become both material and immaterial culture and all of which becomes part of a nation or people's right to cultural identity and part of an international effort at cultural management and preservation. The latter often articulated as emerging from a post-political conflict free set of universal values which also become imprinted on the monument itself. So in reconsidering the rights of the monument, we shift the discussion a bit. In addition to considering a nation's right to its heritage or its duty to protect heritage from violence, in addition to considering the monument's rights as it becomes a nation or person's property or cultural expression, I want us to also reflect on the ways in which the rights of monuments were imagined to extend from the framework of human rights or the rights of nations to consider what types of human and national rights were and were not being articulated. In response I wanted us to consider something that might be a bit jarring for some of you, but a qualified post-humanist rights of monuments and it was informed by a body of literature that I'll explain in just a moment. And I think this is the most provocative and potentially difficult if not problematic idea that moved through the workshop and that we responded to. So in using an admittedly provocative term like post-humanist rights to describe monuments and rights, the goal is not to write people, their culture and traditions out of the rights of their heritage, nor to enact some form of cultural insensitivity in the name of the autonomy of architecture. The goal is the opposite. I wanted to see if we could reconsider the relation of monuments rights relative to human rights because of the historical tensions that exist in those historical practices, existing charters and acts that define monuments and actually work against human rights. So for example, one set of tensions concerns the way monuments and rights are articulated in the major centers and the manner in which sites and landscapes were historically transformed into spaces of monumentality. Consider the fact that the transformation of historical sites into historic monument sites, such as the work by Leo von Klenze at the Acropolis in the 19th century or Henri Serri in Palmaire in the early 1930s actually entailed a dispossession of people's rights to their property, their spatial community and culture. People were moved or encouraged to move landscapes so the buildings that they lived in and the surrounding historical works of architecture could be demolished. This enabled the transformation of the temporal and historical complexity of these sites into a better representation of a particular period of time and or culture. Another set of tensions concerns more recent events, both documented by the journalist Hugh Akins and that raised problems in the attempt to balance the rights of things and people. In 2015, the government of Francois sought to reduce the number of Syrian refugees during France while simultaneously offering to move endangered Syrian antiquities to France to keep them safe from harm and violence. Now if you're gasping the latter is actually a process outlined in one of the documents discussed today, article 18 of the 1954 UNESCO document. Olan's proposal made explicit more general sentiments within the West about rights and values in the Syrian Civil War and the political stakes are lack thereof in granting access to safety for people or things. That same case, the US military, the organization culture under threat which is a hashtag culture under threat, proposed to the US military that they conduct airstrikes on enemy personnel in Syria involved in the destruction of ancient monuments. Something the US military was reluctant to do. All of this illustrates the often violent balance that is brokered between the rights of people versus the right of heritage in international discussions. When I think about these contemporary and historical issues, the first instinct is to avoid any type of right stocks about monuments, I have to be honest. As it becomes clear that we already imagine monuments that have very strong rights. In an article titled the rights of things, the intellectual historian W. J. T. Mitchell noted that if you want to extend rights to nature and animals, begin by looking at art in monuments, which has a surprising number of rights and protections. Additionally, and as pointed out again by Hugh Akins, the ability of an argument has historically meant little unless there are people in museums and archaeological sites that are prepared to actually do something to protect the people or nation's cultural heritage in ways outlined by Lori Rush, by the Chiwia Lei and others. But this ladder issue I think returns us to a more general problem in the matter in which abstract theory or abstract rights must be implemented or to put it more bluntly in the context of an architecture school the relations between theory and practice. So while not examining cultural heritage the types of tensions that we see in the above heritage discourse have been explored in recent years within environmental history, which is frankly a subject that I can speak about much more easily than historical monuments and preservation. What has been termed post-naturalism or post-humanism among other re-thinkings of the relation between people and nature are a multifaceted way of thinking about environment. But I would summarize these complex philosophical beliefs and at the same time show you how they come together as monuments in the following way. Writers interested in post-humanism generally believe that the matter in which we typically broker or extend rights and the key words under critique here are we and extend. Typically it tells the degree to which we can either identify with or anthropomorphize something that includes our ability to socially spatially, temporally and aesthetically abstract that aspect of the environmental world to successfully transform it into some representation of an idealized time or space or balance it with human rights. For example, a writer like Harry Wolfe who has done much to agitate for a post-humanist ethics questions whether many of the living beings that constitute the non-human world deserve rights solely because they can feel love or communicate in ways that are familiar to us. Others such as Jane Bennet or Donna Harroway ask if a landscape deserves protection solely due to its beauty its historical importance. What about experiences that are outside our frame of reference? What about landscapes that are aesthetically offensive or that reflect poorly back on the human nature interaction via histories of colonialism or environmental degradation? These writers believe that we are in position to articulate or consider a series of protections, I may not use the word rights for nature, but what those are and what are being enunciated and implemented need serious consideration. So just very quickly and I'll move on to monuments. A post-humanist environmentalism might imagine a rather unusual set of environmental rights, rights to migration, the right to silence, the right to experience time differently which I personally would imagine something like a right to darkness or the right to see the moon at night which we wouldn't necessarily consider human rights. Or another way to think of this is to consider the potential temporal complexity within which we store nature through environmental reconstructions and remediations. Finally, post-humanism asks a very provocative question if parts of the world deserve to be free from their love and affection which has not always benefited them. In other words, parts of the environment might have the right to strategically disappear from our scrutiny. So something like a pure post-humanist theory of the monument is impossible probably sounds absurd and I would agree with that because monuments are obviously human recreations that become monuments via our belief that they represent social, cultural and artistic human achievement and uniqueness. Nevertheless I do think this is one way to rethink the way in which the monuments' rights or the rights that negotiate relations between people and monuments have been articulated. I would also argue that aspects of what I am calling post-humanist thinking are already a part of the preservationist discourse even if they're not articulated that way. So this latter idea would include 19th century ruminations on the rights of architectural recreations of patina and dust to be integrated into the structures, mid-20th century examinations on the potential of monuments to retain the damage that they accrue from the impact of time or through violence. I'm thinking of the writings of Shazari Burandi which incidentally enough are inspired by the same philosophers like Derrida that inspire a lot of the post-humanist material late 20th century demands to establish separations between the formally shared environments of people and artifacts a confrontation with the dominant institutional experience of aesthetic objects and that was briefly explored by the Metropolitan art in the late 1960s and early 21st century explorations of digital reproduction that disentangle notions of authenticity and originality separating the experience of the authentic and the original by thousands of miles something explored quite recently by Bruno Latour and preservationist Adam Lo who's here in the preservation program at Columbia. So in our workshop we read and reconsidered the rights of monuments through three frameworks the territorial rights of monuments which includes concepts around geographical and mobility considerations that's actually the top row moving across the copyrights of monuments which explores the reproducibility which is in the center and finally the protective rights of monuments which is the right to be free from discussion. One of the again the metacritical rights that emerged in our first meeting and the stretch through our three categories included the rights of monuments to be seen as something other than a monument so it was a way to sort of explore historical and try to find an outside to the kind of trap I think that we had set up for ourselves. So that is something other than a unique expression of a particular human historical culture with universal cultural value. Without denying the historical connections or aesthetic appeal of a particular monument or site many of the rights of monuments considered by the group advance the monument is imperfect and fluctuating sites of multi-temporality and spatiality as ongoing sites whether that be international conservation sites or as people's homes and communities the monument also emerges as both a stable and unstable environment in their writing a multiple versus a unique work a more ambient experience versus an attentive one something that we thought was quite critical and an object that negotiates versus negates violence and most evocative at least for me as evidence more than expression so that last term that I just mentioned evidence made a very powerful impression on me through the course of this workshop and I want to conclude with my own thoughts about this. I found it to be a particularly striking and contemporary counter definition of the monument and a term with both historical and juridical implications. The term evidence was actually used in the Venice Charter an important early preservation document that probably many of you are familiar with. In the Venice Charter the term evidence is meant to suggest how a preserved building becomes a material index of another time as in our belief that any restoration of the Colosseum in Rome should provide evidence of the Roman civilization that built it. But the term evidence gives us another way to think about the monument that is useful in considering monuments and rights in a broader context whether speaking of colonial archeology like I described in Palmyra and the Acropolis or post-colonial violence which we see in many examples of today we see how monument sites accrete histories that inhibit our ability to define the monument and its surroundings solely as a positive expression of human cultural value. In the face of contemporary forms of destruction of historic monuments and which have now imprinted their histories in the forms of landscapes of rubble and debris, the word evidence takes on both a deep historical and a more contemporary legal meaning. The deceased Lebanese curator Amir Maurice Habab explored the concept of the monument as evidence and his heritage practices at the Lebanese National Museum. Several of the ancient bronze and glass artifacts that were under his care are actually currently on display at the new museum downtown in the exhibition Keepers. So during the Lebanese Civil War, Habab encased the rarest pieces of Lebanese National Museum's collections in concrete at this image in my mind now and hit others in boxes like the banana boxes in the building to protect them. But many of these artifacts still became horribly damaged in the shelling of the museum. Rather than dispose of the damaged artifacts or fully restore them, the partially melted bronze and glass artifacts became and remain evidence of this more recent, common and violent past. This is now entangled with the common past that these artifacts once represented and it is typical of a nation's architectural, I'm sorry ancient archeological finds that are on display. The monument is evidence among some of the other concepts that emerged in this workshop enable some shifts in thinking. So what I began as a post-humanist critique of artifactual rights came back full circle. Instead of affirming the monument as a conflict-free site of universal cultural values, the monument pointed towards other values such as justice and human rights but a potential that's actually carried within its multiple materialities, histories and geographies articulated as our ethical obligations. Thanks. I'd like to invite all of the panelists to join us here on the table so that we can begin our dialogue. Okay. I'd like to prompt the discussion with a couple of questions. We have only about 15 minutes but I would like to allow us to have a dialogue and also hopefully open up the floor to a question or two as well. So you started us out, Professor Winter, really making us think about some of these issues of national narratives and the way in which heritage can be used as, in many cases, a propagandist tool. And throughout the rest of the presentations, we also heard about the way in which heritage has become a victim. In the same way, however, that we consider war and its perpetrators and victims being both human. Professor Gissen, you remind us that heritage is, in fact, propaganda itself. And so we are really dealing with a double-edged sword in that we are trying to protect these objects that we're trying to preserve or sequester from all of these negative issues but at the same time, they are inherent contributors to conflict, tension, and injustices. And so given that a large part of our audience is students who are entering the field of preservation, I'd like to ask the panel to consider, as young professionals entering this field faced with a lot of the tools that have been a traditional core of preservation, things like listing, things like designating heritage, things like just the vocabulary of protecting it from these forces, what advice can you give them in terms of how to transform the field into something that can more effectively respond to these contemporary challenges? There's any victims. What I would say is that there has been more of a recent acknowledgement that the destruction of heritage is linked with the loss of human life. And as we see that link become stronger through data coming from terrorist organizations and let's say the funding of terrorist organizations and how sites are used and the destruction of sites are used as a propaganda tool to continue with the growth of terrorist organizations I believe that well enforcement officials and agents and attorneys and people working in the field recognize how important it is to stop the destruction. It's not as I ended my presentation discussing UNESCO and the UN and their recognition that heritage is not just a collateral crime, destruction of heritage is not a collateral crime but something that is involved in terrorism and the loss of human life. So hopefully as that continues or as that recognition continues there will be more action taking against perpetrators as we saw this week in the case of the ICC against the terrorists in Timbuktu. I guess I don't know if this is what you're looking for but the heritage is propaganda itself. You know the biggest propaganda is that heritage is only objects things that can be listed and I mean I thought that that's what you were kind of getting at when you described in fact one of my questions to you is why continuing to talk about the monument that's such 1930s language. Of course at the scale of UNESCO an object on a map when you zoom in becomes a site so I guess I don't particularly think I'm qualified to give advice to any starting preservationist but certainly there are lists which are going to probably remain objects like the Parthenon probably will continue to be thought of as an object even though it's quite obvious that it's not an object it's a construction site and similarly I'm sure Palmyra could be debated these kind of high level basically objects where there's a strong sort of impetus towards it but in most realms of preservation there's no particular need to continue to abide by the logic that things that need preserving aren't necessarily objects and I think that your presentation where you showed the alternative possible sites of the silk route where you could potentially draw it this way or that way I think that's a much more accurate way to think of what preservationists do when they engage in designating something as significant and something as not so finding any way to have practices architectural practices that demolish that is I think that makes it harder to destroy one thing if you designate many things and disperse things and generally refer to makerly culture or artifactual culture as being disperse than which it is My advice especially to students in terms of the most local people and the descending populations so for example in North American archaeology the very best thing that ever could have happened to our profession was the Native American Graves Protection and Patriotation Act because it requires active participants in North American archaeology to work directly with the descending populations so in my work at Fort John I'm a liaison with the Haudenosaunee people who had ancestors on the installation and their contributions to my understanding of the ancestral places in Northern New York has made me a thousand times better archaeologist and steward than I ever could have been without their partnership and assistance and as I work with my colleagues who work around the world I can see an enormous opportunity for learning and growth from that North American example so because you mentioned people lost their homes when Palmyra was developed as an iconic destination Patra is the same way it's surrounded by angry frustrated people who lost their home there when it was turned into a World Heritage Site so if we learn to think about what these places mean and maybe even those young women who are praying for luck and love that's when you begin to appreciate what should the priorities be what should our approaches be so my advice would be thinking about many of these what we're viewing as minors these are people's homes and deferring to them and taking our guidance at that level I was going to add the importance of what we've heard in this opening session is a good historicization of both cooperation and the measures post-conflict also iconoclasm and how that needs to historicize that to get out of the knee-jerk reactions that the media are presenting us with and sensationalism around destruction and just understand what's at stake here I think beyond just what the media to readily feeds us and also to another thing in the same lines as you in terms of engaging both the communities I've got a PhD graduate working on Myanmar and human rights for her the monument is all around cultural practices and the rights to have cultural practices around sites and active religious spaces so I think it speaks to your theme as well of really working with communities on the ground but also I guess to my talk which was encouraging and it was not a tight talk it was mostly encouraging to let's get our heads up to really look at the real driving forces at the real kind of global level today what's driving preservation both cooperation and its destruction at a very very international level and I think those are kind of the things that we don't often want to really critically engage with and I feel most of my work is on Asia that the world is changing very fast and countries like Qatar or South Korea South Korea is investing heavily into a museum outside of the Banyan Buddhas Japan is giving $300 million to US dollars the Egyptian government for a museum outside Cairo there's a huge amount of investment going on outside the west Australia is very proudly giving $5000 to the Myanmar government for post reconstruction and heritage preservation and that's just a drop in the ocean compared to what India and China are doing so we need to engage in how that's changing things, that's changing the game as well I think the irony of your question is that there's 10 students in the room who have been listening to me speak for the past 10 days about this topic but first of all I just want to say that I learned so much watching everybody's presentations and it was a really like fantastically assembled panel so the advice I would give is that as someone who writes I think it's really important to explore the documents that outline the kinds of expectations of your practices or the concepts that you might have the documents that we read is in many ways a rewriting of previous documents this is something that came up in several of the talks so for me it's a writing it's actually like a writing exercise and one of the things that I said to the students, I said there'll be success in reconsidering the document if you come to it from a position of sympathy and of criticality and I also used the word humility which we ultimately decided to toss out so it was very interesting at the advice of a historian named Olga Tulumi who told me that in a program like Columbia's School of Historic Preservation which most of the students are women you should not ask women to articulate their ideas about preservation in a humble way and I learned a lot speaking to her and yes and it was spent it was so sympathy and criticality humility maybe I want to ask another provocative question and hopefully we'll be able to edge a couple of minutes out for a question from the floor we have an underlying assumption particularly within this panel and to some extent within the symposium as a whole that destruction is always bad and in the formation of what we consider to be cultural identities and what becomes quote-unquote heritage tangible or intangible we oftentimes see that destruction is part and parcel of creating that narrative or understanding that history and I think immediately of the situation in Canada for example and the destruction of orphanages that has occurred in recent months and brought about some legislative issues I think about the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the way in which locals made that choice and many would argue that it's not non-locals who are often making the decision about destruction particularly in performance destruction in hybrid warfare right now it's actually locals so if you could comment on the way in which given that this is a pre-war panel our concerns about preservation and heritage can confront this idea that destruction may not always be bad I was accused at a presentation at Yale University of being way too optimistic of a person to be working with the military with that acknowledgement we have examples of signs of hope after destruction and people often use Monte Cassino but rarely mention the fact that the Temple Podia that Monte Cassino was built upon was actually exposed and reminded the world of the fact that that monastery was actually a way of erasing perhaps the pagan beliefs and practices by building right on top of the Temple there sometimes too from a very perhaps even colonial preservation perspective we have places like Palestine and Italy where the World War II damaged exposed the huge sanctuary which is now a major tourist destination and that community rebuilds around material that was laying beneath so it can provide a little bit of optimism in an unexpected way I mean my book's title presumably if it's okay with the editors is Designs of Destruction so I would say that the important thing about destruction is that it's designed of course war is a very particular case in which many people are concerned with destruction most of the time it's usually architects or demolition specialists or preservationists so I would say that preservationists and architects know a lot more about destruction than most people and it just happens that war is a moment when their expertise becomes fraught but it seems to me that the question is the tool of the destruction and the way in which it's planned so it's clear that in the 20th century in opposition to an older idea where destruction was kind of a natural force and human culture was that which resisted it or which didn't resist it destruction begins to be seen as a cultural artifact in itself so a destroyed landscape is itself one is no longer certain whether that's a natural or non-human thing and so that in itself just opens up a discipline so I'm not sure that I would the question of whether destruction is either good or bad again sort of places more objects on the destruction as though there was a monument or not a monument and let's just assume that there is destruction under its design and then the conditions under which it is and who has the tools and I do think that the idea of performance is sort of the latest mode of design and that accords with basically a competition between national narratives which want to perform a certain history via preservation of objects and then let's say forces from below who want to perform a pertinence and belonging via either destruction or construction of heritage not in museums but in a kind of lived experience I think what's so interesting about your question is that preservation practices itself have redefined how I think about destruction so for example Cheseray Bondi whose name I hope I'm pronouncing correctly mentioned earlier and his theories around the lacuna have completely transformed I think for those that are familiar with them I think completely transformed how you might understand flood damage or the missing pieces that emerge in buildings as being more particular than just the word that we use debris or rubble that these things take on different characteristics in the face of the preservation practices that we can use to contend with them or to restore them so yeah. The only briefing I would add is that it is a helpful and provocative question to raise I think but my concern is that we often end up focusing on the five or six kind of key causes around the world at a particular moment around destruction and discussing those and whilst we're aware of the unprecedented level of military power today in the 21st century it's obvious but it's also the return the pernicious return of the nation's state and I think what we often focus on are the international causes but the state and sort of civil conflicts and what's going on outside these international visible cases that the state is inflicting an awful lot of cultural violence, cultural erasure and destruction that doesn't reach the international media and there's many many cases we can think about that and I won't put any on the table right now but I think that's the level of violence through which doesn't really get any provocatively discussed and it's easier to flag up the Syrian cases but I think there's many more that I think are very disturbing that that idea opens a can of worms to that I will kind of think we're going to be very careful about. Given the high sign that our time is up could you do one? I want to give a big round of applause for our panelists and thank you very much for a very good talk.