“A Disturbing Portent of Future Harm”? Attacks on Cultural Heritage, Atrocity Crimes, and the Problem of Prevention

Preventing atrocities has garnered significant scholarly and practitioner attention. In 2014, the UN Office of Genocide Prevention issued a Framework of Analysis of Atrocity Crimes listing 14 risk factors and 143 indicators to support risk analysis and early action. Cognizant that conflicts regularly include deliberate attacks on cultural heritage, the Framework identifies fourteen indicators that pertain to culture and cultural heritage. Five years after the Framework’s release, Simon Adams decried the international community’s ineffectiveness at translating early warning into practical action with respect to cultural heritage. Instead of focusing on lack of political will or obstructionism—an obstructionism that led to a certain blindness in the international legal framework of the intimate relationship between cultural and human destruction—this article observes that definitional, temporal, and scalar ambiguities in the Framework likewise contribute to translation problems. The essay adopts a human rights framing of cultural heritage to help mitigate some of those problems, especially as it broadens the array of relevant agents to work proactively to avert and prevent tensions from erupting into violence, and sometimes reactively when situations devolve.