Ruin Warfare: How and Why We Weaponize the Past

This review explores how and why we weaponize the past, underscoring how all parties to a conflict might manipulate antiquity, its materialities, and its meanings. The decision to destroy or preserve sites—whether to rewrite, challenge, or reify historical narratives—increasingly matters in an era of global disinformation, amid conflicts among states or within them. The past is both a tool and a target in modern warfare, prompting us to rethink how heritage is increasingly exploited as an instrument of power, coercion, and security. The review also discusses how damage and destruction of heritage have become a generative force within ruin warfare. Consequently, historic sites and disputes over them have prompted stricter legal accountability in the past two decades, raising issues of injustice, erasure, and genocide. Tracking these developments, I also ask how heritage assets, once seen as global goods in the twentieth century, have shifted to weapons of war in the twenty-first century.