Cultural Heritage in Palestine between Political Chaos and Systematic Falsification of Evidence

Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts confronts the politics and dynamics of cultural heritage in the aftermath of conflict across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, demonstrating that reconstruction is never neutral, recovery is rarely complete, and the past is contested terrain.

Drawing on case studies from Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Sudan, contributors interrogate the assumptions that shape post-conflict heritage practice: whose past gets preserved, whose memory is memorialised, and whose communities are consulted — or sidelined — in the process. The book’s chapters examine the affective and therapeutic dimensions of heritage in exile and return; the ethics of reconstruction and digital rebuilding, from Palmyra to al-Raqqa; the role of international actors, from EU policy in Libya to Russian media framing of Syria; and the political weaponisation of heritage evidence itself, including the widespread falsification and erasure of heritage in Palestine. Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contextschallenges the hierarchies inherited from colonial-era heritage frameworks and asks what a decolonial, community-centred practice might look like on the ground.

Combining a diverse range of theoretical and empirical perspectives on post-conflict heritage interventions, Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts is a critical reckoning with the question that lingers when the dust settles: heritage for whom, and at what cost? The volume appeals for researchers and students in heritage studies, memory studies, museum studies, archaeology, architecture, history, peace and conflict studies, and anthropology.

When the Dust Settles

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Heritage

in Post-Conflict MENA

Nour A. Munawar and James Symonds

Reclaiming Heritage from the Rubble

On a June morning in 2017, the al-Nouri Mosque in Mosul, a twelfth-century

landmark whose iconic leaning al-Hadba minaret had stood for centuries, was

reduced to rubble. Three years earlier, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had used the

mosque’s pulpit to self-declare the Islamic State caliphate (Daesh). Its destruc-

tion, as the city was being retaken by Iraqi forces, was not simply an archi-

tectural loss. It was the removal of a landmark around which generations of

Mosulawis had oriented their daily lives, organised their prayers, remembered

their dead, and located themselves in history: a deliberate assault on collective

memory, community identity, and historical continuity. Yet this act, like the

earlier destruction of Palmyra’s temples, the dynamiting of Hatra, and the lev-

elling of Nimrud, paradoxically revealed a persistent truth: cultural heritage

in the MENA region has long been contested terrain, viewed through external

lenses and mobilised for competing political agendas.

Eight years later, in September 2025, UNESCO and the Iraqi government

inaugurated the reconstructed al-Nouri Mosque and al-Hadba minaret. The

$115 million ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ initiative had drawn funding from

the United Arab Emirates ($50.4 million), the European Union ($48.2 mil-

lion), and a coalition of donor states including Canada, the Netherlands,

Japan, and Germany (UNESCO 2018a, 2025b). The reopening was framed

in the language of resilience, coexistence, and solidarity. It also raised the

questions this volume was written to address. Whose Mosul was rebuilt, and

on whose terms? Whose timeline governed what was prioritised, and what

was not? What did the rapid, generously funded work of al-Nouri mean for

the quieter, slower, less cinematic work of people trying to repair neighbour-

hoods, archives, ritual calendars, and ways of living together whose funders

are few and whose photographers are fewer? Who, in the end, was the audi-

ence for the restored minaret, and which audience does heritage in MENA in

2026 actually serve?

This chapter begins by highlighting the inadequacies of the current domi-

nant frameworks (universalist, expert-driven, rooted in the institutional im-

agination of the global North) for understanding post-conflict heritage in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003483137-24 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

MENA and then pivots to set out the questions the volume seeks to an-

swer: who decides what is rebuilt, on whose timeline, with whose labour, and

against whose objections; whose destructions become internationally visible;

and what ‘decolonising’ heritage practice can mean in a region whose co-

lonial histories are differentiated and whose post-independence trajectories

diverge. It then reviews the literature the volume builds on and departs from:

the critical literature on heritage destruction, the scholarship on heritage gov-

ernance, and the decolonial heritage literature, and develops new theoreti-

cal ground organised around four governance themes (the multi-actor field;

professional labour and epistemic authority; the rhythm of recovery; and

the politics of recognition). It concludes by setting out the structure of the

volume and the contributions of its 15 chapters. Two clarifications belong at

the outset. First, the volume’s focus is on reconstruction and decolonisation

together: reconstruction is the empirical site at which colonial logics most

visibly persist (in funding architectures, expert hierarchies, donor timelines,

and the monumental aesthetics that govern what gets rebuilt), and decoloni-

sation names the analytic and ethical horizon against which reconstruction

practices are read. Second, the specificity of the MENA case (what makes it

analytically distinct from the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Mali, Afghani-

stan, or Ukraine) lies in the convergence of six features set out in the third

section below: the density of conflict, the scale of displacement, unresolved

sovereignty, the inequality of international attention, the entanglement of

conflict with climate-driven deterioration, and the systematic, pedagogical

character of the targeting.

These are not new questions facing the multi-ethno-religious communi-

ties across MENA today. What is new, and what this volume attempts to

confront directly, is the density of the conjuncture in which they are now

being asked. Three contemporary conflicts bring it into focus. The genocidal

war on Gaza since October 2023 has destroyed or damaged religious and

cultural sites in the Gaza Strip, by the count of the UN Independent Inter-

national Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (UN

Human Rights Council 2025), with consequences the Commission links to

the crime of extermination and to systemic violation of the Palestinian right to

self-determination. Sudan’s civil war, escalating since April 2023, has placed

the collections of the National Museum in Khartoum, the royal pyramids of

Meroe, and Jebel Barkal at direct risk, while drawing a fraction of the interna-

tional mobilisation directed at heritage in Ukraine (UNESCO 2024, 2025a).

The US–Israeli war on Iran, which began in late February 2026, has extended

heritage destruction along a new axis: UNESCO has verified damage to four

of Iran’s World Heritage Sites (the Qajar-era Golestan Palace in Tehran, the

seventeenth-century Chehel Sotoun Palace and the Masjed-e Jame mosque in

Isfahan, and buildings adjacent to the Prehistoric Sites of the Khorramabad

Valley), alongside damage to Tyre in Lebanon (UNESCO 2026a).

These are not parallel crises to be inventoried. They share a pattern: targeted

destruction, markedly unequal international recognition, and reconstructionWhen the Dust Settles 5

prospects shaped more by geopolitical alignment than by the scale of cultural

loss. That pattern is the analytic object of this volume.

To it must be added two slower pressures whose timescales exceed those

of any single war. Syria’s post-Assad reconfiguration, beginning with the re-

gime’s collapse in December 2024, has opened both possibilities and uncer-

tainties for a heritage landscape already fractured by nearly 14 years of war.

Libya’s renewed violence, felt acutely in Tripoli and Benghazi, has exposed

sites that had only just begun to be catalogued after the 2011 conflict; Leba-

non’s cumulative economic collapse continues to hollow out archaeological

and museum institutions; and by the end of March 2026 Iran’s Ministry of

Cultural Heritage had reported more than 120 museums and historic sites

damaged, while Lebanon requested ‘enhanced protection’ status under the

1954 Hague Convention for 39 additional sites (UNESCO 2026b). Climate

change, meanwhile, is moving from background condition to foreground

threat: 2024 was the hottest year on record across much of the MENA re-

gion (UNESCO 2023). Conflict destruction and climate deterioration are not

parallel threats either; they are mutually reinforcing, and the communities

most exposed to one are most exposed to the other.

The scholarly response has been substantial. A generation of work has

mapped heritage destruction, catalogued losses, and theorised their meanings

(Azzouz 2023; Bevan 2006; Harmanşah 2015; Isakhan and Meskell 2019,

2024; Meskell 2018; Munawar and Plets 2025; Plets and Munawar 2024;

Rabbat and Sharp 2025; Rouhani et al. 2025; Zarandona et al. 2023). Yet

three gaps persist, and this volume is organised around closing them.

The first gap is regional specificity. MENA is routinely included in the

comparative literature on heritage and conflict but is rarely treated as a field

with its own internal differentiation and historical depth. The colonial herit-

age regimes of the French protectorates in North Africa, the British man-

dates over Iraq and Palestine, the Ottoman late-imperial governance of the

Levantine provinces, and the post-independence trajectories that followed

produced different institutional apparatuses, different professional cultures,

and different relationships between states, experts, and local populations

(Baram and Carroll 2002; Çelik 2008; De Cesari 2019; Gutron 2010; Jack-

son 2016; Maffi 2009; Oulebsir 2004; Zobler 2011). Treating the region as

a single analytic unit—‘the Middle East’—erases this differentiation and re-

produces precisely the flattening that nineteenth-century colonial taxonomies

performed (Hannoum 2021; Lockman 2004).

The second gap concerns heritage governance. Recent work has addressed

the destruction of heritage in MENA and the major international responses

to it, with UNESCO, the UN Security Council (UNSC), and ALIPH as the

principal institutional actors (Isakhan and Meskell 2019; 2024; Larkin and

Rudolf 2024a, 2024b; Meskell and Isakhan 2024; Rosen 2022). Less at-

tention has been paid to the governance question underneath: who, in any

given post-conflict setting, actually decides what gets rebuilt, on what time-

line, using whose labour, with whose sign-off, and against whose objections?6 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

The answer involves state antiquities directorates, international organisa-

tions, diaspora foundations, private donors (state and corporate), informal

networks of displaced professionals, municipal authorities, religious trusts

(waqf), resident communities (who may themselves be internally divided),

and increasingly the digital publics that watch and intervene from a distance

(Badran et al. 2022; De Cesari 2019; Maffi and Daher 2014; Munawar and

Plets 2025). Governance is where the politics of heritage actually happens.

It is also where an honest account must acknowledge that being from the re-

gion is not a prophylactic against colonial logic: professional elites educated

in and oriented towards Western academic centres frequently reproduce the

frameworks they are elsewhere said to be resisting.

The third gap is the critical literature on decolonial heritage itself. Calls to

decolonise heritage practice have proliferated since the late 2010s, and they

have been productive (Atalay 2006, 2012; Bolin and Nkusi 2022; Giblin

2012; Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022; Munawar 2024, 2026; Reddy and

Russell 2024; Shepherd 2020). But the concept travels unevenly. Tuck and

Yang (2012) issued the foundational warning against using ‘decolonisation’

metaphorically, as a synonym for any progressive social justice project, argu-

ing that such metaphorisation underwrites ‘settler moves to innocence’ that

re-secure rather than unsettle colonial structures. The warning is consequen-

tial for heritage scholarship in MENA. Abu-Lughod (2024, 2025), addressing

the ‘Indigenous turn’ in anthropology from a MENA vantage point, makes

a complementary case: the methodological and ethical lessons developed by

scholars working in Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawaii, Bolivia, and Native

America cannot simply be transposed onto MENA settings, where the legal-

political form of indigeneity, the structure of settler-colonialism (acute in

Palestine but not generalisable), and the relations between researcher, state,

and community differ in kind. The lessons can travel; the categories cannot,

not without considerable work. We take this seriously: the chapter’s use of

‘decolonising’ throughout is meant neither as metaphor nor as the whole-

sale import of an indigenous-studies framework, but as an argument for the

situated reworking of heritage frameworks within MENA’s own genealo-

gies of practice. As Brulon Soares (2023, 2024) has argued, the language of

‘community participation’ and ‘co-production’ that dominates mainstream

decolonial heritage discourse is itself a product of specific liberal-democratic

institutional histories, and it does not map cleanly onto settings where the

state, civil society, religious authority, tribe, and family occupy different rela-

tional positions. Kreps (2003, pp.1–16) made the related point two decades

ago: non-Western ‘museological behaviours’ have long existed, long pre-

dated Western museology, and are not best understood as adaptations of it.

Bhatti (2012, p.117) extended the argument through a sustained study of the

Lahore Museum, showing that ‘best practice’ as exported from the global

North systematically misrecognised how a major South Asian institution

actually worked. In MENA, the point has been made repeatedly—by Pie-

przak (2010) on Morocco, Boum (2013) on the curation of Jewish-MuslimWhen the Dust Settles 7

memory, Mejcher-Atassi and Schwartz (2012) on collecting practices across

the modern Arab world, De Cesari (2019) on Palestinian civil society herit-

age, Abu-Khafajah and Badran (2015) on Jordan, and Rey (2019, 2020)

on Tunisian museography—but it has not always been absorbed into the

broader post-conflict heritage literature.

These three gaps (regional specificity, the governance question underneath

heritage destruction, and the unevenness of decolonial thought in practice)

are not separate problems to be solved in sequence. They converge in a set

of governance questions that structure the rest of this chapter and the vol-

ume. We organise these questions around four themes: the multi-actor field

in which heritage decisions are made and contested; the distribution of pro-

fessional labour and epistemic authority across international, regional, and

community scales; the mismatch between donor timelines and the rhythms

at which communities actually recover; and the politics of recognition that

determines which destructions become internationally visible and which do

not. These are not the only governance questions that matter, and we make

no claim that they exhaust the field. They are, however, the questions that

recur across the chapters collected here.

Our central claim, built on and extending these scholarships, is that post-

conflict heritage work in MENA requires both a more specific account of

how colonial-era frameworks actually operated in the region and a more

critical account of what ‘decolonising’ those frameworks might now mean.

The generic story (Western colonial powers extracted and interpreted, post-

colonial states inherited the extractive apparatus, and local communities

were marginalised until recent participatory turns) captures something real

but misses the variation and the contradictions. In the chapters that follow,

Syrian diaspora archivists create cultural forms that refuse the categories of

either ‘national heritage’ or ‘exile nostalgia’ (Ammar Azzouz, Chapter 3;

Emanuela Sebastiani and Patrick M. Michel, Chapter 6); grassroots organi-

sations in al-Raqqa preserve intangible heritage by ignoring the paradigms

that funders prefer (Sarah Barker, Chapter 9); Palestinian heritage practition-

ers have long since treated heritage as a mode of civic existence rather than

an object of state display (Ghattas J. Sayej, Chapter 8); and curators, archi-

tects, and heritage managers working in Aleppo and Benghazi have devel-

oped reconstruction approaches that are neither imitations of international

technical guidance nor simple rejections of it (Christine Kousa, Chapter 12;

Nur Alah Abdelzayed Valdeolmillos and Djamel Boussaa, Chapter 13). The

pluralism of these practices is not a problem to be resolved into a single

method. It is the material from which a more honest and more useful account

of post-conflict heritage in the region can be built.

The chapter proceeds as follows. We first set out the historical and in-

stitutional formation of heritage in MENA, attending to the differentiated

colonial and post-independence trajectories across the region, and to the

scholarship that has interrogated them. We then examine the politics of nam-

ing (the terms ‘Middle East’, ‘Arab world’, ‘MENA’, ‘WANA’, and ‘SWANA’)8 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

and explain our usage. We next turn to the present conjuncture of heritage

destruction, drawing out what is specific about it in MENA. From there, we

move to international heritage interventions since 2011, using the Mosul case

as an analytic anchor, and examine the securitisation paradigm, the funding

politics, and the post-Assad reconfiguration of the Syrian heritage sector. We

then offer a theoretical framework for heritage governance in post-conflict

MENA organised around four themes, before turning to the critical literature

on decolonising heritage and its application and limits in the region. We close

with the structure of the volume, the methodological commitments shared

across the contributions, and our statement of intervention.

Heritage, Colonialism, and Institutional Formation in MENA

Cultural heritage in MENA did not emerge as a category from within the

region’s own intellectual traditions. It arrived as an imported administra-

tive and scientific framework, embedded in specific nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century colonial apparatuses, and was absorbed into the new post-

independence states in ways that varied considerably from one national con-

text to the next. Any serious account of post-conflict heritage in MENA has

to begin with this institutional history, because the frameworks inherited

by contemporary antiquities directorates, heritage authorities, ministries of

culture, and national museums still bear its imprint (Maffi 2009; Maffi and

Daher 2014; Munawar 2022).

The Algerian case, which Oulebsir (2004) has reconstructed in rich ar-

chival detail, is in many ways foundational. From 1830 onwards, French

architects, archaeologists, and military administrators assembled a heritage

regime in Algeria that selected which pasts would be exhumed, studied, and

displayed. The Roman ruins of North Africa were privileged as evidence of

a ‘Latin Africa’ whose continuity with European civilisation justified the

colonial presence itself. Islamic and pre-Islamic Amazigh pasts were either

incorporated into orientalist taxonomies or rendered secondary. The institu-

tional infrastructure that supported this selection (museums, archaeological

services, conservation laws, and training schools) was not dismantled at in-

dependence in 1962. It was transferred, with its selectivity intact, to Algerian

successor institutions that operated under new political imperatives but with

old categories.

The French protectorates in Tunisia (1881–1956) and Morocco (1912–

1956) followed related but distinct patterns. Gutron’s (2010) study of ar-

chaeology in Tunisia shows how Carthage and Dougga were constructed

as sites of both imperial and national importance, and how the transition

from protectorate to independent state involved a slow and contested re-

working of the inherited archaeological apparatus. Bacha’s (2013) study of

monumental heritage in Tunisia between 1881 and 1920 traces the paral-

lel institutionalisation of monument protection, showing how the 1885

establishment of the Service des Antiquités et des Arts—under the FrenchWhen the Dust Settles 9

Ministère de l’Instruction publique and the Académie des inscriptions et

belles-lettres—operated as both preservation instrument and colonial asser-

tion of sovereignty, and how its institutional successor remains embedded in

what is today the Institut national du Patrimoine de Tunisie. In Morocco,

Pieprzak (2010) has shown how the absence of a major national museum of

modern art under the protectorate and after independence produced a dif-

ferent kind of museological landscape—one in which informal, private, and

counter-institutional spaces assumed functions that public museums in other

national contexts performed. Boum’s (2013) work on the curation of Jew-

ish memory in Morocco adds a further dimension, showing how local com-

munities and descendants of displaced populations have developed practices

of memory work that operate outside, and sometimes in tension with, state

heritage institutions.

Çelik’s (2008) comparative study of French-Ottoman encounters makes a

crucial point easily lost in narratives that position European colonialism as

the sole engine of heritage institutionalisation in the region. The late Otto-

man state was itself a modernising empire that established antiquities laws,

built museums, excavated sites, and asserted claims over the past of its Arab

provinces. The 1874 and 1884 Ottoman antiquities laws, the founding of the

Imperial Museum in Istanbul under Osman Hamdi Bey, and the Ottoman

approach to sites in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine constituted a parallel heritage

regime with its own imperial logics. When the post-Ottoman successor states

inherited the territories of the old Arab provinces, they inherited a layered

institutional history in which Ottoman, European colonial, and national-

modernist strata coexisted. Baram and Carroll (2002) note the paradoxical

consequence: the Ottoman period itself, despite being the most recent impe-

rial phase, was often systematically under-excavated and under-represented

in national museums, precisely because neither colonial powers nor national-

ist successor states had strong incentives to centre it.

The British mandate in Iraq (1920–1932), which Jackson (2016) has

examined through its architectural and planning interventions, produced

an institutional heritage landscape inflected by imperial visions of nation-

building. The Iraq Museum, founded in 1923 with the involvement of

the British political officer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell (reorganised

in 1926), was an explicit instrument in a colonial construction of Iraqi

identity, in which a glorified Mesopotamian past was made to legitimise

a new state whose borders had been drawn in Europe and by Europeans.

The museum’s 2003 looting after the US–UK invasion, and the subsequent

decades of reconstruction, restitution, and reform, played out against this

inheritance—not against a tabula rasa.

Syria’s trajectory was shaped by the French colonial rule (1920–1946),

during which antiquities, archaeology, and the ethnographic apparatus of

museums were developed within a clearly colonial frame (Zobler 2011).

What Zobler’s research makes visible is something easy to miss from the out-

side: Syria’s national heritage regime, post-independence, was never uniform10 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

across the country. The curation of the past at the National Museum of Da-

mascus differed substantively from that at Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, or Palmyra.

Regional museums mirrored the political economies of their regions, and the

staff who managed them (many of whom continued working through the

2011–2024 conflict at immense personal risk) had long been practising lay-

ered, careful, and internally nuanced forms of heritage work that have rarely

been acknowledged in Anglophone scholarship. While the Assad regime did

instrumentalise heritage to bolster its authoritarian legitimacy (Munawar

2022; Rabbat and Sharp 2025), its reach was also deeply colonising and

micromanaging towards the heritage sector and museums. Nevertheless, this

top-down control did not entirely subsume or erase grassroots heritage prac-

tice on the ground.

Palestine presents the most theoretically demanding case in the region,

addressed at length in this volume (Ghattas J. Sayej, Chapter 8), De Cesari’s

(2019) Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine, and Munawar and

Nassar’s recent work (2025) on heritage in Jerusalem. Under Ottoman rule,

Palestine’s antiquities and sacred landscapes were administered through the

empire’s broader heritage regime, overlaid by European (especially biblical-

archaeological) scholarly interest in the region (Silberman 1982; Abu El-

Haj 2001). Under British colonialism (1920–1948), a heritage apparatus

was created—with laws, a Department of Antiquities, and a museum in

Jerusalem—whose bureaucratic frameworks were then split in 1948 between

the new state of Israel and the Palestinian territories now under Jordanian

and Egyptian administration. The subsequent Israeli occupation of the rest of

Palestine (West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) after 1967 produced a situa-

tion without analogue elsewhere: a Palestinian heritage practice that has had

to operate for decades without a sovereign state, in direct confrontation with

an occupying settler-colonial regime that actively appropriates, destroys, or

reassigns Palestinian heritage sites (De Cesari 2019; Munawar and Nassar

2025). The response, as De Cesari shows, has been the emergence of heritage

organisations (Riwaq, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, the Palestinian

Museum) that perform governance functions the state cannot, and that treat

heritage not as an object of national patrimony but as a mode of political

presence.

Jordan’s case is different again. Maffi (2009) traces ‘the itinerary of a co-

lonial invention’: the way cultural heritage in Jordan emerged through British

mandate archaeology and was then absorbed into a Hashemite nation-building

project that used museography to align national history with dynastic history.

Her later work with Daher (Maffi and Daher 2014) extends the analysis across

the Arab region, showing that the heritage-as-nation-building model has dis-

tinct regional inflections but shares a common post-independence grammar.

Abu-Khafajah and Badran (2015), writing as Jordanian heritage scholars, push

the critique further, arguing that even the reflexive and participatory turns in

international heritage practice have reached Jordan in forms that continue to

privilege external expertise over locally grounded knowledge.When the Dust Settles 11

Two general observations emerge from this survey. First, the colonial con-

struction of MENA heritage was not a single uniform apparatus but a set of

differentiated regimes—French, British, Ottoman, and internal nationalist—

with distinct legal architectures, institutional cultures, disciplinary prefer-

ences (archaeology in some settings, architectural conservation in others,

and ethnography in still others), and relationships to local populations. Any

post-conflict heritage framework that treats the region as if it were a sin-

gle inheritance will misread the specificities that actually matter. Second, the

post-independence heritage institutions did not simply replicate the colonial

frameworks they inherited. Curators, archaeologists, architects, and heritage

managers across the region have been engaged, for decades, in a sustained

effort to rework those frameworks, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly,

often without recognition from Anglophone scholarship, and sometimes in

forms that do not map onto the ‘community participation’ vocabulary now

dominating international heritage discourse. The work has been plural rather

than programmatic, and it is from this plurality that a more adequate deco-

lonial practice can be built.

The decolonising move the volume proposes is therefore not a complete

rupture. It is a recognition that the scholarly and practical work of criti-

cally reworking MENA’s heritage regimes has been ongoing, that it has taken

many forms, and that the international heritage sector’s relatively recent dis-

covery of ‘decolonisation’ has often overlooked, rather than engaged, this

longer genealogy.

Terminology and the Politics of Naming

The question of what to call the region is not a preamble to the argument; it is

part of it. Names carry histories, and the histories carried by the names available

to us are precisely those the volume is attempting to read critically.

The term ‘Middle East’ (AR: al-Sharq al-Awsat, الشرق الأوسط) exempli-

fies a Eurocentric view of the world, positioning continental Europe as the

world’s centre. Consequently, regions adjacent to this centre were desig-

nated by their proximity to Europe: ‘Near East’ (closer to Europe), ‘Middle

East’ (moderate distance), and ‘Far East’ (furthest away from Europe). The

‘Middle East’ term is undeniably entrenched in nineteenth-century West-

ern colonialism. It is geographically ambiguous and fails to recognise the

contemporary borders and the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of

the region. From a colonial lens, the use of ‘Middle East’ in literature and

daily news echoes the same colonial oversimplification that sought to con-

trol, govern, and extract resources. Adopted by the European Union, the

British Foreign Office, and the US State Department, by the mid-twentieth

century, it had become the default in diplomatic, military, and scholarly us-

age. Its defaultness is the problem. The term variably includes or excludes

Türkiye, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the Maghreb, and it continues to

structure the field of ‘Middle East studies’ around an external vantage point12 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

(Hannoum 2021; Lockman 2004). Critics have argued for decades that the

term should be replaced or at least denaturalised, and the argument is not

academic fastidiousness: the geographic imagination encoded in the name

shapes funding priorities, the organisation of university departments and

curricula, the design of museum collections, and the terms in which herit-

age destruction becomes intelligible to international publics.

Alternative terms like ‘Arab world’ (AR: al-ʿalam al-ʿarabi, العالم العربي) and

‘Arab Homeland’ (AR: al-watan al-ʿarabi, الوطن العربي), used extensively and

exclusively by major institutions and researchers in Arab countries, present

different challenges: while evidently reflecting pan-Arab emphasis on the

common cultural, religious, linguistic, and historical connections among the

22 Arab League states, they inadvertently marginalise the many non-Arab

indigenous communities whose heritage is integral to the region: Amazigh

(Berber), Armenian, Assyrian, Baloch, Circassian, Kurdish, Syriac, Turk-

men, and Yazidi communities. Those minorities have their own languages,

ritual practices, and material pasts that predate or sit alongside Arab cultural

formations.

Recognising these limitations, scholars increasingly advocate terms that

are geographically accurate, thereby respecting the cultural diversity of this

region. ‘MENA’ (Middle East and North Africa) is the current default in in-

ternational heritage policy and remains the most widely recognised framing,

but it inherits the Eurocentrism of ‘Middle East’ without resolving it. Terms

like ‘West Asia and North Africa (WANA)’ and ‘Southwest Asia and North

Africa (SWANA)’ have emerged to de-centre Europe and Western perspec-

tives while emphasising geographical accuracy and inclusivity. Terminology

employed in heritage scholarship influences research priorities, funding deci-

sions, policy frameworks, and ultimately whose voices are centred. Colonial-

era labelling has historically justified appropriating antiquities as ‘universal’

assets governed by Western institutions rather than local communities.

Throughout this volume, we primarily employ ‘MENA’ as the work-

ing term (Chapters 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13), since it remains the

most widely recognised term in international heritage policy and scholar-

ship, while acknowledging its limitations and supporting ongoing efforts to

develop more inclusive terminology. Individual contributors use terms like

‘WANA’ (Chapters 1 and 2), ‘Arab region’ (Chapters 1 and 9) and ‘Middle

East’ (Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 9), reflecting their specific contexts and ana-

lytical emphases. We make no attempt to standardise usage across the vol-

ume, because the terminological plurality is itself part of what the volume

documents.

Heritage Destruction and Intersecting Crises in Post-Conflict MENA

The destruction of heritage during conflict is not unique to MENA. It has

been studied in the former Yugoslavia (Bevan 2006), Cambodia (Winter

2007), Mali (Joy 2012), Afghanistan (Flood 2002), Ukraine (Dawson 2024;When the Dust Settles 13

Munawar and Symonds 2023), and across the broader literature on ‘negative

heritage’ (Meskell 2002) and cultural violence. What is distinctive about the

MENA case(s), and what justifies the focus of this volume, is the combina-

tion and compounding of several factors that elsewhere appear separately.

We may begin with the sheer density of conflict. The region has expe-

rienced a series of political upheavals and devastating armed conflicts: the

Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the Gulf

War (1990–1991), the US–UK–led invasion of Iraq (2003) and its aftermath,

the Syrian Revolution and subsequent war (2011–2024) and armed conflict

in Libya (2011–present, with renewed violence in 2024–2025), the war in

Yemen (2015–present), the Sudanese civil war (2023–present), the ongo-

ing genocidal war on Gaza and the wider Occupied Palestinian Territories

(October 2023–present), and most recently the ongoing US–Israeli war on

Iran (February 2026–present) and the Israeli assault on Lebanon (March

2026–present). These conflicts have systematically targeted cultural heritage:

archaeological sites, monuments, and museums have faced weaponisation,

looting, and deliberate destruction. The consequences extend far beyond

physical damage: thousands of lives lost, millions displaced, social cohesion

shattered, and decades of developmental progress reversed (Azzouz 2023;

Rabbat 2016; Rouhani et al. 2025; Zarandona et al. 2023). The density of

conflict is itself a feature of the analytic terrain.

Next, there comes the entanglement of heritage destruction with the un-

precedented scale of population displacement. The region currently hosts

and produces some of the largest refugee populations in the world (Syrian,

Palestinian, Sudanese, Libyan, Iraqi, Yemeni, Somali, and others), and dis-

placement is not only a humanitarian condition but a heritage one. Intan-

gible heritage practices (e.g., foodways, ritual calendars, craft knowledge,

musical traditions, and oral histories) travel with displaced people into new

contexts where they may be reconfigured, professionalised, commodified,

or lost (see Chapters 3, 6, and 9). When heritage scholarship focuses on

sites, monuments, and objects without attending to the displacement of

the communities whose practices animated them, it misses most of what is

happening.

In the case of Palestine, heritage destruction is structurally bound up with

the continuing absence of a recognised Palestinian state and with Israeli

settler-colonial practices that extend to the appropriation and reassignment

of Palestinian cultural sites (Taha 2024; UN Human Rights Council 2025). In

Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Yemen, the question of who the legitimate state au-

thority is has been unsettled for substantial periods, and heritage institutions

have had to operate in the shadow of that unsettlement. In north-eastern

Syria and parts of Libya, non-state actors have asserted heritage claims that

central governments have resisted. The generic literature on heritage and

conflict tends to assume a settled sovereign frame against which heritage

destruction can be measured and heritage recovery can be planned. In much

of MENA, no such frame is available.14 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

This makes for sober reading, for example, the UN Independent Interna-

tional Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2025)

documented that since October 2023, Israeli security forces have caused

damage to more than half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip,

including the fourteenth-century Hammam al-Sammara, the Great Omari

Mosque, and the fifth-century Church of Saint Porphyrius, one of the old-

est Orthodox churches in the world (Isakhan and Childs 2026; Taha 2024;

Usher 2025). As of March 2026, UNESCO documented damage to at least

164 cultural sites in the Gaza Strip, while many archaeological tells, muse-

ums, and archives also faced systematic destruction since 7 October 2023

(UNESCO 2026c). The UN Commission characterised these attacks as part

of a widespread and systematic campaign against the civilian population and

found that they violated both the 1954 Hague Convention on cultural prop-

erty in armed conflict and broader human rights instruments concerning self-

determination. Commissioner Chris Sidoti has consistently emphasised that

the scale and systematicity of this heritage destruction have no recent parallel.

The international response, however, has been disproportionate when com-

pared with the mobilisation around heritage in Ukraine, where UNESCO

and an array of regional and national heritage bodies moved rapidly to docu-

ment, protect, and fundraise from the first weeks of the Ukraine–Russia war.

Sudan has attracted even less response, despite a heritage crisis UNESCO

itself has called severe (UNESCO 2024, 2025a; see also Maamoun Abdulka-

rim, Chapter 15). The pattern is a feature of an international heritage system

whose attention is structured by geopolitical alignments and media visibility

rather than by the scale of cultural loss.

On a wider global scale, the convergence of recent conflict-driven destruc-

tion has also coincided with climate-driven deterioration. The 2024–2025

summer produced record temperatures across the region, with intensifying

patterns of drought, flooding, wildfire, and coastal erosion. Heritage sites

from Morocco’s Ksar Ait Ben Haddou to Iraq’s southern marshes face de-

terioration that is not captured by conflict-focused frameworks (UNESCO

2023). Water scarcity and agricultural stress are themselves drivers of con-

flict, and the affected communities whose intangible heritage practices de-

pend on specific environmental conditions (Bedouin pastoralists, Marsh

Arabs, oasis cultivators) face the prospect of losing practices whose material

substrate is itself eroding. Climate and conflict are not parallel threats; they

are mutually reinforcing.

Finally, it needs to be recognised that heritage destruction in MENA is

rarely collateral. It is targeted and intentional. Al-Nouri Mosque (Iraq) was

targeted. Palmyra (Syria) was targeted. The Great Omari Mosque (Pales-

tine) was targeted. The Mosul Museum (Iraq) was targeted. The Old City

of Jerusalem (Palestine) is endangered. The Historic Town of Zabid (Yemen)

is endangered. The Archaeological Site of Sabratha (Libya) is endangered.

The National Museum of Damascus (Syria) was threatened, and the Na-

tional Museum in Khartoum (Sudan) has been fought over. The targeting isWhen the Dust Settles 15

ideological—by non-state radical groups, by state militaries, and by settler

movements—and pedagogical: it is designed to teach populations a lesson

about the precarity of their claim to continuity. This is what heritage destruc-

tion in the region shares with heritage destruction elsewhere, but the density,

duration, and ideological clarity of the targeting in MENA are distinctive.

The features outlined above, in combination, are what make the MENA

case(s) analytically specific. They also set the terms for what adequate post-

conflict heritage work has to grapple with: not simply the rebuilding of dam-

aged structures, but the reconstitution of communities, the management of

displacement, the navigation of unsettled sovereignty, the work of attracting

attention that geopolitics withholds, the adaptation to environmental change,

and the long, unglamorous work of rebuilding without re-traumatising.

International Heritage Interventions in Post-Conflict MENA

Since the early 2010s, the international heritage response to heritage destruc-

tion in MENA has been organised around a small number of institutional ac-

tors: UNESCO (with its ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ initiative as the flagship

case), the ALIPH Foundation, the EU’s cultural programmes, the Smithso-

nian’s Cultural Rescue Initiative, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the Islamic

World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO), and a

rotating set of bilateral donors (Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Japan, UAE,

and others). The sector has generated its own vocabulary (‘cultural first aid’,

‘heritage resilience’, ‘cultural emergency’, ‘heritage in the crosshairs’) and

its own preferred visual economy, in which monumental restorations are

photographed against recently violent backdrops. Drawing on regional case

studies, this section explores the international community’s involvement in

fundraising, advocacy, and community engagement, contending that these

initiatives are anything but impartial. They are inherently political actions

that favour certain narratives of loss and prospects of recovery above others.

The three cases examined below are not a comprehensive inventory of inter-

national intervention but three lenses through which the governance ques-

tions raised earlier come into focus.

The Mosul Model

UNESCO’s ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ project, launched after Daesh’s 2017

defeat, is the most studied example of international post-conflict heritage

intervention in the region. With $115 million in mobilised funds drawn from

15 partners—most notably the UAE ($50.4 million), the EU ($48.2 mil-

lion), and contributions from Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, and Germany

($16.4 million combined)—the project rebuilt the al-Nouri Mosque complex,

the al-Saa’a Convent, and the al-Tahera Church. Former UNESCO Director-

General Audrey Azoulay (2017–2025) framed this as ‘a historic partnership’

to foster ‘hope and social cohesion’ and to provide ‘a springboard for skills16 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

and jobs for young people’ (UNESCO 2018a). This direct intervention aligns

with UNESCO’s ‘people-centred’ policy, designed to engage local communi-

ties in reconstruction to ensure projects meet their needs, provide livelihoods,

and help heal societal trauma (UNESCO 2018b). The September 2025 reo-

pening generated global press coverage and was presented, in UNESCO’s

language, as ‘a collective triumph of resilience, coexistence, and global soli-

darity’ (UNESCO 2025b).

The programme’s documented outputs are substantial. More than 7,700

local jobs were created over seven years, and more than 2,800 young Iraqis

received training in traditional construction and restoration skills. The mina-

ret itself was rebuilt with community consultation over its leaning angle—

a detail Mosulawis had been emphatic about preserving. A programme of

school rehabilitation and cultural centre support extended the intervention

beyond the headline monuments. By its own institutional standards, the pro-

gramme is a success.

Yet questions persist. Critical literature on the project requires engagement

rather than dismissal. Isakhan and Meskell (2019, 2024), working with Aus-

tralian Research Council funding,1 surveyed over a thousand Iraqi and Syrian

respondents on the reconstruction effort and found that local attitudes were

more ambivalent than the institutional narrative acknowledges. Consultation

was real but limited. They claim that if heritage reconstruction initiatives are

genuinely intended to foster community engagement, they should enable lo-

cal people to directly oversee and lead the rebuilding of their heritage. Key

decisions (about scope, timeline, and the balance between international and

local contractors) were largely made before meaningful local input could be

incorporated. The framing of Mosul’s reconstruction as an exemplary case

of ‘people-centred’ heritage practice was already in international circulation

before the people of Mosul had the chance to weigh in substantively.

Larkin and Rudolf (2024a, 2024b) extend this analysis. Their ethno-

graphic work with grassroots heritage initiatives in Mosul shows a parallel

and unrecognised sector: Mosulawi architects, conservators, community his-

torians, and diaspora members who were doing reconstruction work before

UNESCO arrived and who have continued doing it alongside, around, and

sometimes in explicit tension with the international programme. This parallel

sector has developed forms of heritage practice that the international sector

has had difficulty recognising as heritage practice at all, because the practice

is diffuse, unmonumentalised, unphotographed, and not readily convertible

into donor deliverables.

When read through the four governance themes, the Mosul case makes a

pattern visible. Programmes that attract major international funding tend to

privilege iconic, monumental sites whose restoration can be photographed,

inaugurated, and counted. The work that most directly reconstitutes commu-

nity life (rebuilding neighbourhoods, recovering intangible heritage, and rein-

tegrating displaced people into heritage landscapes) is harder to fund, harder

to photograph, and accordingly under-resourced. This is not a criticism ofWhen the Dust Settles 17

individual practitioners working within the international sector, many of

whom are acutely aware of the problem. It is a structural observation about

what the sector’s incentive architecture produces, and the same architecture

recurs, as the next two cases show, in very different institutional and political

settings.

The Securitisation Turn

The second significant feature of international heritage response to MENA

conflicts since 2011 has been the framing of heritage protection as a security

and counter-terrorism imperative. The ‘securitisation’ of cultural heritage be-

came a defining theme in international policy during the 2010s, advanced

notably by former UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova (2009–2017),

who has consistently issued statements, speeches, and declarations urging

fighting parties to protect and neutralise cultural heritage in Syria, Iraq, and

elsewhere. In 2015, Bokova stated:

The destruction of heritage is inseparable from the persecution of peo-

ple. This is why we consider the protection of cultural heritage today as

far more than a cultural issue. This has become a humanitarian impera-

tive, and a security issue. . . . Violent extremists target culture because

they know it weakens the social fabric and damages the capacity for

resistance.

(UNESCO 2015)

The framing was influential. While scholars suggest this was partly driven

by Bokova’s political ambitions ‘to be elected as UN Security-General’, she

managed to establish a logical nexus between cultural property, securitisa-

tion, and peacebuilding on the international stage and throughout her tenure

(Meskell and Isakhan 2024).

Acts of terrorism and its financing, as well as the securitisation and pro-

tection of cultural property in Syria and beyond, have become a discourse

adopted in UN agency meetings. Over the past decade, the UNSC has passed a

significantly higher number of resolutions on protecting cultural heritage than

in any previous decade. This responds to widespread destruction, looting, and

trafficking of cultural goods during the armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq. Be-

tween 2015 and 2017, the UNSC passed six resolutions identifying risks and

threats to cultural property (Resolutions 2199,2 2249,3 2253,4 2322,5 2347,6

and 23797), linking heritage protection to the counter-financing of terrorism

and to the prevention of violent extremism and responding to Daesh’s occupa-

tion of, and heritage destruction in, parts of Syria and Iraq. In November 2015,

the UNSC adopted the 2249 Resolution, which condemned Daesh’s ‘barbaric

acts of destruction and looting of cultural heritage’.8 Scholars argue that the

UNSC 2249 Resolution exemplifies how the international community inter-

vened in the heritage sector to address and fight ‘violent extremist ideology’,18 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

particularly when the attacks on cultural property are used as a tool of ‘eradi-

cation of cultural heritage and trafficking of cultural property’ by non-state

radical groups (UNSC 2015; Meskell and Isakhan 2024).

While the securitisation turn brought unprecedented international atten-

tion and resources, it also embedded heritage work within broader geopoliti-

cal agendas and security discourses (Rosen 2022). International interventions,

however well-intentioned, become politicised instruments mirroring global

power dynamics, shaping historical narratives, and determining whose griev-

ances merit redress. The fact that six UNSC resolutions addressed heritage

destruction by non-state actors while ongoing state-sponsored destruction

(such as in Palestine, particularly in Gaza, and in Iran and Lebanon) receives

comparatively less institutional response reveals how heritage protection

remains selective and politically contingent. As a paradigm, securitisation

values heritage instrumentally: it matters because destroying it matters for

security, for peace, and for stabilisation rather than for its intrinsic cultural,

social, and spiritual significance to communities. This functional approach

can marginalise local meanings and priorities, subjecting heritage to external

security logics rather than community-defined values.

Geopolitics and Post-Conflict Reconstruction

The third significant feature, newly visible since December 2024, is the re-

configuration of the Syrian heritage sector after the collapse of the Assad re-

gime. Syria’s Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) has

renewed engagement with international partners and secured approximately

$12 million in initial funding to safeguard cultural heritage across the Syrian

territories ($5 million comes from a project funded by ALIPH; the remainder

from a range of bilateral donors and international organisations) for projects

in Palmyra, Aleppo, and Damascus. These funds will support the livelihood

of youth, restoration works of Palmyra Museum and the gate of Bel temple,

the walls of the ancient city of Aleppo, and the emergency support of the

National Museum of Damascus. In the first nine months of 2025, the DGAM

and Ministry of Culture (MoC) of Syria’s interim government launched 23

restoration projects, recovery plans for the UNESCO World Heritage sites

of Aleppo and Palmyra, and organised or participated in 25 cultural pro-

grammes, activities, trainings, and workshops. Cultural diplomacy in post-

Assad Syria has produced 47 experts’ meetings with international partners

and renewed MoUs with 26 archaeological missions to resume archaeologi-

cal activities across Syrian sites.9

Despite the worldwide attention drawn to heritage destruction during Syr-

ia’s conflict and the momentum of research on the topic, no conclusive assess-

ment exists of all heritage monuments or sites damaged or destroyed in Syria.

This point was made clear by Anas Zaidan, former Interim Director-General

of Syria’s DGAM appointed after the regime’s fall, who stated: ‘We will sur-

vey all the damage in different archaeological areas; we have a three-yearWhen the Dust Settles 19

plan for this’ (Geranpayeh 2025). The collapse of the Assad regime marked

a watershed moment for Syria’s heritage landscape, opening both opportu-

nities and uncertainties. While potentially enabling more inclusive heritage

governance, freed from the authoritarian control that had instrumentalised

heritage for political legitimacy, it also raises urgent questions about insti-

tutional continuity, protection mechanisms, and competing visions for re-

construction. Early 2025 witnessed both hopeful signs of community-led

heritage initiatives emerging across Syria and concerning reports of looting

at vulnerable sites amid institutional transitions. International actors, includ-

ing some who maintained ties with the Assad regime until its collapse, moved

quickly to re-engage with Syrian heritage authorities (UNESCO 2025c). Yet

this rapid resumption raises critical questions about accountability for past

marginalisations and whether new frameworks will genuinely centre Syrian

communities or reproduce earlier patterns of external control. These dynam-

ics are not unique to Syria or Iraq. Across MENA, post-conflict heritage

work operates within complex political economies involving international

organisations, national governments, civil society actors, foreign donors, and

affected communities, each with distinct interests, priorities, and power. Her-

itage becomes a site where these interests converge, clash, and are negotiated,

with outcomes often reflecting existing power hierarchies rather than chal-

lenging them.

Both destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage are political acts,

or, as Munawar (2017) put it, ‘two sides of the same coin’. Intentional herit-

age destruction during conflict is undoubtedly a tragic assault that transcends

physical obliteration of past remains: it undermines a community’s identity and

cultural memory and social cohesion (Bevan 2006). Reconstruction, though a

crucial process for healing and recovery, is intricately entangled with politics,

power dynamics, and competing visions of the past and future (Munawar and

Plets 2025; Munawar and Symonds 2022; Rabbat and Sharp 2025). Recognising

this political dimension is not a matter of cynicism but essential for developing

more equitable, community-centred approaches to post-conflict heritage work.

Heritage Governance in Post-Conflict MENA: Consolidating

the Four Themes

The four themes introduced earlier can now be stated with the empirical ma-

terial of the preceding sections in view. They are not four discrete domains

but four angles on a single object: the governance of heritage decisions in

post-conflict MENA settings where the sovereign frame is often unsettled,

the professional field is internally stratified, and the international sector’s in-

centive architecture systematically privileges certain kinds of outcomes over

others.

The first, the multi-actor field, names the crowded institutional landscape

in which any post-conflict heritage decision is made. State antiquities20 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

directorates and ministries of culture retain formal sovereignty but of-

ten lack the resources to exercise it; international organisations bring re-

sources but also conditionalities and reporting demands that shape what

can be done; regional donors such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran,

and Türkiye act as strategic funders whose contributions carry political

valence; diaspora networks, private foundations, NGOs, religious trusts

(waqf), municipal authorities, and informal community networks all oc-

cupy positions in the same field. The structural question is not whether

external actors should be involved (they already are) but how the terms of

their involvement are negotiated.

The second, professional labour and epistemic authority, tracks the uneven

distribution of the right to speak about and act on heritage. International

programmes regularly privilege external ‘experts’ whose relationship to

the sites and communities in question is thin; local practitioners are posi-

tioned as informants, facilitators, or assistants (Abu-Khafajah and Badran

2015; Badran et al. 2022; Munawar 2024). Shifting the authority is not

a matter of adding names to project reports. It requires changes in who

sets research questions, who controls budgets, who signs memoranda of

understanding, and who is named as a co-investigator. As the earlier dis-

cussion of regional elite formation makes clear, this shift cannot stop at the

international–regional divide: the most senior MENA heritage practition-

ers are often themselves products of Anglophone or Francophone training,

and the epistemic hierarchies operate inside the region as much as across

its borders.

The third, time and the rhythm of recovery, registers the systematic mismatch

between donor project cycles and the timescales at which communities

actually reconstitute themselves. Recovery may take a generation; urgent

priorities (housing, livelihoods, mental health, missing persons) precede

heritage; and the readiness to rebuild a particular site depends on condi-

tions (the return of displaced people, the settlement of property disputes,

the end of ongoing hostilities) that donor calendars cannot accommodate.

Plets and Munawar (2025) have theorised the temporalities at stake; sev-

eral contributions in this volume (Paul Newson and Ruth Young, Chap-

ter 4; Christine Kousa, Chapter 12; Nur Alah Abdelzayed Valdeolmillos

and Djamel Boussaa, Chapter 13) speak directly to how donor and com-

munity rhythms can be, or fail to be, coordinated.

The fourth, recognition and the politics of visibility, is the one that the contem-

porary conjuncture has made starkest. Whose heritage destruction becomes

internationally visible, which communities are recognised as having heritage

to defend, and how those recognitions are produced are not secondary ques-

tions. The asymmetry between international mobilisation around Ukraine

and the much more constrained response to Gaza, Sudan, Iran, and parts

of Libya and Lebanon is the current example; the pattern is older. Recog-

nition produces resources, and the absence of recognition produces invis-

ibility. Several contributions (Aurora Hamm, Chapter 7; Ghattas J. Sayej,When the Dust Settles 21

Chapter 8; Thomas Richard, Chapter 10; and Maamoun Abdulkarim, Post-

script) address recognition politics directly.

Together, these four themes organise much of what follows: not as a closed

analytic grid, but as the set of questions the volume holds open across its

chapters.

Decolonising Heritage: Promise, Paradox, and Plural Practice

Calls to decolonise heritage have become ubiquitous in the sector over the past

decade. They have been generative, shifting attention to issues of restitution,

representation, and epistemic diversity that the field had long neglected (Ata-

lay 2006, 2012; Bolin and Nkusi 2022; Colwell 2016; Giblin 2012; Greenberg

and Hamilakis 2022; Harrison 2013; Munawar 2024, 2026; Reddy and Rus-

sell 2024; Shepherd 2020; Smith 1999, Smith 2006). They have also produced

a literature whose key terms (‘community’, ‘participation’, ‘co-production’,

‘indigenous’, ‘local’) circulate across very different contexts without always

being examined for the specific assumptions they carry.

The genealogy runs through several related traditions. From museum an-

thropology, Kreps (2003) argued that ‘museological behaviours’ (the selec-

tion, preservation, display, and transmission of culturally significant objects)

are universal rather than uniquely Western, and that Western museology is

one mode among many whose global exportation has obscured indigenous

curatorial practices that long preceded it. From indigenous studies, Smith

(1999) argued that methodologies themselves carry colonial assumptions

and require decolonising. From Latin American decolonial theory, Mignolo

(2011) insisted that colonialism is constituted epistemologically as well as

politically and economically, through the suppression of other ways of know-

ing. Within heritage studies specifically, Smith’s (2006) ‘Authorised Heritage

Discourse’ crystallised a critique of expert-driven heritage practice; Water-

ton and Smith (2010) extended it to the politics of ‘community’ recognition;

Harrison (2013) offered a synthetic framework; and Shepherd (2020), Bolin

and Nkusi (2022), Giblin (2012), and Reddy and Russell (2024) contributed

regional and case-based elaborations, particularly from African contexts.

De Jong’s (2022) study of decolonising heritage in Senegal offers an instruc-

tive comparator for MENA: working in another formerly French colonial

space, he shows how decolonial heritage work cannot be sequenced as a

clean break with the colonial past but unfolds through multiple, overlapping

temporalities of repair, refusal, and recomposition. The point matters for the

MENA cases gathered here, where the rhythms of recovery likewise resist lin-

ear decolonial narratives. Munawar (2024, 2026) and Munawar and Nassar

(2025) have argued for the application of these frameworks and practices in

MENA settings, with a particular focus on Palestine and Syria.

The productive work of this literature has also generated internal critiques

that are essential to engage with. Brulon Soares (2021, 2023, 2024), writing22 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

from Latin American museological traditions, has argued that the decolonial

discourse in mainstream international heritage practice has taken over the

language of participation and community without doing the deeper work of

questioning the institutional form of the museum itself. The result, he argues,

is ‘decolonisation’ as rhetorical capture: the absorption of decolonial vo-

cabulary into institutional practices that remain structurally colonial. Bhatti

(2012), through a sustained ethnography of the Lahore Museum, developed a

related argument from a South Asian vantage point: Western ‘best practice’ in

museology consistently misrecognises how museums in non-Western settings

actually work, how visitors use them, how staff understand their role, how the

museum sits in public life, and how relationships between objects, visitors, and

interpretations are configured. Yet, ‘community participation’ as packaged in

international heritage practice is a specific political form, one that emerged

from the history of liberal-democratic governance in the global North and

assumes particular configurations of civil society, public sphere, individual

rights, and state–citizen relations. In contexts where those configurations are

not given—where tribal affiliations, religious authorities, kinship networks,

or authoritarian states occupy positions that the North’s civil society occupies

in its own institutional imagination—the ‘community participation’ template

may not fit, and may indeed generate categories of participation that com-

munities do not recognise as capturing how they actually work, and missing

forms of collective agency that the template cannot see.

The critique applies with particular force in MENA, and this is where

the regional scholarship cited earlier rejoins the argument. Pieprzak (2010),

Boum (2013), Mejcher-Atassi and Schwartz (2012), De Cesari (2019), Abu-

Khafajah and Badran (2015), Rey (2015, 2019, 2020), Zobler (2011), and

Badran et al. (2022) have collectively been making versions of the point

for more than a decade, though their work has not always been absorbed

into the broader heritage-in-conflict literature. Taken together, this scholar-

ship shows two things that matter for the volume. First, communities in the

region have long been engaged in forms of heritage practice that the ‘com-

munity participation’ template does not capture: Palestinian heritage or-

ganisations like Riwaq operate as civil society institutions performing state

functions the Palestinian Authority cannot (De Cesari 2019); Moroccan

‘countermuseums’ have developed art and memory practices in the absence

of a major national modern art museum (Pieprzak 2010); Tunisian curators

have, in specific historical moments, enacted forms of resistance to authori-

tarian heritage narratives that the literature on the ‘authorised heritage dis-

course’ has difficulty recognising as resistance because they do not take the

forms resistance takes in liberal-democratic contexts (Rey 2015, 2019); and

Syrian regional museum curation reflected plural approaches to the past that

were never fully harmonised by central state authority (Zobler 2011). These

are not failures to catch up with the North. They are alternative practices

whose existence the decolonial literature, at its best, is trying to surface.

Second, the assumption that heritage practitioners from the region are inWhen the Dust Settles 23

a privileged position relative to colonial logics needs complicating. Being

from the region is not a cure for the reproduction of colonial frameworks.

Many of the region’s most senior heritage practitioners have been educated

in European and North American institutions, have built careers around

international collaborations, and have internalised categories (of ‘heritage’,

of ‘community’, of ‘participation’, and of ‘authenticity’) whose history is

inseparable from the colonial heritage regime.

A concrete illustration helps. When international donors and MENA-

based heritage authorities converge on a reconstruction project, the working

language is typically English or French, the reporting architecture is donor-

defined, the senior consultants are drawn from a small pool of regionally

born but Anglophone- or Francophone-trained professionals, and the ‘com-

munity consultation’ is structured around the timelines and deliverables of

the donor cycle. The Mosulawi conservator who trained in Baghdad, Beirut,

or Aleppo, works in Arabic, and has been rebuilding her or his neighbour-

hood for eight years without external funding may appear in such processes

only as a local contact, if at all. This is not a matter of bad faith on anyone’s

part. It is a matter of how ‘MENA-led’ heritage practice has been institution-

ally configured by the same histories this volume seeks to denaturalise. Sev-

eral chapters document this dynamic in different national contexts (Ammar

Azzouz, Chapter 3; Paul Newson and Ruth Young, Chapter 4; Sarah Barker,

Chapter 9; Christine Kousa, Chapter 12); Chapter 8 (Ghattas J. Sayej) shows

what heritage practice looks like when the regional professional hierarchy is

not reproduced.

A further complication is that the authoritarian structures within which much

MENA heritage work has historically taken place, and within which it continues

to take place in many countries, complicate the ‘community-led’ framing in ways

that cannot be resolved by methodological adjustment alone. Where civil society

is surveilled or suppressed, where state institutions have been instrumentalised

by authoritarian regimes, and where ‘the community’ is itself fragmented by

displacement, communal violence, or political reconfiguration, the question of

who speaks for the community is acute. Macdonald’s (2009) work on ‘difficult

heritage’ in Nuremberg offers tools that are relevant here, but the authoritarian-

to-post-authoritarian transitions under way in parts of MENA require their own

analytic vocabulary. The post-Assad moment in Syria is making this urgent: the

question of whose voice constitutes ‘community’ input into the reconstruction of

Aleppo, Palmyra, or Damascus is not reducible to a methodology of stakeholder

consultation.

Taking all this into account, the volume’s position on decolonising herit-

age practice in MENA can be stated compactly. It is a necessary and ongoing

project that cannot be abandoned because its international circulation has

sometimes been superficial, but it must be pursued with commitments the

subsequent chapters enact in different ways: centring scholarship produced

in and about the region, including in Arabic, French, and other regional lan-

guages; attending to long genealogies of local practice rather than positioning24 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

‘decolonisation’ as a recent arrival from outside; being honest about the in-

ternal stratifications of regional professional elites; holding the ‘community

participation’ template open to forms of collective practice that do not fit

liberal-democratic configurations; acknowledging that authoritarian and

post-authoritarian governance complicate the ‘community-led’ framing ir-

reducibly; and remaining plural, not proposing a single MENA model for de-

colonial heritage practice, but building an account of how multiple practices,

in different national and sub-national contexts, are developing in ways that

deserve sustained attention.

Community Agency and Local Knowledge

Cultural heritage understood as a means of empowerment rather than as an

object of preservation, as Atalay (2012), Colwell (2016), and Badran et al.

(2022) have argued, enables local and indigenous people to participate in

knowledge production about the presentation, interpretation, protection,

and reconstruction of their tangible and intangible heritage. This is the ho-

rizon towards which the volume orients itself. At the same time, and as the

previous section argued, the ‘community agency’ framing needs to be held

with critical awareness of its limits. This shift has the potential to transform

heritage practice from a top-down, expert-driven enterprise into a collabora-

tive, mutually inclusive process fostering equality and building just societies.

Across the region, local heritage professionals have maintained work un-

der extraordinarily difficult conditions. In Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Leba-

non, Sudan, and in Palestine under occupation, archaeologists, architects,

conservators, and heritage managers have documented destruction, pro-

tected threatened sites, and continued conservation work, often at great per-

sonal risk, often without adequate resources or international recognition.

Their work is the empirical substance that international heritage interven-

tions depend on but seldom centre. The 2020s have seen growing advocacy

by MENA heritage professionals for more equitable partnerships: fair com-

pensation, co-authorship, inclusion as co-investigators, and capacity building

that responds to locally identified needs. This advocacy challenges persistent

colonial patterns whereby knowledge about the region is produced primarily

by and for external audiences.

Several chapters in this volume document community-led heritage initia-

tives in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Syrian diaspora communities have

created cultural archives and artistic productions in exile (Ammar Azzouz,

Chapter 3; Emanuela Sebastiani and Patrick M. Michel, Chapter 6). Civil

society organisations in northern Syria have preserved intangible heritage

through participatory storytelling (Sarah Barker, Chapter 9). Palestinian her-

itage practitioners have treated heritage work as a mode of political presence

(Ghattas J. Sayej, Chapter 8). Such initiatives demonstrate that affected com-

munities are not passive recipients of external salvation but active agents who

have developed creative responses to heritage destruction and displacement.When the Dust Settles 25

What does successful decolonial heritage practice look like in concrete terms?

The scholarship and the volume’s contributions suggest several elements: in-

ternational organisations providing resources while following community-

determined priorities, rather than the reverse; heritage professionals from the

region leading projects, with international collaborators as genuine partners;

reconstruction timelines and approaches determined by affected communities,

even when these diverge from donor guidelines; recognition that those who

have lived through violence possess knowledge about recovery that cannot be

replicated by external expertise; research funding architectures that do not re-

quire regional scholars to structure their work around the epistemological pref-

erences of Northern funding bodies; and publication and citation practices that

foreground regional scholarship in regional languages.

Supporting community agency requires international organisations and

external actors to adopt fundamentally different postures: listening before

prescribing, following priorities rather than imposing agendas, providing

resources without controlling outcomes, and accepting that recovery may

take forms that diverge from conventional heritage frameworks. It requires

humility about the limits of external expertise and recognition that effective

support sometimes means stepping back rather than stepping in.

Challenges and Contradictions

Advocating for community-centred, decolonial approaches does not mean

romanticising local communities or ignoring the challenges. Communities

are not monolithic; they contain diverse and sometimes conflicting perspec-

tives on heritage (Waterton and Smith 2010). Questions of representation

(who speaks for ‘the community’?) are particularly acute in post-conflict con-

texts where violence may have displaced populations, disrupted social struc-

tures, and empowered certain actors while marginalising others (Macdonald

2009). The unevenness of regional professional elites, discussed earlier, com-

pounds the problem: ‘community-led’ can mean many things depending on

which communities and which leaders are centred.

Moreover, completely rejecting international involvement risks aban-

doning communities that may lack resources, technical expertise, or polit-

ical power to protect and rebuild heritage independently. The question is

not whether external actors should be involved but how they can support

community-led recovery without imposing external agendas or perpetuating

colonial patterns.

Several chapters grapple with these tensions, exploring the challenges of en-

suring genuinely inclusive participation beyond gatekeepers (Paul Newson and

Ruth Young, Chapter 4), the risks that memorial initiatives may perpetuate divi-

sions rather than fostering healing (Mounir Sabeh Affaki, Chapter 5), and the

ways that digital heritage technologies can both empower and further marginal-

ise communities (Emanuela Sebastian and Patrick M. Michel, Chapter 6). Rather

than offering simple prescriptions, the volume embraces complexity, presenting26 Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

multiple viewpoints and demonstrating that effective heritage recovery must be

context-specific, adaptive, and responsive to community needs and priorities.

Structure of the Volume

This volume comprises 14 chapters organised into three thematic parts, to-

gether with a postscript, each addressing distinct but interconnected dimen-

sions of heritage in conflict and post-conflict recovery contexts. The book’s

introduction (this chapter) offers a theoretical framework for heritage prac-

tices in conflict and post-conflict contexts. The subsequent contributions de-

velop the framework through specific empirical and analytical case studies,

envisaging sustainable pathways for heritage recovery that empower affected

communities and promote peacebuilding and social justice.

Part I: Heritage as Therapy: Memory, Communities, and Responses explores

therapeutic dimensions of heritage in conflict and displacement. Chapters

address ‘catharsis heritage’ and the role of emotions and affective ethnog-

raphy in post-conflict heritage work (Sarina Wakefield and Annette Lo-

eseke, Chapter 2); community-driven heritage practices among displaced

Syrian communities (Ammar Azzouz, Chapter 3); the challenges of inclu-

sive participation in post-conflict heritage work (Paul Newson and Ruth

Young, Chapter 4); and contested memorialisation in post-war Aleppo

(Mounir Sabeh Affaki, Chapter 5).

Part II: Ours and Theirs: Heritage Responses and the International Commu-

nity critically examines international heritage interventions, analysing power

dynamics, funding politics, and relationships between global organisations

and local actors. Chapters investigate digital preservation and reconstruction

of Palmyra’s monuments and the engagement with refugee communities in

heritage practices (Emanuela Sebastiani and Patrick M. Michel, Chapter 6);

EU cultural heritage diplomacy in Libya (Aurora Hamm, Chapter 7); the

threats to Palestinian heritage under the Israeli settler-colonial regime (Ghat-

tas J. Sayej, Chapter 8); grassroots efforts to preserve intangible heritage in

al-Raqqa (Sarah Barker, Chapter 9); and Russian media narratives about the

protection of Syrian heritage (Thomas Richard, Chapter 10).

Part III: Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict MENA: Comparative Ap-

proaches develops comparative perspectives across different conflict con-

texts, examining varied reconstruction approaches, methodologies, and

challenges. Chapters analyse Iranian-funded reconstruction of Shiite reli-

gious heritage sites in Iraq (Bijan Rouhani and Bill Finlayson, Chapter 11);

approaches and frameworks to post-conflict reconstruction of Aleppo’s

historic buildings (Christine Kousa, Chapter 12); critical reflections on

heritage reconstruction works in post-conflict Benghazi (Nur Alah Ab-

delzayed Valdeolmillos and Djamel Boussaa, Chapter 13); the impact of

Syria’s armed conflict on UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Ancient

Villages of Northern Syria and its utilisation as refuge sites (Maamoun

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