Part III Important Themes in Armed Conflicts in 2013, 6 The protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict

Because culture is representative of a people’s core identity, cultural heritage has long been targeted during armed conflict, both directly and indirectly. Deliberate attacks on cultural heritage may be part of a planned campaign to damage an opponent’s resilience and morale.1 The domination of an adversary’s cultural expressions has been used to crush the opponent’s sense of identity, thus hastening the assimilation of a newly vanquished population into the conquered’s own. Too often, cultural heritage has also been destroyed as a result of the collateral...