Challenges, opportunities, and future directions

Abstract

This chapter discusses a typology at the landscape level of conflict-related destruction, the international legal protections that exist for cultural landscapes in conflict, stabilisation and stabilisation measures that can be taken to damaged cultural landscapes, and post-conflict trajectories for newly created and damaged cultural landscapes. Looting damage to cultural landscapes occurs in conflict situations where artefacts found within that landscape are valued as a commodity. Collateral damage refers to the destruction sustained as an indirect effect of conflict. Deliberate damage to a cultural landscape occurs when the landscape itself is the target. Cultural erasure is a specific kind of deliberate damage. It occurs in conflict situations when an armed actor damages a site intentionally and curates it in such a way as to remove any evidence that the site once existed. International law protecting cultural landscapes during periods of armed conflict and violence is less developed than other areas of cultural heritage law.