Five years ago, AUR began a collaboration with UNICRI (the UN agency for combatting organized crime) to run a professional development course on Cultural Heritage: Crime and Security. The aim is to offer professionals in the field (and aspiring professionals) an opportunity to learn the latest intelligence on how to protect heritage sites from all kinds of threats. As we embark on our 5th edition of this joint venture, it is salutary to look back on how the course has developed, and how it reflects the increasingly threatening world in which we find ourselves.
The 5th edition of Aur and UNICRI's 'Specialized Course on Cultural Heritage, Crime and Security: Protecting our Past to Invest in our Future' will run online from 9 June 2025 to 13 June 2025.
Deadline for application: 26 May 2025.
More information and registration at: https://unicri.org/advanced-education-cultural-heritage-crime-security-2025
When we began five years ago, the impetus for the course was the disturbing levels of looting of cultural objects, especially from war zones, and the way these were used to fund terrorism and organized crime. UNICRI, as an agency focused on transnational crime, is well placed to bring together the various cultural and law enforcement agencies that work to intercept the convoluted supply chains of looted art and antiquities stretching across continents. As the problem became more and more exposed in the media, the complicity of museums and auction houses in trafficking was uncovered, generating public outrage, not to mention red faces in the hierarchies of the affected institutions. For an unlucky few, dawn raids, arrest warrants and court appearances became a regular feature of their hitherto rarefied social diary.
Fast forward five years and, regretfully, we cannot say that the situation with art and antiquities trafficking has much improved. There has been notable progress in resolving some of the more egregious examples, but, like a game of whack-a-mole, as soon as one case is resolved two or three new ones spring up, demonstrating that some museums and auction houses - including the more famous ones - still have not completely internalised the concept of due diligence in their provenance research. A cynical person might say that, for some, provenance research has resembled more of a public relations exercise than a dedicated attempt to clean up their house.
Even in our first course we tackled the weaponisation of cultural heritage and, at this time, our vision was inevitably dominated by ISIS and the destruction carried out in Mosul, Palmyra and other sites across Iraq and Syria. Fortunately, this kind of theatrical performance of destruction is less in evidence today, but this does not mean that cultural heritage is safe from this type of threat. Indeed, in many ways, the problem is even more difficult to tackle today because it is so insidious. Cultural heritage has become a key component of hybrid warfare. It is used to create narratives that justify military actions. The clearest example of this is in Ukraine, when Russia declared that Ukraine did not exist as a separate state because it did not have a culture distinct from Russian culture. The ensuing military campaign aimed in part to make this assertion a reality by targeting Ukrainian heritage sites with missiles.
Yet even this is not the most testing aspect of the weaponisation of cultural heritage. The surreptitious reconfiguration of a heritage landscape presents dangers that might be even harder to counter than an outright attack on Ukrainian sites. In an excellent article in The New Yorker (Russia's Espionage War in the Arctic Sept 9 2024) Ben Taub explains how stealthily destroying heritage sites and replacing them with the heritage of another culture can be a prelude to a territorial claim based on a false historical narrative.
In any era this idea would be disturbing, but when combined with the power of AI, it creates an unparalleled opportunity to propagate false historical narratives, which can be disseminated across platforms like TikTok to a vast audience. It has the ability to fundamentally change people's perception of history and of other cultures.
Whilst I love teaching on this course, I can still feel that it is a shame that it is needed. It would have been hugely satisfying to say that, after five years, we have solved the problems or, at least made significant progress. The unfortunate reality is, that courses like this are needed more than ever.
Valerie Higgins, February 2025.