Syria: Cultural Property Protection Policy Failure?

Summary

International ‘cultural property protection’ policy is structured around two UNESCO Conventions: the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Together, these conventions encourage a policy which aims at cultural site protection at source and the recovery and restitution of stolen or otherwise illicitly-traded cultural objects. The widespread looting of archaeological sites that broke out in Syria in 2011, nearly thirty years into this UNESCO-inspired policy regime, suggests that as regards looting and trafficking of cultural objects, the policy is not working. It has failed. In this paper, I discuss possible reasons for this failure.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Investigating the trafficking of cultural objects: novel and interdisciplinary approaches   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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