Reconfiguring Heritage: Present Engagements with Communities' Pasts for Resilient Futures

Increased incidents of internal conflict, along with the desire to assert power and control territory, has seen cultural heritage become a key target in warfare, positioning heritage as a source of tension and violence. In response to this and to mitigate against the loss of heritage under threat, there has been an increased focus on the protection and preservation of heritage in fragile and conflict affected contexts (FCACs). However, the last two decades alone have seen unprecedented levels of heritage violence across the Middle East and North Africa, including the destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyan, wide-scale damage to the ancient city of Babylon by US forces in Iraq, the desecration of sacred tombs in Mali, the looting and burning of Coptic Churches in Egypt, and the vast devastation wrought by Daesh to the rich and diverse heritage of Iraq and Syria. Such incidents illustrate the failure of current international mechanisms to ensure recognition and respect for cultural heritage in all its dynamic forms, with the limitations of current frameworks widely recognised. This project will redress these gaps through a novel and interdisciplinary approach that draws together studies in the fields of heritage, geography, international relations, and law to develop innovative solutions and new protocols and toolkits for understanding, engaging and preserving heritage under threat. Advancing the notion of 'pacific heritage' which attends to the potential of heritage to advocate peace, and peace as a means of protecting heritage in all its myriad and changing forms, this project investigates how affective encounters and engagements with community heritage are conceived and employed in embodied acts of everyday peace and resistance in FCACs in response to persecution, displacement and oppression, and as a form of remaking and resilience. Working alongside peer-researchers in in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan this project explores the diversity, contestations and nuances contingent in heritage and the ways in which practices of belonging can also be practices of exclusion. As such, it unravels the ways in which heritage is being reconfigured by young people in the Middle East and the impacts and affects this has in reconfiguring their communities. It also explores opportunities for sharing and learning about heritage as a means of facilitating peaceful encounters across difference. Through creative methodologies that weave together ethnographic and participatory methods with host community and displaced youth - with the methods themselves used as a means of exploring how peace, trust and agency can be enhanced within the research process - this project asks: 1) What role can heritage play in cultivating peace in the aftermath of violence and displacement? a. How is heritage encountered, engaged with, and produced by young people living amidst fear, dispossession, and insecurity? b. In what ways is heritage employed by young people in everyday acts of peace, resistance, and/or exclusion? How does this relate to human rights, security, and wellbeing? c. What are the implications of this knowledge for international, national, and community-based projects and frameworks related to heritage and/or peace? Working with peer-researchers across three countries and key stakeholders at the local, national, and international levels, this study will generate longitudinal and contextually informed research - across geographic boundaries and time - that is rooted in local cultures, histories, identities and knowledges. Moreover, through an approach that foregrounds collaboration, in the design, methods, analysis and outputs, this project paves the way for decolonising research and peacebuilding initiatives to evidence how cultural rights can be used in the realisation of justice, equity, wellbeing, and security.