Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts

Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts confronts the politics and dynamics of cultural heritage in the aftermath of conflict across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, demonstrating that reconstruction is never neutral, recovery is rarely complete, and the past is contested terrain.

Drawing on case studies from Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Sudan, contributors interrogate the assumptions that shape post-conflict heritage practice: whose past gets preserved, whose memory is memorialised, and whose communities are consulted — or sidelined — in the process. Chapters examine the affective and therapeutic dimensions of heritage in exile and return; the ethics of reconstruction and digital rebuilding, from Palmyra to al-Raqqa; the role of international actors, from EU policy in Libya to Russian media framing of Syria; and the political weaponisation of heritage evidence itself, including the widespread falsification and erasure of heritage in Palestine. Cultural Heritage in Post□Conflict Contexts challenges the hierarchies inherited from colonial-era heritage frameworks and asks what a decolonial, community-centred practice might look like on the ground.

Combining a diverse range of theoretical and empirical perspectives on post-conflict heritage interventions, Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Contexts is a critical reckoning with the question that lingers when the dust settles: heritage for whom, and at what cost? The volume appeals for researchers and students in heritage studies, memory studies, museum studies, archaeology, architecture, history, peace and conflict studies, and anthropology.