Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict Zones addresses the connection between cultural heritage and cultural cleansing, mass atrocities, and the destruction of cultural heritage. Pulling together various threads of discourse and research, Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities outlines the issues, challenges, and options effecting change.

A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize international efforts to protect people and cultures.
 
Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify.
 
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and—as this book argues—must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action.
 
The free online edition of this publication is available at getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.

Since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, genocide, crimes against humanity, and other mass atrocities have been explicitly illegal. When such crimes are committed, the international community has an obligation to respond, which has come to be known as “the responsibility to protect.”

Parallel to this responsibility, two related responsibilities have developed: to prosecute those responsible for the crimes, and to provide humanitarian relief to the victims—what Kurt Mills in this book calls the “responsibility to palliate.” While this rhetoric of protection is well used by the international community, its application in practice has been erratic at best. In International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa, Mills develops a typology of responses to mass atrocities, considering four cases in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Darfur. Putting the cases into historical context and analyzing them according to this typology, Mills investigates the limitations of these responses and calls for such responses to be implemented in a more timely and thoughtful manner. Mills provides critical analysis of the possibilities for the international community to respond to humanitarian crises in the future.