The course aims to help military commanders, and those interested in working with the military, understand why cultural property is important and how it can be protected during military operations. It will explore how and why cultural property can be damaged or destroyed, as well as practical steps that can be taken to avoid such damage without compromising military effectiveness. It will also explain why Cultural Property Protection is an important military responsibility. The scripts for each section are available upon request if you would like to access the material in a different way.
In this first section, Drs Cunliffe and Sheldrick introduce themselves and explain how this module has been constructed.
In this section we will answer the questions: what is cultural property? How is it different to cultural heritage? And why are both of these concepts so important? At the end of this section you will have a deeper understanding of cultural heritage and cultural property, and will be able to recognise and describe it.
Section 3 will consider the ethical, legal, and military reasons why cultural property protection is important in military practice.
In order to protect cultural property, we need to understand how and why it is damaged during conflict.
In this section, we will explore the legal obligations of military forces to safeguard and respect cultural heritage and cultural property.
We’ve covered why cultural property protection matters, what risks it faces, and what your legal obligations are. Now we we’re going to start bringing this all together, exploring what to do about it using a framework called the 4-tier approach. This section will help you to understand the spectrum of cultural property protection activity that can take place in military practice and operations.
In this section, we will look at cultural property protection from the perspective of Operational Planning and the decision making process, with a particular focus on the targeting process.
The aim of this section is to help military commanders and other interested parties to be able to consider and respond to threats to cultural property using the four-tier approach as part of operational planning
The last major topic that we’re going to consider is looting and illicit trafficking. Because they have their own set of laws, and their own set of actions that can aid in countering them, we’re going to deal with looting and trafficking separately here. Nevertheless, bear in mind that many of the points that have been raised in the previous sections will still be equally applicable here.
A revue of the course, coordinating CPP activity and key institutions that can assist
