The National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. The Dalada Maligawa Temple in 1998. The Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. The Al-Askari Shrine in 2006. The libraries of Timbuktu in 2012. The Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo in 2013. The ruins of Nimrud in 2014. The ancient city of Palmyra in 2015.
Despite the significant scholarship about the nature of violence, the causes of war, and violations of civil and political rights, very little consideration has been given to cultural loss during periods of conflict. This absence of scholarly attention has impoverished out theories about conflict, our ability to explain why culture is targeted by armed actors, and our understanding of how people live through periods of war.
To answer these questions, the Penn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and American Association for the Advancement of Science received a collaborative National Science Foundation grant in 2014 to establish the Conflict Culture Research Network (Award #1439474). Consisting of researchers from over 17 international organizations and coordinated by the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, the Conflict Culture Research Network developed a research community and capacity for the study of cultural heritage in conflict. This grant supported focus group discussions with different academic communities about potential research areas, the development of standards for collecting data, and the production of a sample dataset using the current Syrian civil war as a case study. In 2015, additional seed funding from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Maryland supported proof of concept analysis.
Building from this proof of concept analysis, the CCRN developed Conflict Culture Research Data (CCRD), consisting of two interoperable datasets to examine why we are now seeing an upsurge in the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage in contemporary conflicts: the Cultural Heritage Event Dataset and the Cultural Heritage Site List. In 2021, CCRD released case-study visualizations of cultural heritage destruction in three countries: Syria, Bosnia, and Mali.