The Conflict Culture Research Network had three primary goals:
To study cultural destruction as a form of civilian targeting during conflict.
Cultural destruction can be understood through explanatory frameworks developed in the field of peace and conflict studies. Current research about actions directed toward non-combatants and the role of territorial control and security presence framed the CCRN’s discussions about damage from neglect, fighting, looting, and intentional destruction. The literature on civilian targeting can help explain when and why actors expend limited resources to cause damage to a heritage site — or to protect it.
To investigate the material remains of cultural destruction in order to understand everyday violence and survival.
Studies of material culture in conflict settings provide a greater understanding about human resilience through adversity, the material consequences of cultural erasure, and deliberate representations of cultural identity in contested landscapes. Such an examination is within the domain of archaeology, which makes an important contribution to research about cultural destruction. Much of the field’s subject matter has been destroyed by human actors, disasters, or the slow actions of post-depositional processes in which human and non-human agency are combined. Moreover, attention to material shifts can identify other destructive processes, such as climate change and forced resettlement.
To undertake the systematic collection and analysis of data about cultural destruction, cultural protection, and post-conflict cultural interventions.
Unlike other instances of conflict studied by political scientists, there had not been a systematic effort to aggregate basic information about cultural destruction over any time-period. A priority during the NSF-BCC grant was therefore to develop standards for the systematic collection of cultural site damage that could be employed in future data development projects. Based upon feedback from consultations and workshops, a beta version of standards for coding cultural destruction events was prepared and tested. Its structure tracked recent theoretical developments, which have called for micro-level, georeferenced, event-level datasets and followed the data fields developed for the Uppsala Conflict Data Project’s (UCDP) Georeferenced Event Dataset with additional information relevant to cultural heritage sites.