A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace

From May 2015 to March 2017, the Islamic State intermittently occupied the ancient Roman ruins of Palmyra, subjecting the site to destruction and defacement. Palmyra became a figurehead for cultural heritage in danger and an archaeological martyr to ISIS’s vandalous war crimes. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) vowed to correct the senseless destruction of this World Heritage Site. But was the destruction truly senseless? A Future in Ruins posits that it was not and that until UNESCO is willing to truly engage with fraught issues of conservation, the organization is powerless to fulfill its mission “to build peace through international cooperation in Education, the Sciences and Culture.”1 Author Lynn Meskell is an archaeologist and anthropologist, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, professor at large at Cornell University, and honorary professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). She also has personal experience with UNESCO’s impact on heritage sites as an archaeologist and consultant, which she draws on for the book. Meskell’s other significant primary sources are the United Nations (UN) archives, personal papers of British academics and diplomats involved in the early years of UNESCO, and individual conversations with contemporary diplomats and UN staff. A Future in Ruins is an examination of how political realities hobble UNESCO, and its stable of World Heritage Sites, from fully living up to its utopian mission (p. xvii). The World Heritage designation, created to preserve and conserve locations of “outstanding universal value,”2 can inversely be the catalyst of danger and destruction to listed sites. Meskell criticizes UNESCO for focusing on “technical” aspects of physical preservation instead of tackling more challenging holistic issues about the social, political, and economic impacts of an internationalist approach to cultural conservation. A Future in Ruins is divided into two parts delineated by the introduction of the World Heritage List, which came into effect in 1972. The first two chapters examine UNESCO’s founding in the aftermath of the destruction of World War II and UNESCO’s great success salvaging the ancient Egyptian sites of Abu Simbel. Meskell simultaneously explores the lack of international consensus about archaeological standards and the exclusion of research from UNESCO’s mission priorities. The rest of the book is organized by broad themes, jumping Reviews