Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The desire to assert power and control territory during conflict has seen the destruction of cultural heritage become an increasingly common technique in warfare. This paper undertakes to document and understand the spatial and social legacy of the multiple layers of disruption and displacement that have occurred as a result of the targeting of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria by Daesh. Through an anthropological approach and ethnographic research, I explore the impacts and affects of heritage destruction on minority communities and identities to argue that the temporalities embodied in the materiality of heritage and the memories and emotion contained in these landscapes have the power to shape human action. I therefore seek to further understandings of how space and place are constituted and utilised by terrorist organisations, modes of place-based relationships, and how the affects of place are intentionally reorganised when distributed across space. This is significant because it establishes how reconfigurations of space through place-based violence can generate embodied affect; adding a new dimension to current understandings of how spatial and ideological wars are waged and how violence is experienced in an increasingly connected world.