Ruins of Power: Lynn Meskell on the Weaponization of the Past
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- May 8
- 2 min read
RUINED: Weaponizing the Past in the Age of Heritage Warfare
Reflecting on Lynn Meskell’s lecture at the CBRL Amman Institute, May 7th, 2025
On May 7th, at the CBRL Amman Institute, Lynn Meskell delivered a searing and timely lecture titled RUINED: How and Why We Weaponize the Past. Drawing on her decades of work across global heritage governance and cultural politics, Lynn asked us to consider an unsettling proposition: that the very ruins we celebrate as testaments to humanity’s greatness have become a battleground in 21st-century geopolitics.
Whether in UNESCO’s hopeful rhetoric of peace through shared heritage or NATO’s uneasy incorporation of cultural sites into military strategy, Lynn traced the contours of a world in which the past is no longer merely remembered, but mobilized. “Whether in outsized claims for fostering world peace and resilience on one hand,” she argued, “or ensuring maximum devastation and inter-generational trauma on the other, deploying the past is decisive.”
This was no abstract warning. Through the lens of what she terms cultural heritage exploitation (CHX), she explored how heritage sites—from Palmyra to the churches of Ukraine—are increasingly entangled in the machinery of conflict. They serve as tools for terror financing, symbolic targets of cultural cleansing, and platforms for legitimizing political or territorial claims. Meanwhile, international institutions like UNESCO and NATO, originally founded for peacekeeping and collective security, now find themselves grappling with the paradox of cultural protection in an era when heritage itself has become weaponized.
At the heart of Lynn’s provocation was a question both forensic and philosophical: how have the celebrated sites of humanity’s collective past been instrumentalized into a new future of risk and ruin?
Lynn’s visit to Amman is part of a wider and ongoing regional dialogue on heritage and its global entanglements. She will join Dr. Trinidad Rico (Rutgers University, USA) on May 13th from 11:30 to 13:00 hrs for The Heritage Dialogue: Heritage Internationalism and the Arabian Peninsula, a discussion that promises to deepen the conversation on how international heritage discourses intersect with the politics and power dynamics of the Gulf and wider Middle East.
