Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: Paul Lott Lecture
RUIN WARFARE: How and Why We Weaponize the Past
Speaker: Lynn Meskell, Dept of Historic Preservation and Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
Monday, October 5, 2026, 6:00pm
In-person only
How did global heritage become the new battlespace for 21st-century warfare? Nations and non-state actors alike increasingly use the ruins of the past to leverage legal, political and territorial ambitions. This talk examines the roles of two intersecting international organizations that seek to combat the fallout from ruin warfare and their respective aspirations for mission success. The first, UNESCO, established after the Second World War and dedicated to world peace through culture and co-operation, has inherited a ruinous legacy of war and destruction. The other is NATO, a Cold War military alliance that must now confront cultural heritage in both its protective and punitive missions. Within the international order, along a spectrum of peace and war, both are struggling to contain the conflictual status of cultural heritage. This talk reveals how the past is progressively militarized, securitized, and legalized across an array of formal settings from UNESCO to NATO. Charting these developments, Meskell asks how the celebrated sites of humanity’s collective past have been instrumentalized into a new future of risk and ruin.
Lynn Meskell is Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Richard D. Green Professor in Anthropology, Professor in Historic Preservation at the Weitzman School of Design, and curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at Penn Museum. Meskell has received honorary doctorates from Rome and Bergen and holds Honorary Professorships at Oxford University, Liverpool University, Shiv Nadar in India, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Previously, she was the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. An authority on UNESCO World Heritage, her award-winning book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (OUP, 2018) reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. Her forthcoming book with OUP, RUINED: The Heritage of War from UNESCO to NATO, explores the escalation of ruin warfare worldwide.
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