On 22 January 2025, an international conference titled “Patrimoine en péril?” was held at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. It was organized by the UNESCO Chair in the International Law of the Protection of Cultural Heritage (University of Geneva), the Museum of Art and History (MAH), and the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (ALIPH) Foundation. This event was part of the eponymous exhibition at MAH,1 commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the entry into force of the Swiss Cultural Property Transfer Act. The conference explored these two themes, bringing together international experts from academia, law, and heritage conservation and management, reflecting a cross-disciplinary perspective on the protection of cultural property in times of crisis. In his opening remarks, Marc-Olivier Wahler (Director of the MAH) highlighted the evolving role of museums in contemporary society. The conference was split into five sessions, each addressing various critical issues related to cultural property, and were moderated by Béatrice Blandin (MAH), Antoinette Maget Dominicé (University of Geneva), and Marc-André Renold (University of Geneva).

In May 2021 a group of 96 classical antiquities was seized from Fordham University where they had formed part of their museum collection. The seizure was directly linked to the investigation by US authorities of objects that had been handled by the dealer Edoardo Almagià. The Fordham material was dominated by objects derived from Italy: Apulian, Campanian, and Paestan figure-decorated pottery; red-on-white ware associated with Crustumerium in Lazio; and Etruscan pottery, architectural terracottas, and terracotta votives. The objects were all donated to Fordham by William D. Walsh and had largely been acquired at auctions or through a narrow group of Manhattan galleries.

Even though places of worship are protected by the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, they often become targets. To safeguard the cultural property of religious communities, it is necessary to plan for wartime protection under peaceful conditions, but studies of how this planning was conducted after 1945 are largely missing. This Article compares how the cultural property of the Church of Sweden (Lutheran) has been planned for protection up until 2023. Cultural property protection was first introduced in World War II, but the Church had to plan and carry out most protective measures without state support. During the Cold War, a system for protecting movable property was developed that lasted until it was replaced in the 1980s by cultural protection plans that employed a more holistic approach to risk mitigation in peace as well as in war. Finally, the recent development and future challenges are discussed in relation to the 1954 Hague Convention and the reconstruction of a Swedish total defense due to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

This article considers the relevance of the Society for American Archaeology's 2018 “Statement on Collaboration with Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past” for imported antiquities (specifically, “classical” ones—that is, from Mediterranean regions). Various practical, legal, and ethical differences between collecting imported versus domestic objects make it difficult to identify “responsive and responsible stewards” of the former. An obstacle to responsible stewardship of privately owned classical collections—and to collaboration between classical archaeologists and collectors—is the 2008 acquisition guidelines issued by the two leading professional organizations in the museum field. I argue that the best home for unprovenienced and poorly provenienced antiquities collections is in university museums, where their complicated object biographies can be fully researched, taught, and displayed.

This article analyzes the contribution of the Guidelines for the Implementation of the 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (the Guidelines) to better protection of cultural property in peacetime and in times of armed conflict. The first part of the article introduces the Guidelines within the context of the implementation of the 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1999 Second Protocol) and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and provides examples of UNESCO's other standard-setting instruments such as the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural or Natural Heritage, the 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, as well as bodies providing for guidelines for these instruments. The second part underscores the most important advances of the Guidelines in the implementation of the 1999 Second Protocol. The third part focuses on the contribution of the Guidelines as subsequent practice in the application of the 1999 Second Protocol establishing the agreement of the parties regarding its interpretation in the framework of Article 31(3)(b) of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Finally, the fourth part concludes by highlighting the main advantages of the Guidelines in providing better protection for cultural property.

As an emerging and largely unfamiliar form of cultural heritage, digital cultural property remains something of an enigma. Under the law of armed conflict, States are bound to protect cultural property from harm, yet the rules applicable to traditional cultural property do not transfer neatly to digital works. It is unclear, for example, how the twin obligations to safeguard and respect cultural property, as outlined in the 1954 Hague Cultural Property Convention, should apply to digital creations – or even what digital material appropriately qualifies as cultural property. Can only new digital creations, otherwise known as “born-digital” material, be cultural property? What about high-quality copies of existing works, such as an extremely high-resolution image of the Mona Lisa? Does it matter whether a digital work has been reproduced in large quantities? Given the ubiquity of digital media and the growing popularity of digital art and other works, protecting digital cultural property in the event of armed conflict will require States to consider and resolve as-yet undecided questions concerning the nature of digital creations and the reasons why certain works should be preserved.

Respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) in the battlefield is contingent on the measures undertaken in peacetime. Indeed, satisfactory compliance with IHL rests in the implementation of multiple measures at the domestic level crossing different spheres, including legislative, administrative and educational. In most latitudes, governments and other stakeholders coordinate these measures in what is known as National Committees for the Implementation of International Humanitarian Law. The article addresses the practice of these bodies in Latin America and provides alternatives to enhance their work.

Complexity and uncertainty often animate the desire for regulatory approaches seeking to fix, limit and constrain. But what if, instead of doubling down on ‘solid’ regulation, we also make room for ‘liquid’ regulatory approaches? We interrogate this question through deep empirical analysis of the developing regulatory framework around a form of Melanesian cultural property known as water music. We argue that, although both solid and liquid regulatory forms exist in all normative orders, we have recently seen an increasing emphasis on solid forms of regulation (legislation, registers, etc.) with respect to cultural property. As an effort to consider alternative approaches, we identify a range of liquid regulatory strategies drawing from our case-study. We show how attention to temporality, relationality and situatedness can impact upon the degree of liquidity of individual regulatory approaches, and how they can cumulatively impact the solidity or liquidity of the overall regulatory system. Finally, we identify the different ways in which gendered power and forms of accountability emerge in contexts of solid or liquid regulatory strategies.