Terrorism and cultural heritage: an unconventional threat assessment

Abstract

Multiple terrorist attacks on cultural heritage since 2001 have drawn heritage into international security politics, reframing it from a Law of Armed Conflict issue to one of hybrid warfare. This exploratory study uses semi-structured interviews with 51 practitioners from two community groups to examine perspectives on terrorism and heritage, testing assumptions in the literature against protection practices. Findings reveal that credible, dynamic threat data is scarce, leading to reliance on historic event data to extrapolate future risks. The article proposes a new multi-layered cultural intelligence framework for more critical threat assessments and argues that concerns over religiously motivated terrorist attacks may be overstated, suggesting a shift toward considering political and ideological drivers within unconventional warfare.