ABSTRACT
In the Middle East, cultural heritage destruction and rapidly evolving systems of power are altering political and social structures and in turn directly transforming tangible and intangible cultures. US-European interventions that have addressed heritage in crisis have in recent years been informed by the immediacy to respond and have largely viewed the politics of a country, the evolution of its state institutions and their impact on heritage sustainability as being of less importance. This paper calls for a research agenda that underlines the need to anchor practices of sustainability in heritage as well as heritage destruction within notions of politics as contestation. How the past is put into use for political ends, managed and concomitantly practised as well as the broader impact of political systems can also tell us much about the future of cultural heritage. An Iraq focused case study is introduced by examining key turning points and ruptures over the past century to better understand the entwined connections between heritage, politics and cultural continuity.
