Virtues Impracticable and Extremely Difficult: The Human Rights of Subsistence Diggers

Hardy, Samuel Andrew

doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-1643-6_14

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…This practice, too, emerged in the devastation of the invasion, which destroyed businesses and fertile farmland. Compounded by the lack of economic rebuilding by coalition forces, this resulted in extremely high rates of unemployment, driving many to sell their own culture to survive (Hardy, 2014; Marrone, 2017). Because organized crime and subsistence looting are the direct consequence of the instability caused by US and Coalition military and government action, they constitute a form of active destruction.…”

Section: ‘The Crime Of the Century’: The Plunder Of Mesopotamiamentioning

confidence: 99%

The oilfields of Mesopotamia: Resource conflict, oil extraction and heritage destruction in Iraq

Saymour

2022

Human Geography

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The 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the US Coalition forces, is amongst the most politically and culturally significant events of the twenty-first century. Much research across disciplines has been dedicated to explaining the War, with a significant body of work in the social sciences illuminating the role of oil in fuelling war and ongoing instabilities in the region. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways that resource conflicts in Iraq expand beyond physical militarized clashes, bleeding into social and cultural realms that are purportedly unconnected to oil. This paper attends to a particularly significant one of these realms: the passive and active destruction of the material cultural heritage of Iraq and the immaterial social, cultural, and political consequences of this on the Iraqi people, including the violent colonial ecologies of plunder-based conflict curation. Using a critical, multidisciplinary array of secondary sources, this paper links oil, conflict, and culture against a (neo)colonial backdrop to illustrate that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a resource war that targeted not only natural but also cultural resources, leading to the parallel extraction and displacement of oil and heritage. Reframing the Iraq War through the lens of culture reveals how the conflict and following instability dispossessed the Iraqi people of their autonomy and capacity for political mobilization, with the broader purpose of establishing a stable regime of extraction to mitigate the demands of resource dependency. This analysis presents a new reading and conceptualization of oil, and a broader understanding of how resource dependency creates holistic spheres of violence and dispossession that work to reproduce and reinforce colonial and imperial power relations.

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Section: ‘The Crime Of the Century’: The Plunder Of Mesopotamiamentioning

confidence: 99%

The oilfields of Mesopotamia: Resource conflict, oil extraction and heritage destruction in Iraq

Saymour

2022

Human Geography

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“…On the reasons for targeting cultural property during conflict, see e.g. Brosché et al 2017; on the complications and potential need for looting by some, (Hardy 2015b). Videos likely to have been taken at Dura also appeared in 2015 Buzzfeed reports on antiquities looting (Giglio and al-Awad 2015).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ruination of Dura-Europos

Baird

2020

Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal

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has asked what happens when we shift our scrutiny from the picturesque ruins of empire to the ongoing process of ruination. Examining some of the many and continuing ruinations of the site Dura-Europos on the Syrian Euphrates, this paper compares ancient and modern destructions by the Roman army, Sasanian forces, Yale archaeologists and 'Islamic State', and questions the different way these are understood. Through these stories of ruination I interrogate the relationship between archaeologists and processes of site destruction, examining archaeologists not only as those who evaluate loss but as agents of destruction themselves.

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“…At least some illicit digging around the world is reportedly done as a "way of surviving poverty" (Yahya 2010, pp. 97-98), a "desperate effort to feed families" (Politis 1994, p. 15), and as Hardy (2015) observes, "sometimes 'looting' is the only thing that does feed the 'looters'" (p. 235, emphasis in original). For these archaeologists, diggers are "victims" who are "poor, malnourished farmers without money for seed, and without sufficient land to practice subsistence agriculture" (Matsuda 1998, p. 88).…”

Section: Indigencementioning

confidence: 99%

Field Archaeologists as Eyewitnesses to Site Looting

Balestrieri

2018

Arts

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In a recent worldwide study on the nature, scope, and frequency of archaeological site looting, the vast majority of field archaeologists reported having had multiple encounters with archaeological site looters both on- and off-site. Despite the criminalization of looting in most countries’ domestic statutory schemes, nearly half of surveyed field archaeologists do not report looting activity to external law enforcement or archaeological authorities when they encounter it. The rationales for their actions—or inactions—are examined within a criminological framework, and field archaeologists’ perspectives on looters as “criminals” and “victims” are explored. The paper concludes with a consideration that the criminalization of looting creates an emergent duty to report among archaeologists, and how they choose to address site looting changes their role in and relationship to the trade in illicitly obtained antiquities.

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Virtues Impracticable and Extremely Difficult: The Human Rights of Subsistence Diggers

Cited by 9 publications

References 5 publications

The oilfields of Mesopotamia: Resource conflict, oil extraction and heritage destruction in Iraq

The oilfields of Mesopotamia: Resource conflict, oil extraction and heritage destruction in Iraq

The Ruination of Dura-Europos

Field Archaeologists as Eyewitnesses to Site Looting

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