Photograph of project researcher Suad Ismaeel capturing the sensorial dimensions of the Rabban Hormizd Monastery through arts practice

Sofya Shahab, University of Stirling

Pacific Heritage: embodied modalities of peacebuilding with the past

There are some moments that become etched in memory. Similar to 9/11 and the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, I feel as if I can exactly recall how and where I first learnt that Daesh had damaged the ancient Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra in 2015. As I sat at my desk in Kabul, I was confronted by the images released by media outlets around the world. These photographs evoked a sense of foreboding that arose from a deadening sensation within my gut, rising through my chest to a furious pounding in my skull. I had never been to Palmyra, nor did I have any direct connection to it, but I felt the loss personally and viscerally, as a physical act of violence that reverberated through my bodymind.

In response to such incidents of heritage violence and to mitigate against the loss of heritage under threat, there has been an increased focus on the protection and preservation of heritage during conflicts (see Isakhan & Meskell 2019; Isakhan & Meskell, 2023; Shahab 2024). However, through a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Reconfiguring Heritage that works with a team of 13 peer-researchers across Iraq, Syria and Jordan, I have been exploring the role of heritage in cultivating an everyday embodied sense of peace for young people living in the midst of violence. Drawing on the notion of ‘pacific heritage’ (Hammami et al. 2022; Harvey, 2024), we recognise and respond to the affective dimensions of heritage to understand what peace and peacebuilding might look like if it were taken to be a process that begins and ends in the bodies that feel it. This is essential in going beyond notions of heritage as merely a means of promoting understanding and shared identities, as this runs the risk of perpetuating injustices by flattening difference and re-entrenching power hierarchies. That is, understanding may not be enough to lead to real change.

Photograph of project researcher Rama Omar capturing the sensorial dimensions of the Rabban Hormizd Monastery through arts practice

Rather, in advocating for a ‘pacific’ heritage, Hammami et al. note that ‘Heritage is always about the future – and it can ‘do stuff’’, and therefore it can ‘do stuff’ in relation to peace (2022: 244). The affective nature of heritage especially through its coalescing of values, narratives and histories as well as its sensorial qualities, is used to help situate and orientate bodyminds in processes of becoming through practices of belonging and identity. This can and has been used to mobilise people during conflicts (Shahab 2023), but that does not preclude the potentialities of pacific heritage, whereby research and projects relating to heritage are developed with the aim of advancing peace through social justice.

Similar to a processual approach to heritage, whereby heritage is formed in the present by how and what peoples choose to value and preserve, and the meanings they give to this (Harvey, 2001), peace is produced through practices, manifesting differently across times, spaces and cultures (Courtheyn 2018). Consequently, just as heritage is made rather than given, peace may be viewed as continuously emergent through practices which arise in the doing or making of it and consequently also within fights or struggles for justice. Both of these approaches to heritage and peace directly connect to the ‘local-turn’ (also encompassed within ‘everyday’ and ‘bottom-up’) that moves away from liberal mechanisms and institutions or ‘authorised heritage discourses’ to recognise the agencies of individuals and collectives as they engage with one another – and their environments – to produce and reproduce heritage(s) and peace(s) through their daily actions and encounters.

Bringing this together, the call to pacific heritage asks us to reorientate from observation and documentation to knowing by being (Ingold, 2013) and becoming. It is a call to action with regards to how we produce, encounter and engage heritages. For example, in the revival of tattooing among Yezidi youth there is a direct refusal to be silenced or eradicated through a permanent and visual marker of identity, and by so doing, work towards building a society where this identity is accepted.

Watercolour by Ruby Al Sayed of the Rabban Hormizd Monastery

Within the Reconfiguring Heritage project and team, we have approached learning through a decolonial feminist praxis that centres care. This has enabled us to think through methodologically how research attending to heritage and peace might advance social justice by working to dismantle hierarchies of knowledge of power by employing participatory models that are driven by peer-researchers, as well as autoethnography and embodied methods. The agency and creativity promoted within the project, as well as paid spaces of care and attention, have contributed to an embodied sense of peace for those living in the midst of conflict and precarity. Furthermore, as one of the peer-researchers, Sozdar Abdo, described ‘we became more convinced that friendship could fill many gaps within ourselves’, speaking to the place of friendship as method and the relational dimensions of research for peace in building solidarities.

Along with the methodological elements, focussing on heritage(s) as spaces of enquiry highlights the possibilities of future visioning in transformation and practices of peace. In entering into a symbiotic relationship with heritage that shapes us as we in turn shape it, we are reconfiguring the societies in which we wish to live. This is particularly pertinent during conflict as engaging with heritage can be a form of peace practice, including when it is a mode of resistance or protest in response to oppression. The core question therefore becomes how these multiplicities of heritage(s) may sit alongside, rather than compete, with one another.

Bibliography

Courtheyn. C. (2018). Peace geographies: Expanding from modern-liberal peace to radical transrelational peace. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), pp. 741-758.

Hammami, F., Harvey, D,. Laven, D. & Walters, D. (2022). Heritage and peace-building: challenges, possibilities and sustainable practices. in K Fouseki, M Cassar, G Dreyfuss & KAK Eng (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Heritage. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 241-260.

Harvey, D. (2024). Heritage in conflict: still searching for pacific practices. in L Lixinski & Y Zhu (eds), Heritage, Conflict and Peace-Building. Routledge, London, Key Issues in Cultural Heritage, vol. 23, pp. 224-239.

Harvey, D. (2001). Heritage pasts and heritage presents: Temporality, meaning and the scope of heritage studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7(4), pp. 319-338.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, Abingdon.

Isakhan, B. & Meskell, L. (2019). UNESCO’s project to ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’: Iraqi and Syrian opinion on heritage reconstruction after the Islamic State. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(11), pp. 1189–1204.

Isakhan, B., & Meskell, L. (2024). Local perspectives on heritage reconstruction after conflict: a public opinion survey of Aleppo. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 30(7), pp. 821–839.

Shahab, S. (2021). Affective terrains of Assyrian heritage under Daesh. Territory, Politics, Governance, 11(8), pp. 1576–1594.

Shahab, S. (2024). Recognising Heritage for Human Rights and Development. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2024.023

Sofya Shahab is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Heritage at University of Stirling and currently holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF). Sofya employs anti-colonial, feminist approaches and specialises in participatory and creative methods in order to explore how heritage is conceived, experienced and utilised by communities in the midst of violence. As part of the FLF, she is working alongside a team of 13 youth researchers in Iraq/KRI, Syria and Jordan to further conceptualisations of everyday embodied peace and the role of heritage in promoting social justice, agency and dignity.