UNESCO, world heritage and the gridlock over Yemen

Abstract

Since March 2015, the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen has had devastating consequences for the country, its people and its rich cultural heritage. This article traces the responses of the world’s foremost multilateral body concerned with heritage promotion and protection, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research and long-term ethnographic research on UNESCO itself and, more specifically, its responses to the war in Yemen, it documents UNESCO’s profound failures in protecting Yemen’s heritage and in confronting the Saudi-led coalition. To do so, the article utilises the framework of ‘gridlock’ to analyse how and why multilateral bodies such as UNESCO become hamstrung in confronting powerful member states in conflict. The article concludes by arguing that UNESCO’s failures in Yemen hold powerful lessons about the role of multilateral institutions in addressing conflict.

Keywords:

• UNESCO
• heritage
• gridlock
• conflict
• Yemen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The concept of gridlock as applied to the World Heritage arena has previously been developed in Meskell (2015).

2 The current war in Yemen has its roots in earlier political divisions and armed conflicts that ravaged the country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Day 2012; Dresch 2000; Orkaby 2017).

3 The Shia of Yemen, most of whom belong to the Zaidi sect, make up approximately 35% of the population and dominate the north and northwest of the country, while the Sunni make up about 65% of the population and are more prominent across the south and southeast.

4 See https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/yemen-2019-humanitarian-needs-overview-enar, accessed November 8, 2019.

5 See https://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/ye, accessed November 8, 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynn Meskell

Lynn Meskell is Shirley R. and Leonard W. Ely, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Founding Editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Her new book, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (Oxford University Press New York, 2018), reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage.

Benjamin Isakhan

Benjamin Isakhan is an Associate Professor of Politics and Policy Studies and Founding Director of Polis, a research network for politics and international relations in the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia. He is also an Adjunct Senior Research Associate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.