Royal Irish Academy Discourse Lecture with cultural heritage expert, Dr Mounir Bouchenaki
‘Cultural heritage and recent armed conflicts’
Online event on Thursday, 29 October 2020 at 19:00 GMT
Complimentary booking via: https://www.ria.ie/cultural-heritage-and-recent-armed-conflicts
With a response from Grainne Shaffrey, President, ICOMOS Ireland
Dr Mounir Bouchenaki has had a 25-year career in UNESCO as Assistant Director-General for Culture; Director of the Division of Cultural Heritage; and Director of the World Heritage Centre.
He was Director-General of ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) from 2005 until 2011. He is also a past-Director of the Arab Regional Centre for World Heritage.
Currently, Mounir Bouchenaki is acting as Special Advisor to the Director-General of ICCROM and Special Advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO. He contributed between 2013 and 2017 to the launching of a UNESCO category II Centre, ‘The Arab Regional Centre for World Heritage based in Bahrain’.
Conflicts can have profound impacts on human values, cultures and religions. Increasingly, conflicts target symbols of culture to destroy identities and lead to the destruction of cultural heritage. This Academy Discourse affords a new perspective on the social, historical, political, economic, cultural and religious contexts in which the ongoing human suffering is taking place in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Iraq but also in North Africa and parts of Asia. Dr Bouchenaki will also address how the international community ought to continue to find mechanisms to improve responses to these emergencies.