Donna Yates Appointed UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging Crime

Yates is very happy with this appointment. “Being awarded a UNESCO Chair is an honour, but even more it is an opportunity to do something meaningful together,” she explains. “UNESCO has strong ideas and goals and I share many of them. I’m excited that I can work close with UNESCO in a variety of ways to deal with the cultural heritage problems that are present in the future.”

Jan Smits, Rector and former Dean of the Faculty of Law is delighted that UNESCO was willing to create this new chair at Maastricht University: “Its emphasis on how to connect foundational thinking on heritage crime to practical insights greatly fits our profile as a university. There is no better person than Donna to be appointed to this exciting new professorial chair.”
 

Future-oriented research

The Chair fills an important gap in research. While institutions have developed systems to combat heritage crime as it existed in the past, far less attention has been paid to how such crimes may evolve. That’s why Yates focuses specifically on future-oriented research, identifying risks before they become widespread problems. “We live in a situation where technology is changing drastically around us and we just continue to protect the cultural heritage from crimes of the past. We are not actually dealing with reality. The goal of this Chair is not to immediately protect cultural heritage from the future. We need to do some foundational thinking about what heritage crime is and where it is going before we can even start protecting.”
 

Climate change and AI

One of the topics Yates wants to investigate is climate change and (unexpected) forms of heritage crime that are linked to social pressure. She shares some examples: “The past few years people suddenly started throwing soup at paintings, gluing themselves to paintings, spraying red chalk on Stonehenge as part of climate protests. I don’t think anyone predicted it would happen because the connection seems complicated.”

Another scenario is the loss of once-fertile agricultural land to changing weather patterns or rising sea levels. This could force communities to leave areas surrounding archaeological sites. Without local populations present to monitor and protect them, those sites may become more vulnerable to looting.

But it’s not only climate change that can lead to new forms of heritage crime. Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM’s) will also affect this. New technologies could transform art forgery, for example. AI systems trained on the complete works of an artist might one day generate highly convincing new pieces in that artists’ style, complete with plausible documentation and provenance.
 

New framework

A central aim of the UNESCO Chair is to translate academic research into practical insights for policymakers, law enforcement agencies and cultural institutions. A first step will be to document current forms of heritage crime and identify possible future scenarios. From there, the research will be developed into risk and threat frameworks that help decision-makers prepare for emerging challenges.

Ultimately, Yates hopes the Chair will contribute to a broader understanding of why cultural heritage matters in the first place. “Cultural heritage is deeply connected to identity. Personal identity, national identity and the identity of communities,” she explains. “Loss of cultural heritage is very easily acquainted and felt as identity loss and cultural loss. Destruction, theft of cultural heritage and so on can be used as a form of cultural erasure. Crimes against heritage objects and heritage places is a crime against us.”

Photo: Antonia Waltermann