Massive Civilian Looting in Iraq and the Policy Structure of Third World Cultural Heritage Interventions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is part of a larger monographic project intended to advance knowledge about historical sensibilities in the discipline of international law and its engagement with war, cultural property/heritage and public/private policy structure arguments. Drawing on the recent civilian looting of Iraqi cultural and archaeological sites following the US-led coalition invasion and occupation, it proceeds around two intersecting axes. The first seeks to highlight contemporary silences and international legal pathologies on questions of protection of cultural property against the conduct of non-state entities, and see how far Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan (Theorie des Partisanen; Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (1963)) can be accommodated in the vernacular of public law internationalism. The aim here is to foreground international law’s functionality in historically consolidating and reproducing specific personal and professional projects of international lawyers in shaping belligerency and enmity, where a resolutely “partisan” denaturising of the latter constrains legal rules to construct civilians in the Third World as a dehumanized target of complete annihilation to force them within the matrix and veneer of “war”. Secondly, the article unravels the seemingly fetishist unfolding of the public/private distinction in the porous policy structure and grammar of international legal argumentation despite (or perhaps because of) recurring disciplinary strategies at transcending it. Arguments emphasizing the “private” or “public” dimensions of international law’s creeping reach on cultural property/heritage juridification exemplify various intellectual styles of “internationalist policy consciousness”. The tug of war between realists, communitarians and cosmopolitans about defining and circumscribing the ethics of intervention and sacrifice in world politics to protect and restore (or trivialize) Third World cultural heritage partakes in this ascendant policy consciousness. I argue that these various styles are, in the end, disciplined (in a Foucaultian sense) by variable overlapping and competing models and understandings of the public/private distinction, and of how the private law ethos underlying “property” becomes subsumed in public law internationalism’s apprehension of cultural violence, rather than by any palpable material defects in law’s cultural “acculturation” as such.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".