Abstract

Over the past decades, cultural heritage has increasingly become a primary target of terrorist destruction. As such attacks not only hit the cultural objects themselves, but also people and societies inherently associated with them, this article calls for a shift of emphasis in protection of cultural property from mere material substance protection to the relationship between humans and cultural objects. To this end, the present work rethinks cultural heritage as a hybrid entity between legal object and legal person, i. e., as material agency. The article takes a critical view of the traditional juridical distinction between legal object (res) and legal person (persona), and of material and immaterial cultural heritage. By taking full advantage of the legal potential of these four aspects, and reflecting on the recent ruling of the International Criminal Court in The Hague regarding the terrorist destruction of Timbuktu, the article provides a springboard toward an anthropological transformation of the protection of cultural property.

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