Much academic work has been done over the past 20 years or so, and especially since the conclusion in 1999 of the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to draw together and explain to a legally literate audience the rules of international law, in particular international humanitarian law, relevant to protecting the immovable and movable cultural heritage from destruction and misappropriation in armed conflict, including belligerent occupation. The challenge is to translate this legal principle into practice—that is, to take effective measures to ensure the implementation by nonlawyers, including first and foremost military personnel, of what are largely straightforward rules of international law and, failing willing compliance with them, to enforce these rules or to secure accountability for their breach. Implementation is partly a question of thorough and broad-based planning and the resultant systematic and coordinated institution of good practice via military and civil-military doctrine; but it is also a question of conscientious follow-through on the ground and sometimes, more basically, of the awareness and goodwill of individual commanders or subordinates. Accountability is today mostly a question of the imposition of individual criminal responsibility via international or national judicial mechanisms. Joris D. Kila’s Heritage under Siege and Jadranka Petrović’s The Old Bridge of Mostar and Increasing Respect for Cultural Property in Armed Conflict deal, differently but both in a case-study vein, with such vexed questions.

As its full title indicates, Kila’s book—the recipient of the Blue Shield Award 2012 from the Austrian National Committee of the Blue Shield—focuses on the implementation specifically by the military of the core rules of the international law of armed conflict on the protection of cultural property. Its emphasis is practical, rather than juridical. The author, a reserve lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Netherlands Army with in-theatre experience in Macedonia, Iraq, and, in a civilian capacity, Libya, provides anecdotal insights into the bureaucratic and other mundane obstacles and opportunities encountered when seeking to operationalize the 1954 Hague Convention and analogous customary international legal obligations in the course of a military deployment. The work offers useful reminders that damage to and pillage of cultural sites and objects in armed conflict is as often as not a function of negligence or other avoidable oversight as it is of tactical exigencies or malice. In archaeologically rich and sensitive terrain, digging a latrine, filling a “hesco” (the sandbag’s massive modern variant), disposing of captured ordnance, or landing a helicopter can do as much harm to buried antiquities and their stratigraphical context as can combat, while knowing whom and what to pay to act as custodians of a disrupted dig in occupied territory can mean the difference between a fierce commitment to keeping thieves at bay and an inside job. Kila’s book, although a frustrating read on account of its haphazard, stream-of-consciousness argumentation, provides a valuable service in reminding us that knowledge of and commitment to the relevant international rules are only starting points for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict.

Petrović’s book, more tightly structured and argued than Kila’s and more legal in focus, is at the same time burdened by the more fundamental problem of its utility. Insofar as it provides, and for the most part solidly, a general analytical account of the rules of the international law of armed conflict pertaining to attacks against cultural property, it covers well-trodden ground; and insofar as it applies these rules to the attack of 9 November 1993 on the Ottoman Old Bridge (Stari Most) from which the Herzegovinian town of Mostar takes its name, it merely rehearses from a more subjective perspective, and has been rendered a purely academic exercise and partially contradicted by, the judgment on 29 May 2013 of a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Prlić et al., to be followed in due course by the Appeals Chamber’s judgment in the case. That said, in her rich contextualization of an iconic assault on history, architectural perfection, and civic and intercommunal unity, and in her eloquent plea for justice on behalf of Mostarians and humanity, Petrović makes a vivid contribution to a sometimes arid literature. The quoted reactions to the bridge’s destruction are particularly moving.