A colleague, cultural heritage risk management consultant Damian Koropeckyj, kindly pointed out investigations by the Security Police of the Republic of Estonia (Kaitsepolitseiamet or KAPO) into looting of twentieth-century conflict archaeology. Over the last two decades, KAPO has repeatedly addressed “black (market) archaeology” or “black (market) digging” of modern militaria and other illegal handling of firearms and explosives as a matter of ‘threat[s] to Estonia’s national security, independence or territorial integrity’ and/or ‘prevention of international terrorism’. I’ve compiled the key points here.
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27/06/2025
Mobilising Care for Cultural Heritage in Russia’s War against Ukraine: looting and trafficking
Following the overall findings and recommendations of the new report on Mobilising Care for Cultural Heritage in Russia’s War against Ukraine [Мобілізація догляду за культурною спадщиною в умовах війни Росії проти України], which I listed in my previous post, these are extracts of observations about illicit trafficking of cultural goods and obstacles to counter-trafficking.
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26/06/2025
Mobilising Care for Cultural Heritage in Russia’s War against Ukraine: key findings and recommendations
A new, English and Ukrainian-language report has been published on Mobilising Care for Cultural Heritage in Russia’s War against Ukraine [Мобілізація догляду за культурною спадщиною в умовах війни Росії проти України].
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13/01/2025
documenting the appropriation of cultural assets from Kherson Art Museum – a report by the Curia Lab for the Conflict Observatory
introduction
The Conflict Observatory was an independent, U.S. Department of State-funded consortium of organisations with experts in human rights, humanitarian law, open source analysis and geospatial data analysis, which documented potential war crimes and other suspected atrocities in Ukraine and Sudan, in order to advance judicial accountability and transitional justice, and which operated between 2022 and 2024.
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01/10/2024
illicit trafficking of cultural objects by forced migrants – profitable to violent political organisations and corrupt officials, intensified by failed refugee policy
While the matter of subsistence crime or crimes of necessity by people who have been displaced by political violence has a far longer history, questions, misinformation and disinformation about it have become serious issues since the refugee/migration crisis (or, alternatively, a “crisis” of protection) in 2015. They have also become issues in relation to illegal trafficking of cultural goods. Queries and assumptions have been made, and negative and positive observations have been offered, by law enforcement agents, antiquities market participants, humanitarian aid workers, cultural heritage workers and journalists.
By trawling through academic studies – which range from archaeology and heritage to face-to-face ethnography, online ethnography and history – and journalistic reports, it has been possible to identify evidence of looting and trafficking by internally displaced persons and externally displaced persons (asylum-seekers or refugees); their simultaneous normality and infrequency; and the risks of either denying/ignoring these subsistence crimes or policing them like ordinary crimes, particularly when commodity flows are exploited as revenue streams and migrant flows are exploited as cover for conflict financiers and terrorist financiers.
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conflict antiquities 
