Drawing on the author's personal experience of living and working as an architect in Syria, this book offers an eyewitness perspective on the country's bitter conflict through the lens of architecture, showing how the built environment offers a mirror to the community that inhabits it. Marwa al-Sabouni chronicles the breakdown of social cohesion in Syria's cities, exploring how the lack of shared public spaces has intensified divisions within the community, and how corrupt officials have interfered in town planning for their own gain - actions symptomatic of wider abuses of power. With first-hand accounts of mortar attacks and stories of refugees struggling to find a home, this compelling and original book explores the personal impact of the conflict and offers hope for how architecture can play a role in rebuilding a sense of identity within a damaged society.

Marwa al Sabouni was a little-known architect, living in battle-ravaged Homs, unable to practice her profession as the buildings and the lives around her and across Syria were reduced to rubble. Rather than flee her country, like so many of her compatriots, she remained, committed to the belief that the multilayered and multifaceted society she grew up in was worth rebuilding. She turned her fierce intelligence to chronicling how her city and country were undone through decades of architectural mismanagement and mistakes.

The result was The Battle for Home. Published in 2016, the book and her story attracted the attention of international news media and received critical acclaim around the world. She became a TED fellow; some suggested she be nominated for architecture’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize.

Until the book was published, al Sabouni had rarely travelled outside of her native country, but The Battle for Home gained her invitations to speak to audiences, institutes and experts across the world. Her travels, combined with her deep understanding of the Middle Eastern heritage and values, provided al Sabouni with insights into a wide range of cities, which informed her views on how cities best work, how they might fail, and what can be done to enrich and harmonize the lives of all their inhabitants. This is a rich journey, drawing together several narratives: her personal observations of some of the world’s most fascinating cities, from Detroit to Helsinki, from Bristol to Amsterdam; the lessons that Western societies might learn from Islamic culture; and philosophical reflections, drawing on a range of thinkers, on how our personal and communal spaces can provide the basic foundations for happiness. Through this rich tapestry of personal experience, unblinking perspective, and unsettling insight, al Sabouni offers the reader real-world solutions – and hope – for how the conditions for enduring peace might be created in an increasingly polarizing world.

A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize international efforts to protect people and cultures. Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify. Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and--as this book argues--must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action. The free online edition of this publication is available at getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.