Abstract/Summary

Buildings are places of safety and conflict. When shells cracked the horizon and my world in my country of Syria, I sought cultural heritage buildings (CHBs) for quietness and security. I am now understanding that these very buildings are caldrons of entrenched memories, and negotiation spaces of future settlements or, perhaps, of unease. The buildings are not limited to cultural heritage - rather they expand to cultural futures. They have a distinctive agency that emanates from their deep context and history. This paper revisits the literature on CHBs from its cosy moorings of preservation and conservation. We offer a warzone perspective. An ambiguous hinterland where CHBs become the catalyst of simmering grievance that implicate and dictate future conflict or reconciliation. Through a prism of unfolding autoethnography of the lead researcher's experience of the recent Syrian war, the literature review traces boundaries, asserting the need to explore the social and personal questions beckoning with CHBs, and the trauma of the sudden shift from more entrenched rules in stable times towards unprecedented rules (chaos?) conditioned by war. This paper will contribute to an inside-out perspective to the meanings of CHBs in warzones and gives possible future direction.