Sovereign Heritage Crime

Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past

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Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation - constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats - enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies to pursue 'performance legitimacy' by delivering a real or imagined 'permanent security'. Since this state crime is both enabled and exposed by traditional and emerging technologies, the study also explores their dual use for human rights and wrongs. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.