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CULTcrime (Cultural Heritage Crime Network)

Illicit cultural heritage artefacts are increasingly being trafficked and traded through international criminal networks. In the Nordic countries, we are seeing an increasingly serious threat to protected cultural heritage property. Prevention of cultural heritage crime requires collaboration between researchers, museums, government institutions, state administration and international NGOs.

Close up of old coins.

Illicit metal detector finds from the Baltics. Seizure by Buskerud police 2018. Photo: Håkon Roland, KHM.

CULTcrime will produce theoretical and applied research to prevent such crime and investigate the measures used to combat it. The research group is part of Nordic and international networks and constitutes an interdisciplinary pool of expertise in archaeology/numismatics, anthropology, criminology, and investigative journalism.

High profits and low risk make trafficking in cultural heritage objects one of the most widespread and profitable crime areas internationally. Consequently, the illicit trade in cultural artefacts is one of the main causes of cultural degradation worldwide, and illegal metal detector activity and damage to protected cultural property represent a growing threat to national cultural heritage. With conflict areas, terrorist financing, cultural heritage crime and the antiquities market closely entangled, we need to better understand the connections between heritage crime, politics, conflict, social conditions, regulations, and actors and to investigate ways to improve policy and regulatory coherence.

Close-up of coins.
94 Roman coins seized by Norwegian Customs in 2020. Photo: Håkon Roland/KHM, UiO.

The research agenda of CULTcrime will follow three strands:

Strand 1 – Management

Combating the illicit trade in cultural artefacts is challenging for several reasons: the fact that objects are moved across national borders; the fact that social media and new technology make sales easier, but harder to track; the general increase in mobility of people and goods; and limited resources and cooperation in the cultural management sector. Moreover, the complex and diverse nature of national legal systems and processes for dealing with trafficked goods – which must consider how to control finder activities, the threat from criminal activity, such as looting and the illegal trade in antiquities, and import/export/restitution – makes it hard to understand the scope for controlling the movement of cultural artefacts. 

The ambition of this strand is to investigate, improve and facilitate cross-sectoral management of cultural heritage artefacts and protected cultural heritage property. By e.g. employing a Knowledge Value Chain (KVC) methodology, the research group will investigate ‘production’ activities in complex systems or organizations. The key issue will be the transformation of fragments of information within cultural heritage management into applicable knowledge in a cross-sectoral ecosystem (cf. UNESCO Value Chain). CULTcrime will employ a version of KVC aimed at the heritage sector, namely, a Creative Value Chain for tangible movable heritage as suggested by EU (European Commission 2017, Mapping the creative value chains: A study on the economy of culture in the digital age: final report). The model will be adapted and will build on recent experiences from the Nordic heritage sector.

Strand 2 – Regulation and compliance

This strand presents a critical approach to the ideologies that underpin the regulation of cultural heritage crime. Recently, journalistic, and criminal investigations have spotlighted the antiquities market and its intersections with illicit aspects of the global economy and criminal markets. New forms of regulations increasingly include museums and the antiquities market in the tasks of crime prevention and the implementation of foreign and security policy, placing both legal and moral duty on these actors to perform policing functions. This development has raised demand for new market regulations that are exploring the logic of compliance and risk-based approaches appropriated from financial markets and banking regulation. 

The existing regulations will be investigated with a view to how they influence various actors to exploit the opportunities provided by the 'compliance industry'. The strand will also approach key themes, such as the effects of considering cultural heritage primarily through the lens of crime, data, and intelligence, and the financialization and securitization of culture. It will examine what happens to the cultural objects and culture itself in the process, and what gets lost when everything that cannot be subjected to risk assessments, such as social, cultural, historical, or political contexts, are left out of the equation. 

Strand 3 – Actors

A steady stream of criminal investigations and journalistic revelations of fraud, looting and smuggling have confirmed the existence of international and Nordic markets for illicit cultural heritage artefacts. Based on criminological and journalistic approaches, this strand will research the underlying structures of cultural heritage crime and the actors involved.

Investigative journalism will expand the research group’s potential beyond the traditional approaches in the field. The aim is to expose institutional failures and the ways in which society's systems can be circumvented by the rich, powerful, and corrupt. The investigative methods differ from apparently similar work done by police, customs, cultural heritage experts and regulatory bodies because of journalists’ methods and capacity to independently scrutinize the actors involved, including authorities and researchers. 

Equally important is the strand’s ambition to investigate criminal opportunities and the motives and immediate drivers of criminal events. Identifying and understanding the actors involved is essential to generate effective preventive interventions and scope-out evidence-based and theoretical methods to reduce cultural heritage crime. Research is needed to understand both how such crime is planned and committed, and the steps offenders take to avoid detection. The research is based on recent criminal cases in the Nordic countries, seizures by law enforcement agencies and OSINT (open-source intelligence). 

The three strands will be closely intermingled to ensure coherent and impact-driven research outcomes.

Activities

Network and Resources

Published Feb. 3, 2021 8:38 AM - Last modified Apr. 18, 2024 7:20 PM

Contact

Research group leader:
Professor Håkon Roland,
the Museum of Cultural History

Participants

Detailed list of participants