As a leader in heritage preservation, the organization World Monuments Fund (WMF) convenes a biennial panel to select 25 sites that deserve increased awareness, advocacy, and financial support.
This year’s World Monuments Watch panel, chaired by the Penn Museum’s Lynn Meskell, chose from more than 200 submissions to WMF’s World Monuments Watch program. Meskell has conducted research on both WMF and UNESCO, but she is not formally involved with any agency; instead, she contributes to them by sharing her own independent research rather than consulting.
The chosen heritage places span the globe: Spain to Tunisia, Northern Ireland, UK, to Zambia, Mongolia to Morocco, Nigeria to Peru. One is even in outer space: the 25th site is the Moon. Some sites have been ravaged by war (Ukraine, Palestine), others are recovering from earthquakes (Japan, Türkiye), and many are working to stave off climatological threats that haven’t yet occurred.
Nearly 900 sites have made the list since 1996, representing 135 countries. A total of $120 million in funds have supported 350 projects.
Penn Museum Voices spoke with Meskell to learn more about this year’s list.
You served a previous cycle as a panel member for World Monuments Watch. What stood out about this cycle?
It was a great honor to be invited back to chair the selection committee for 2025. I thought it was very important to focus on Indigenous and underrepresented communities. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a world of war, so for this cycle there was a heavy emphasis on conflict and post-conflict sites. Everything from current wars to former wars, and how to process conflict trauma. To look at the risk and threat issues today, we also had to look at those at risk of natural disaster.
You’ve been involved in a number of World Heritage projects. How does the World Monuments Watch fit into this?
What I love about the Watch, which is different from my 15 years of UNESCO World Heritage work, is that these nominations come from ordinary people—from local societies and academics and community members. It’s as close as we’ll ever be to global heritage conservation from the “ground up.” It’s often the impacted communities reaching out. It’s not about nation-states and all the lobbying that goes with the World Heritage List—it’s working directly with people, and that mitigates the conflict factor.
Some of your research has shown that inscribing a site as a heritage site can actually lead to conflict in the first year after UNESCO inscription.
Conflict doesn’t have to mean armed conflict. It could mean strikes, protests, general dissatisfaction, negative sentiment. In my collaboration with Wharton we use an AI-generated analysis of the GDELT database that monitors the world’s news media from nearly every corner of every country in print, broadcast, and web formats, in over 100 languages, every moment of every day.
Heritage sites are now weapons, assets used in the arsenal like everything else. We might then be able to predict that inscribing a UNESCO site might lead to greater conflict and discontent. For instance, in 2008 a World Heritage designation created a border war between Cambodia and Thailand. By contrast, we have found that when World Monuments Fund is invited to collaborate on a UNESCO site, we see that cooperation goes up and the conflict goes down.
Why might the WMF model be relatively successful?
This list is not the beauty contest often described for World Heritage. This is not an exercise in nation-branding and tourism. This is about giving people what they need and creating partnerships. It’s about communities. That need varies: some might request assistance with a management plan or visitor management. Others need conservation advice and expertise.
Take us through the two sites in the middle of war, Gaza and Ukraine.
There are two different approaches happening there: the Kyiv Teacher’s House in Ukraine has a long history in terms of the country’s independence and its symbolic value. It wasn’t directly hit, but it does show you the casualties of war, in that a nearby rocket explosion shattered all of the glass and windows.
What I loved about the WMF approach to Palestine is that they’ve taken a broader perspective and said: This is Gaza as a whole. The scale of destruction, you can’t just pick one site or the other. You have to try to assist people that are on the ground doing the work. People are trying to restore sites in the middle of active conflict.
It’s important to acknowledge that UNESCO has given less attention and visibility to cultural destruction in Gaza compared to Ukraine.
There are two in the United States, both on the East Coast. Historic Lighthouses of Maine, and The Great Trading Path (from Virginia to South Carolina).
On the one hand, the U.S. has ample resources. However, this is also a way of saying that none of us have solved these problems. The Maine lighthouses are a wake-up call that this is on our shores too. The North Carolina site was a clear winner for me in terms of visibility. It’s probably not what the U.S. government would put forward for UNESCO listing, but it’s about a different form of recognition and partnership. It’s a positive story about visibility, legacy and making sure that history is acknowledged.
Lynn Meskell is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Weitzman School of Design, and a Curator in the Near East and Asia Sections at the Penn Museum.
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