Simon Maghakyan

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...

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...