Cultural commodities in conflict. An analysis of moral panic in the discourse on antiquities trafficking in newspaper articles in Germany, 2003–2020

Abstract

This thesis is an analysis of the public discourse about antiquities trafficking from Iraq and Syria in Germany between 2003 and 2020. Germany is a market country for illicit antiquities, with a long-standing market for antiquities from Western Asia. During the researched period, widespread archaeological looting in the wake of the then-current conflicts in Iraq and Syria became public knowledge through reports in news media. At the same time several important changes in the German media's treatment of the German antiquities market can be seen, especially with regards to antiquities from Iraq and Syria. Moreover, in this time, changes in the legislation regulating the antiquities market were adopted in Germany, at the time widely seen as a reaction to the discourse. The development of the public discourse on antiquities trafficking in Germany is analysed in this thesis using the sociological concept of moral panic. To this end, German-language newspaper articles are investigated in detail using news framing analysis. The trends and themes emerging from this media analysis are then contextualised with texts from the lawmaking process of legal changes in Germany in 2007 and 2016, and reactions from the antiquities market. With this methodology, I show that the public discourse on antiquities trafficking rapidly spun into a moral panic between mid-2014 and early 2015, centering the alleged involvement of the terror group Islamic State (IS) in the illicit antiquities trade, and that the following legal change of 2016 was falsely presented to the public as a consequence of the narratives promoted in this moral panic. The thesis concludes with a discussion on the lasting impact of this discourse, the social and intellectual consequences of moral panics and misconceptions about antiquities trafficking, and what this can mean for the future of cultural heritage policies in market countries for antiquities