The International Committee of the Blue Shield: Protecting Cultural Heritage During Disasters

When floods, fires, earthquakes, or armed conflict strike, the loss of human life and property dominates headlines. Yet another casualty often goes unnoticed: the books, manuscripts, archives, and monuments that hold a community’s memory. When the National Library in Sarajevo burned in 1992, roughly two million volumes were lost in a single act of destruction. Events like this gave rise to a coordinated international body dedicated solely to protecting cultural property in emergencies. That body is the International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS). This post explains how it was formed, how it works with global organisations, and why its model matters for libraries and archives everywhere.

How ICBS was formed in 1996 🔗

The roots of the Blue Shield stretch back to the aftermath of the Second World War. Faced with massive destruction of monuments, libraries, and museums, UNESCO drafted the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the first international treaty devoted exclusively to cultural heritage. The Convention introduced a distinctive blue-and-white emblem to mark protected sites, and this very emblem later gave the organisation its name.

The Convention set the legal foundation, but it lacked an active civil-society body to coordinate professional response on the ground. That gap became painfully clear during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when libraries, archives, and museums were systematically targeted. In response, four major non-governmental organisations decided to pool their expertise. In 1996, they signed an agreement in Paris that established the International Committee of the Blue Shield as a standing emergency coordination and response committee.

The four founding pillars 🔗

ICBS was built on four “pillar” organisations, each representing a different branch of cultural heritage. Understanding them clarifies why ICBS could cover such a wide range of cultural property:

IFLA – the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, representing libraries. ICA – the International Council on Archives, representing archives. ICOM – the International Council of Museums, representing museums. ICOMOS – the International Council on Monuments and Sites, representing built heritage. According to the International Council on Archives, these four bodies founded the organisation in 1996, and ICBS adopted the blue shield of the 1954 Hague Convention as its logo.

It is worth correcting a common confusion: the Red Cross is sometimes mistakenly listed as a founder. While the Blue Shield is often called the “Cultural Red Cross” because it does for heritage what the Red Cross does for people, the actual founders were the four heritage organisations named above.

The mission and core objectives 🔗

The purpose of ICBS was practical and clear. According to the Blue Shield’s own history, its objectives were to encourage safeguarding and respect for cultural property, to promote standards for risk preparedness, and to train experts at national or regional levels to prevent, control, and recover from disasters. In short, ICBS aimed to coordinate the response before, during, and after an emergency, rather than simply reacting once damage was done.

A landmark moment came in 1999. Patrick Boylan, the author of an influential UNESCO review of the Hague Convention, led the joint ICBS delegation at the drafting conference for the Convention’s Second Protocol. For the first time, international legislation contained a clear role for civil society in the form of the non-governmental sector. This recognition transformed ICBS from a coordinating committee into an advisory body whose voice carried weight in international law.

Global cooperation for cultural preservation 🔗

ICBS never operated in isolation. Its strength came from partnerships with the largest intergovernmental and humanitarian bodies in the world. UNESCO and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) served as partners and permanent observers at ICBS meetings. This meant the committee had direct lines to the agencies that set global heritage policy.

The cooperation extended into the field of conflict response as well. According to IFLA’s guide to the Blue Shield, the organisation works with bodies including coalition forces such as NATO, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and ICCROM. By building relationships with military and humanitarian actors, the Blue Shield ensures that cultural property is considered when troops are deployed or when relief operations are planned.

Why the IFLA link matters for libraries 🔗

For library and information science, the IFLA connection is the most direct point of relevance. IFLA is the global voice for libraries, and its role within the Blue Shield ensures that libraries holding rare and significant collections are part of the protection conversation. IFLA’s Preservation and Conservation (PAC) Core Activity has long produced disaster planning resources, and it documented cultural losses through projects such as the “Lost Memory” study on libraries and archives destroyed in the twentieth century. This integration means that a flooded archive or a bombed manuscript collection is treated as part of a single, coordinated heritage-protection effort rather than as an isolated problem.

Risk preparedness and response strategies 🔗

The most valuable lesson from the Blue Shield model is its emphasis on preparation rather than reaction. Cultural property cannot usually be reconstructed once it is lost, so the focus must be on preventing damage and planning recovery in advance. This philosophy is sometimes summed up as the four Rs that guide heritage emergency work: preparedness, response, recovery, and risk reduction.

ICBS promoted this approach through several practical activities:

Training – The committee and its founding organisations developed training for heritage professionals, emergency services, and the armed forces, so that responders know how to handle fragile materials during a crisis.

Guidelines – IFLA, ICA, and the wider network produced manuals on disaster planning for libraries and archives, including guidance on both the physical protection of materials and the recovery of damaged collections. Resources such as ICCROM’s risk preparedness manuals and IFLA’s disaster planning resources reflect this body of work.

Documentation and risk assessment – A key principle is identifying which collections are most at risk and preparing emergency plans before disaster strikes. Heritage experts stress that a disaster plan must be tested and updated regularly rather than left to gather dust, since an untested plan often fails at the moment it is needed most.

National Blue Shield Committees 🔗

While the international committee set the overall direction, much of the real work happens at the national level. National Blue Shield Committees were created to translate global principles into local action. According to IFLA, these national committees bring together a diverse group of professionals: librarians, archivists, museum curators, conservators, local and national government representatives, emergency services, and the armed forces.

The functions of these committees are concrete and locally grounded. They promote the ratification and practical implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention and its Protocols by national governments. They organise training, run awareness campaigns, and help coordinate the national response when an emergency occurs. Because they bring together heritage specialists and emergency responders in the same room, they build the working relationships that make a fast, effective response possible during a real crisis.

This network has grown steadily over the years and now spans national committees in dozens of countries, with new ones continually being established. For a country with a vast and varied documentary heritage, such a committee provides a ready-made framework for protecting libraries, archives, and monuments against both natural disasters and human-made threats.

From ICBS to “The Blue Shield” 🔗

The structure evolved as the network expanded. In 2006, an Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield (ANCBS) was formed to coordinate the growing number of national bodies. In 2016, new statutes merged the original ICBS and the ANCBS into a single organisation known simply as The Blue Shield. Today’s Blue Shield therefore carries forward the mission that ICBS began in 1996, now under one unified structure.

Success stories of ICBS interventions 🔗

The value of any organisation is best judged by its action in real emergencies. Two early examples are frequently cited as showing why ICBS was needed.

Former Yugoslavia. The wars in the Balkans during the 1990s were the catalyst for the Blue Shield’s creation, and the region became an early focus of its concern. Cultural sites were deliberately targeted, and the destruction of the Sarajevo library remains one of the most cited examples of heritage loss in modern conflict. The international attention these events drew helped push cultural property protection onto the global agenda. Years later, some of those responsible for targeting cultural sites in the Balkans were prosecuted, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia treated the destruction of cultural property as a serious offence, reinforcing the legal principles the Blue Shield supports.

Central America. Beyond armed conflict, ICBS turned its attention to natural disasters. Documented accounts from the early 2000s note the committee’s concern with hurricane damage in Central America, where libraries, archives, and historic structures were threatened by severe storms. This work, recorded in the heritage journal Heritage at Risk, demonstrated that the Blue Shield’s mission covered floods and storms just as much as bombs and shells.

Over the following decades, the Blue Shield network applied this experience to crises around the world, from conflicts in Iraq and Syria to natural disasters affecting cultural institutions. In each case, the underlying model remained the same: assess the risk, prepare a plan, coordinate with local and international authorities, and act quickly to safeguard what cannot be replaced.

Why this matters for library and information professionals 🔗

For anyone working in or studying libraries and archives, the Blue Shield offers more than a piece of history. It provides a working model for disaster management that can be adapted to any institution. The core ideas are universal: treat preparedness as a routine professional duty, build relationships with emergency services before a crisis, keep a tested disaster plan, and recognise that the loss of records is a loss to the whole community, not just to the institution that held them.

One ongoing challenge the network has openly acknowledged is funding. Heritage protection bodies often struggle to maintain full-time staff and run regular activities, which can limit how much they achieve. This is a reminder that protecting cultural heritage requires sustained commitment and resources, not just goodwill during a crisis. For future librarians and archivists, building the case for preservation funding is part of the job.

What do you think? If you were asked to draft a disaster preparedness plan for your local library or archive, which collections would you protect first, and how would you decide? And should the protection of cultural heritage during conflicts and disasters be treated as an essential public service rather than an optional extra?

References

1. https://uscbs.org/blue-shield-emblem.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Shield_International
3. https://www.ica.org/discover-ica/our-mission-our-objectives/blue-shield/
4. https://theblueshield.org/about-us/history/international-committee-of-the-blue-shield-icbs/
5. https://www.unesco.org/en/heritage-armed-conflicts/partners
6. https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/topics/cultural-heritage/documents/ifla_get_into_blue_shield_2019.pdf
7. https://www.ifla.org/useful-resources/
8. https://www.ifla.org/news/get-into-blue-shield-guide/
9. https://www.blue-shield.de/en/aboutus/internationalnetwork/
10. https://www.getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities/part-5/31-stone/
11. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/heritage/article/download/22208/15969