Risk Area: Geopolitical
Political interference and conflict-driven disruption, natural disasters and environmental pressures
This risk area covers external political and ideologically driven pressures -including those arising from war, conflict, and occupation- that threaten to influence, alter, suppress, or disrupt the online (open) content, presentation, integrity, or availability of cultural heritage collections. Such interference can take many forms, including funding withdrawals, mandated takedowns or revisions, narrative capture (pressure to align collections with particular political or ideological frames), geoblocking, network outages, platform dependency shocks, cyberattacks against collection systems, or physical damage to servers, connectivity infrastructure, and even to the landmarks themselves.
This risk area also explicitly encompasses natural disasters and other environmental pressures, as their consequences for cultural heritage -and for its online (and open) availability- are deeply intertwined with political dynamics. Even when destruction appears to be purely environmental, the aftermath is never neutral: whether something is rebuilt, how it is rebuilt, and whose heritage is prioritised in that process -including decisions about its digital presence and accessibility- are all fundamentally political choices.
Loss of autonomy, governance interference, and content suppression: External actors pressure institutions to align with preferred narratives, compromising curatorial, editorial, and governance independence. This can include sudden funding cuts, freezes, or “efficiency” and cost-saving measures that drastically reduce staff capacity, slow or halt digitisation and preservation programmes, and degrade digital services even when collections nominally remain accessible. In some contexts, enforced changes to boards, directors, or senior leadership (particularly in state-funded institutions) are used to redirect institutional priorities or funds. These pressures may be accompanied by formal or informal directives to remove, geofence (limit viewing to certain countries), or alter materials (especially those addressing contested histories, territories, or documenting abuses) resulting in censorship, weakened institutional autonomy, and long-term erosion of trust.
Jurisdictional and geopolitical dependency risks: Digital heritage stored on servers or cloud infrastructure located in a foreign jurisdiction may become vulnerable if diplomatic or political relations deteriorate. Changes in law, sanctions, access restrictions, or state control over infrastructure can render collections inaccessible, subject to seizure, surveillance, alteration, or forced takedown, even when hosted in countries previously considered “friendly”.
Access disruption from war, conflict, or crisis: Physical damage to data centres, local servers, power grids, or collection storage facilities; telecom blackouts (internet or phone cut-offs); internet traffic rerouting through hostile or unstable infrastructure, making services slow, altered, or unreachable; and supply-chain interruptions delaying repairs, hardware replacement, or digitisation efforts. These disruptions can affect both digital access and the safety of un-digitised physical collections.
Cybersecurity and integrity threats: Targeted ransomware (hackers lock files for payment); data theft (collections or user data stolen); Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS: flooding a site so it goes down); defacement (public pages altered); and integrity attacks (catalog records or files silently changed). Such incidents can corrupt catalogs, finding aids, or digitised objects, undermine authenticity, and damage institutional credibility and public trust.
Risk to physical collections and gaps in digitisation: Where digitisation has not yet occurred (especially for smaller or under-resourced institutions) physical objects remain uniquely vulnerable to destruction, theft, neglect, or decay during conflict, political upheaval, austerity, climate-related events, and natural disasters. Increasingly frequent and severe floods, fires, heatwaves, storms, and seismic events threaten collection storage, buildings, and environmental controls, particularly where resources for adaptation are limited. Delayed or reactive digitisation strategies increase the likelihood of irreversible loss, especially when mass digitisation and preservation programmes are not funded proactively in advance of a crisis.
Governance and policy
Establish clear governance policies: Develop long-term (digital) strategies and enforce policies that safeguard the institution's mission and resist undue external influence.
Prepare and publish a public statement affirming commitment to artistic/cultural and intellectual freedom of speech, and a clear editorial/takedown policy with public criteria, an appeals route, and a public log of changes.
Define risk-based digital access states in advance (e.g. open / limited / embargo / dark archive), and clear criteria for switching between them during a crisis.
Ensure governance frameworks, legal agreements, and board-level decisions explicitly permit geo-redundant storage, cross-border replication, and collaboration with trusted external partners. This policy groundwork is essential for technical measures such as multi-provider storage, international mirroring, and emergency access arrangements to function when needed.
Run simulated, discussion-based training activities (tabletop exercises/walk-through drills) where staff or team members talk through how they would respond to hypothetical crisis scenarios, such as censorship pressure, ransomware playbook, prolonged outages, loss of key personnel, fire, earthquake etc.
Technical resilience
Geo-redundant preservation: Keep copies in multiple locations and with multiple providers; follow the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 types of storage, 1 off-site). Use community replication approaches such as LOCKSS/CLOCKSS (“Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”).
Standards-aligned preservation workflows: Adopt Open Archival Information System (OAIS)–aligned workflows; record provenance and preservation actions with PREMIS (“Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies”); run regular fixity checks to detect silent corruption; and maintain immutable or air-gapped backups (write-once and offline).
Fast failover and degraded-mode access: Be ready to switch users to backups or read-only services, including Content Delivery Network (CDN)-backed static mirrors, a read-only ‘safe mode’ for catalogs, and low-bandwidth site versions for blackout or degraded connectivity conditions.
Zero-trust and segmentation: Don’t assume any internal system is safe by default; split networks so a breach in public systems can’t reach preservation storage. Apply least-privilege access, multi-factor authentication (MFA) login, and privileged access management for administrators.
DDoS protection and continuity access: Protect portals and APIs (machine-to-machine interfaces) with anti-DDoS services, web application firewalls (WAF), and rate limiting (limits on request bursts). Provide offline or bulk export options when systems are degraded or unavailable.
Legal and partnership safeguards
License and host diversity: Avoid single-vendor lock-in; include data-portability and exit clauses in contracts; keep off-platform discovery via interoperable protocols such as OAI-PMH (harvesting protocol) and IIIF (standard for interoperable images) to ensure collections remain findable even if primary platforms fail.
Formalise external partnerships: Maintain memoranda of understanding with trusted international repositories, preservation networks, and web-archiving partners to support emergency mirroring, custody transfer, or access continuity.
Map jurisdictional exposure: Maintain a clear map of where data is stored, which legal regimes apply, and how traffic is routed, including exposure to sanctions, data sovereignty rules, or infrastructure control changes.
Funding
Diversify funding sources: Seek a mix of public, private, philanthropic, and community funding to reduce reliance on volatile or politically contingent sources.
Maintain a continuity fund: Keep a modest, protected fund for preservation storage, emergency maintenance, incident response, and short-term staffing continuity during crises.
Transparency and community
Document and disclose changes: Keep detailed records of any access restrictions, content alterations or removals to preserve institutional history and provide context for future reference; share annual integrity and availability metrics (e.g., fixity pass rates, uptime) to maintain trust.
Establish a crisis communications plan (roles, press representatives, message templates, disclosure timelines) for addressing the press or complaints from partners and the public.
Engage in advocacy: Collaborate with professional associations, advocacy groups and communities of practice to learn from the experience of others, and collectively address and respond to geopolitical pressures.
Risk assessment templates: Use and adapt a risk assessment template to register and evaluate real or potential vulnerabilities to political and ideological interference.
Risk assessment template of the Risk Management Toolkit for Open GLAM.
Repository Crisis Scorecards to measure how resilient a repository might be in its normal state and during certain crises. This includes a measure of how well a repository might weather an example crisis, how easy it might be to restore metadata, and how much societal impact a missing repository would have.
Policy development guides: Access resources for crafting governance policies that reinforce institutional autonomy.
Museum Best Practices for Managing Controversy includes a “Freedom of Speech Commitment” template, steps to prepare in advance for potential controversy, and procedures for addressing the press or complaints from the public.
Publication by MBR regarding the “culture wars” from the far-right in memorials and museums (in German, includes recommendations to prepare in advance for potential controversy, and procedures for addressing the press or complaints from the public).
ARCHES (At-Risk Cultural Heritage Series) – Thematic series exploring endangered cultural heritage around the world. The continuous nature of the problem of endangered and destroyed cultural heritage, and the fact that it is not limited to far-away countries in political disarray, underscores the importance of training on historical examples and the legal frameworks that exist to protect important works and sites.
Wikipedia essay: There is a deadline is a page containing the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors, who warn that the preservation of the world’s knowledge is at stake, and encourage everyone to contribute to Wikipedia before it’s too late.
Learning Lessons from the Cyber-Attack (8 March 2024) by Sir Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library.
Learning from Cyberattacks (14 November 2024) by Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive.
Lessons from a Cyberattack: The National Museum of the Royal Navy’s Journey Through Crisis and Recovery (27 September 2025) by Manuel Charr.
SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online is an initiative of over 1,500 international volunteers who are collaborating online to digitise and preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage. Since the start of the invasion, SUCHO has web-archived more than 5,000 websites and 50TB of data of Ukrainian cultural institutions, to prevent these websites from going offline. The websites range from national archives to local museums, from 3D tours of churches to children’s art centers.
Safeguarding Research & Culture is creating an alternative infrastructure for archiving and disseminating cultural heritage and scientific knowledge. They seek to preserve cultural memory in a way that traditional archives cannot, so as to ensure that our cultural, intellectual and scientific heritage exists in multiple copies, in multiple places, and that no single entity or group of entities can make it all disappear.
Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort of three data organizations, including members of IASSIST, RDAP, and the Data Curation Network, with the aim to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. Efforts include: data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets.
UChicago Data Mirror is a platform that provides convenient access to public datasets that are frequently used in academic research and education at the University of Chicago.
The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts issued a statement disapproving the reuse of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting “Slave Market” (1866) by the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), while still enacting an Open Access policy, allowing for any reproduction of a public domain work to be downloaded high-resolution for free, as expressed in their FAQ page.
Advocacy networks and coalitions supporting cultural institutions in navigating political challenges:
SAVE the NEA! Restore NEH and IMLS! is a call-to-action urging people to contact the U.S. Congress to protect and fully restore federal funding and staffing for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The campaign highlights recent cuts that have left these cultural agencies unable to fulfill their mandates supporting arts, humanities, libraries and museums across every state and territory, and emphasises the economic and community benefits of this federal investment.
Advocate Alert Trump Budget Proposes Billions in Cuts, Including Elimination of IMLS, NEH and NEA is an advocacy alert about a proposed U.S. federal budget that would cut billions in domestic spending and eliminate funding for three key cultural agencies – the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The alert highlights the potential impact on museums, libraries, arts, and humanities programmes and encourages readers to contact Congress to support continued funding for these agencies.
How this risk area connects to other risk areas
Geopolitical risks rarely create new vulnerabilities; instead, they expose and accelerate existing ones. Legal ambiguity, ethical uncertainty, technical fragility, financial dependency, and weak governance become acute under political pressure, conflict, or environmental crisis. Mitigation strategies in this area therefore function as stress tests for the effectiveness of measures implemented across all other risk areas.
Use cases
A publicly funded institution restricts access to sensitive digital materials because political pressure and funding controls are used to reshape governance and priorities, impacting curatorial autonomy, staff capacity, and long-term trust in the collection.
An institution relies on foreign-hosted cloud infrastructure for its digital collections, because it is cost-effective and previously considered low-risk. When geopolitical relations shift, legal and political controls restrict access or impose takedowns, impacting collection integrity, autonomy, and availability.
A cultural heritage institution relies on local data centres, servers, and on-site collection storage to provide access to its digital and physical collections. When war or crisis damages power, telecom, and storage infrastructure, and disrupts supply chains, digital services become unreachable and undigitised physical collections are placed at heightened risk, impacting access, preservation, and institutional continuity.
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