Looting and trafficking of cultural heritage from conflict areas to the European markets stand for an increasing phenomenon with strong consequences in terms of security, economics, culture and society. Smugglers take advantage of disparate frameworks, providing the artefacts with a fake background in order to give them the appearance of legality, before proposing them to the market. Although the protagonists in the fight (law enforcement agencies, justice, structures devoted to cultural heritage, art market) can know each other, the potential for cooperation still remains underexploited: time, resources and space limitations, discrepancies between approaches, practices and work cultures. The gap which is noticeable at the national level gets broader at the European scale. Nevertheless, each of those professional bodies is keeping a part of the solution: resource inventory, knowledge of the artefacts, production areas and fraudulent cases, proof culture, rates and trends changing. A cooperation protocol as well as a Pan-European collaborative tool for control, able to cross investigation data, are strongly required. POLAR project (“POLice and ARchaeology against cultural heritage trafficking”) was born in 2016 through the National Council of Scientific Research “Attentats Recherche” special call for proposals. It aims to identify relevant structures and tools, facilitating dialogue between professional spheres (methodology sharing, legal frameworks, slowdown levers identification). It is composed of three phases: Understand, Act and Prevent. As POLAR implies to work at the European level, an international consortium is currently built in keeping with professional divisions such as LEAs/Justice/Cultural Heritage/Art Market. The Cultural Heritage team maps the “artefacts in peril” as presented on the ICOM Red Lists. A digital tool will be built in order to find occurrences on Internet and to compare the proposed background to the archaeological evidences. In so doing, the protocol will reinforce the expertise and detect possibly fraudulent cases. If needed and according to the recognitions, a warning notice could be transmitted to the authorities. The approach will offer guarantees to honest buyers and sellers, avoiding the potential misfortunes related to ancient transactions led without due diligence and facilitating the lasting recovery of misled-traceability works of art, bringing the proof of the ancient provenance. POLAR will lead to training and information actions in a complex and unknown field. The dissemination phase implies to explore restitution ways for saved artefacts. Those actions will help to know more about them and to raise public awareness. Outputs are expected in the field of security, economics, society and culture. POLAR manages a large quantity of data, opening up fieldworks and enable the expression of innovative methodologies in order to face a security challenge. This cooperation is brand new in its form and breadth. A consultation about frames, methods and strategy is required to tackle the European scale. The planned call for the proposal is SU-FCT03-2018 (republished in 2019-2020): Information and data stream management to fight against (cyber)crime and terrorism. The ANR MRSEI tool seems to be the appropriate launch pad in order to lead the preliminary discussions, reinforce the consortium and provide it with the dedicated working space. The project also meets the needs of the SU-TRANSFORMATIONS-09-2018 call, whose topic is « Social platform on endangered cultural heritage and on illicit trafficking of cultural goods ». For this one, the deadline for submission is 13 March 2018, without assurance of renewal, which imply a more tightened calendar.

The last decades have witnessed a variety of initiatives promoted by a diverse set of actors engaged in the protection of endangered cultural heritage and in stopping illicit trade, initiatives that have tried to bring solutions, remediation, methods and approaches to tackle looting and trafficking. NETCHER seeks to address the complex challenge of harmonising and bringing together these worthy, but often disconnected initiatives by using a participative approach that will result in the establishment of a structured network (defined as a Social Platform) drawing together a broad range of players such as international bodies, umbrella organizations, national governments, researchers, public policy makers, NGOs, as well as public and private foundations. In light of the significance of these uncoordinated efforts, the Platform will take charge of the systematizing and framing of all the emerging best practices in order to enhance and capitalize on the experiences of the partnership members at an international level for building a joint action plan with shared toolkits and a research and innovation roadmap.

TARGET will deliver a pan-European serious gaming platform featuring new tools, techniques and content for training and assessing skills and competencies of SCA (Security Critical Agents - counterterrorism units, border guards, first responders (police, firefighters, ambulance services civil security agencies, critical infrastructure operators). Mixed-reality experiences will immerse trainees at task, tactical and strategic command levels with scenarios such as tactical firearms events, asset protection, mass demonstrations, cyber-attacks and CBRN incidents. Trainees will use real / training weaponry, radio equipment, command & control software, decision support tools, real command centres, vehicles. Social and ethical content will be pervasive. Unavailable real-source information will be substituted by AVR (Augmented / Virtual Reality - multimedia, synthetic role players). Near-real, all-encompassing and non-linear experiences will enable high degrees of dynamics and variability. The distributed Open TARGET Platform will provide extensible standards driven methods to integrate simulation techniques and AVR technology with existing SCA training equipment and be customisable to local languages, national legal contexts, organisational structures, established standard operational procedures and legacy IT systems. At key training points real-time benchmarking of individuals and teams will be instrumented. TARGET will support inter-agency SCA exercising across the EU and act as a serious gaming repository and brokerage facility for authorised agencies to share training material and maximise reuse and efficiency in delivering complex exercises. TARGET, combining training, content and technology expertise, will be co-led by users and technologists, mainly SMEs. 2 successively developed and trialled versions of the TARGET Solution will support user-technologist dialogue. The TARGET Ecosystem will enable sustainable impact, commercial uptake and synergies at EU level.

Trafficking in cultural property, in addition to its impact on world heritage, also represents a gigantic underground economy that plays on borders and participates in the financing of criminal and terrorist groups. For several years, the fight against trafficking in cultural property has been the subject of numerous actions to help the various actors involved in their daily work. All the actions undertaken aim to strengthen the protection of this heritage and require a different perspective based on the widest possible cooperation between the various professional players in the field of cultural heritage. At the national level, this desire to bring together police forces and archaeologists materialized in 2016 through the POLAR project. Following this cooperation, a first request was made to the ANR for MRSEI funding in order to bring this collaboration to a European level and to open it to a wider range of actors (museums, transnational organizations, non-governmental organizations ...). This funding enabled the setting up and success of two H2020 projects, NETCHER and PREVISION, launched in 2019. NETCHER has taken up the complex challenge of harmonizing and linking existing initiatives in a structured network supported by a digital collaborative platform. PREVISION project aimed to provide practitioners with advanced hardware support to analyze multiple metadata streams from diverse sources. The excellent results obtained in these two projects (creation of a network of 288 experts from 29 countries for NETCHER and setting up of a consortium of 28 entities from 13 countries for PREVISION), allow us to consider taking a new step forward. The SyNAAPTIC Tool proposal aims to benefit from the cross-fertilization of these expertises and to initiate a new consortium in the European landscape. Based on a very active relational framework, the mobilization of the different actors, the tools deployed, the use cases and the expressions of professional needs convinced us that a further step could be proposed. Its objective is to better understand the shortcomings of the systems and to fight with a set of tools available to European partners. The driving concept of the SyNAAPTIC Tool project would be the conjunction of a powerful image matching and identification tool such as PREVISION with a network of experts in the form of a modern intelligent networking platform (with indexing of expert skills). A major proposal for this call would be to centralize and standardize the European national databases of stolen cultural objects, but also the positive databases (museum, academic or informative Europeana type). This would allow to: · Centralize "object" data in a single format to promote interoperability. · Optimize research capacities (data and computing resources). · Provide police officers with a unique reference when discovering cultural artifacts. · Rapidly create corpuses of crisis zones, drawn up by teams of zone-experts. · Raise awareness among local populations as well as European citizens. We can meet these high expectations of European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) by developing a specific market surveillance tool that would not only be able to regularly scan sites and catalogs, create a history of transactions but also, by programming it, analyse sales and resale cycles, distribution networks and isolate sales patterns that could lead to the identification of criminal networks and art laundering. This project should serve as a basis for future training modules for professionals involved in the fight against this traffic as well as for raising public awareness.

"<< Background >>The NETCHER project (https://netcher.eu/), started in January 2019 and concluded in March 2021, was aimed at reinforcing the fight against cultural heritage looting and trafficking, by bringing together relevant international actors (security and research communities, public and private institutions, art market specialists, policy makers), to build a sustainable social online platform. With the objective of paving the way to further initiatives, NETCHER issued a set of recommendations, addressing all the different communities of stakeholders. They underline the importance to create reliable, comprehensive and accessible information, on which the efficiency of education and awareness processes relies.The Final Forum of NETCHER, organised on 1-2 March 2021, has also underlined the need to extend its activities to a wider audience, also involving the educational sector and the general public, since the dimension of the challenge requires a wider intervention, involving all the citizens from their early age. In the final round table, representatives of five Directorates-General of the European Commission - also including DG EAC for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture - were requested to comment the recommendations issued by the NETCHER project and highlighted the policy issues from different perspectives. They all agreed that a strong interaction among the educational sector and the key actors involved in looting and trafficking is necessary, with a strong focus on cultural institutions. Archaeological sites and museums are mostly concerned, but any kind of cultural institutions are touched by this severe issue.The present PITCHER project is the first action started to put into practice this strategy, trying to respond to the needs (often not clearly identified yet) of the educational sectors in front of this key problem. Its solution is not involving only a few numbers of police forces, researchers and cultural bodies, but needs the collaboration of all the citizens, starting from the youngsters. It is crucial to make them aware that cultural and archaeological heritage is essential to our understanding of mankind, our history, who we are and where we come from. Taking away the study of these objects from specialists is the same as irreversibly destroying a part of our past.<< Objectives >>The project intends to propose a new model for addressing young people about the problem of fighting the looting and illicit trafficking of cultural goods, focusing on school teachers, in order to raise their awareness and enhance their professional development in this field. This will be done by: - enhancing schools with new models for increasing the knowledge of students, as well as use educational scheme for acquiring the critical thinking necessary to play an effective role in tackling this problem, as a young citizen and as an adult; - creating prototypes of innovative tools based on STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking; - using the educational potential present in the European cultural institutions (archeological sites, museums, libraries, etc.) to support teachers in the development of lessons and workshops aiming at demonstrating the intercultural dimension of the problem. It is a matter of fact that ""creativity"", for born digital youngsters, is strictly associated to the use of IT devices, that are their main tool for communicating and exchanging feelings, emotions and passions. This is why the presence of the ""makers"", the digital artists, can support this action, since they well know the potential of the use of technology and can support the development of educational resources to stimulate creativity. It is important to remember that the word ""poet"" comes from the Greek verb ""poieo - ποιέω"", that means ""to make"". This approach well justify the organization of training events where the partners are working together with creative artists and cultural institutions for jointly designing new educational tools based also on gamification and escape games, enhanced reality, and real-time interaction with the students. In this way, the project will enable all the students to express their culture and ideas, while providing opportunities for the acquisition of necessary skills and know-how to participate in wider cultural developments. The general objective of the proposal consists then of the design and test of a set of open educational resources, to be made available also online, focusing on improving the educators’ capacity in preparing new learning experiences to support the fight against looting and illicit trafficking of cultural goods, thanks to the rich repositories of digital cultural heritage accessible through the web.<< Implementation >>The activities are organised according to the following main phases: Phase 1: COMMON FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY (M1-12) During this phase partners will build a common framework and work methodology by analysing existing good practices and initiatives. This includes the identification of case studies and interviews with stakeholders and key actors. Focus group can be organised in the partner countries with relevant local stakeholders to share and validate the results of this phase. The existing potential available in European digital collections of cultural heritage will be analyzed, to identify and select the most effective materials to be made available to the European schools. Phase 2: DEVELOPMENT & TESTING (M13-M32) During this second phase, partners will develop the Open Educational Resources (OERs). The courses and the related educational materials will be prepared in English in the first version, and they will be translated (if necessary) and tested in the partner countries. Teachers and students, but also citizens, will be involved in the pilot action. Thanks to the feedback received from the participants to the pilot actions, the OERs will be revised and fine-tuned. Evaluation activities will be boosted in this phase to support the testing with the collection and analysis of adequate data. Phase 3: MODELING AND RECOMMENDATION (M29-M36) Based on the results of the test phase, the training materials will be revised and improved and enriched with additional materials. During this phase, partners will work together in order to create a model of intervention and a series of guidelines and recommendations for drafting a document paving the way to a mass use of the training model and resources at local, regional or even national level. Also, the project foresees 6 transnational partners meetings, and 6 multiplier events.<< Results >>PITCHER will develop scenarios that advance the concept of 'open schooling' by building clusters of stakeholders around a creative and critical engagement of youngsters in the fight against looting and trafficking of cultural goods, also involving – as a secondary target group – museum educators, memory institutions and other organisations involved in informal and non-formal educational places, such as community centers, services for youth, young offenders. Through its results: 1: Methods to include a creative and critical thinking approach in education, supporting the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural goods; 2: Design and test of the Open Educational Resources; 3: Guidelines and recommendations for mass use of the training model and resources,PITCHER will create a set of OERs able to help EU teachers in implementing creative ways to involve young generation in this dramatic problem with the help of the educational potential of European cultural institutions. Themes covered in the materials and tools will also include themes of intercultural reflection, values; and identity(ies); dialogue and dialogical relationships; EU values and critical thinking."