Sam Hardy is a researcher with a background in archaeology, cultural heritage studies, socio-legal studies and open-source research. He focuses on financing and incentivisation of political violence with cultural goods, but also covers other aspects of cultural property crime during conflict and crisis, such as political violence against cultural property, propaganda, organised crime and online social organisation of crime.

Hardy has done consultancies for Global Witness, UNESCO, ICOM and the Antiquities Coalition. He has held fellowships with Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), UCL Qatar and the University of Oslo’s Norwegian Institute in Rome, and has contributed to training of cultural heritage workers, law enforcement agents and peacekeepers in Europe and West Asia. In addition Hardy is an Expert in the Alliance to Counter Crime Online. His work aims to reduce the cultural, social and political harms of illegal and otherwise unethical exploitation of cultural heritage.

He is an associate researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) as a member of a project on Destructive Exploitation and care of Cultural Objects and Professional/Public Education for sustainable heritage management (DECOPE), with funding from the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage.