Conflict Zone Research

We live in a planet dominated by unbroken conflict in which the figure of the interpreter in conflict zones (ICZ) has been present since ancient times. Tragic situations such as war and conflict are the breeding grounds in which ICZ have acquired and developed their language skills. These interpreters rarely have any previous training in interpreting techniques and consequently tend to learn the job on the ground. The law of supply and demand rules the hiring procedures in conflict zones and consequently, armed forces deployed to foreign lands tend to prioritise a series of particular requirements when recruiting ICZ. Aspects such as family history, ideology and ethnicity, as well as certain traits, such as being flexible, obedient, resourceful and trustworthy appear best suited to fulfilling the troops’ key needs on the ground. This paper, which is based on a much larger doctoral research project (Gómez-Amich 2017), draws upon a series of semi-structured, in-depth narrative interviews with five local interpreters from Afghanistan who worked for the Spanish troops deployed in that country as part of the NATO ISAF mission between 2003 and late 2014. The results of this study suggest that untrained interpreters adapt their performance to what they believe are the parties’ needs and expectations, which are framed within very particular and sometimes dramatically dissimilar cultures. At the same time, the way they judge their own performance appears to be informed by their ideas about the role of an ICZ.

Soni Sori, Kawasi Hidme, Linga Kodopi and Sukul Nag held the tricolour flag and led a ragtag band including social activists, organisers of political parties, trade unionists, teachers, lawyers, journalists, scribes, artists, filmmakers and academics. All these were seekers of wisdom pertaining to various facets of Bastar including its rich culture, the clouds of mining that loom large over it and aspects of militarisation. The tricolour was hoisted in village Gompad, on the August 15, 2016, around 8:30 am, close to where the Madkam Hidme was laid to rest. Her corpse being since exhumed for postmortem and presently lying in some sarkari (government) morgue somewhere in India, lies buried. The tricolour has never been hosted in Gompad before.

Since 1948, the everyday existence of Palestinians is characterised by manifold experiences of displacement. Starting with refugees, passing to exiles, returnees, nomadic communities -the Bedouins-, urbanised villagers, economic and educational migrants, and black-market labours going back and forth from Israel and its settlements in the West Bank, each of these experiences of displacement is connoted by a different relation with temporariness and a different conceptualisation of the home, expressed on the ground by distinctive built structures and everyday practices. At the same time, the various types of displacements can be also read as the outcome of specific aspects of complex historical processes.
In so far, the scholarly debate approached the Palestinian case mainly through the lenses of the conflict, hence often overlooking other dynamics that derive less directly from the Israeli occupation and that, nevertheless, are equally core to the construction of the Palestinian socio-spatial identity in the contemporary.
This contribution pursues a close-up view of the different homing cultures deriving from two processes of displacement that mostly characterise the today’s urban West Bank, explored through the case of two households respectively settled in Al-Amari Refugee Camp and Umm Al-Sharayiet.
Although closely situated in the suburb of Ramallah, the study cases represent quite opposite socio-spatial systems coexisting in the city, with Al-Amari being the long-term outcome of the forcible eviction of Palestinians by the Israeli occupation since 1948, developed through incremental and informal dynamics, and Umm Al-Sharayiet a recent neighbourhood largely built by private speculators in response to the internal migration of clerical workers from minor centres across the West Bank.
Drawing from Setha Low’s concept of “homing the city” (2016) and relying upon an extensive fieldwork that interpolates full-immersive ethnographic methods and architectural analysis, this contribution will redraw the relation with home and temporariness expressed by the two cases, contextualising the experience in the field within the broader frame of displacement processes.