Analysing Graffiti Traces: Towards the Iconography of Conflicts and Violence Since 2011 the wall along Mohamed-Mahmoud-Street in Cairo exhibits more and more graffiti. The images show scenes of police violence, sexual assaults and gender inequality. Whereas, in Venezuela, graffiti often deals with a colonial past; and in South Africa again, issues of social disparity between ethnic groups are shown. Hence, this paper illustrates a theory-driven analysis of graffiti in order to examine regional conflicts and their impact on international discourses. Stressing the importance of graffiti as carrier of meaning in a given society, graffiti is seen as genuine mass media and gesture of occupation. It is the channel for different units of cultural information into the international discourse via newspapers, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. with its own and specific aesthetic. Protest movements unite similar narrations of recognition, as a basic anthropological requirement for any social existence. Together with their individual local history, they build a new – transnational – discourse about civilian resistance. Since contemporary graffiti all over the world is mainly based on the American graffiti style of the 1970’s, a transnational language of forms and symbols shaped up. Despite of local varieties, graffiti artists draw on standard and formalised codes of characters. Hence, graffiti is a local communication medium with a transnational language of symbols and globalised recipients. For the analysis, I combine discourse-analytical elements with the coding process of Grounded Theory. Furthermore I emphasise, according to the art historian Erwin Panofsky, the difference between semantics, syntax and pragmatics, but not exclusively of the images but also of the individual´s – the artist´s – action. Assuming that graffiti carries elements of meaning and notions of reality during the conflict in the discourse, and modifies or manifests them, it is seen as an art form to yield access to the iconography of everyday life in (post-)conflict societies.