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.

Extant literature on the Palestinian-Israeli separation wall privileges the wall's function in border-making, while ignoring other discursive and spacial functions it fulfills. My paper reaches beyond the border-making function of the wall, resituating it as a node among different spacial networks of activism, tourism, and electronic media. My paper argues that Palestinian tactical use of graffiti on the separation wall traverses these spatial networks and provides a case for us to consider graffiti not only as a process which links these networks, but also as a discursive tool through which Palestinians appeal to transnational actors, particularly those who are complicit with and invested in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. A historical analysis of graffiti in Palestine reveals the ways in which political messages have changed from localized, national contexts (Peteet 1996) to what I argue are transnational messages which link up to the different transnational networks that are centered around the wall. Drawing on De Certeau's (1988) concepts of strategy and tactic, my paper explores how transnational space is socially constructed around the wall. This dyad will be used to identify the wall as an Israeli strategy of controlling both Israeli and Palestinian space, while Palestinian resistance to and graffiti of the wall are examples of tactic. Sassen (2001), Castells (2012), and Fraser (2008) emphasize the importance of communications technologies in creating transnational networks and space. The ways in which images of the graffiti circulate in a transnational arena, especially through the use of internet, indicate the role of communications technologies, but decenters their importance in favor of the materiality of the wall and the networks that converge in it.

There was - and still there is - much talk and research about graffiti and street art that appeared for the first time after the revolution in Cairo, Alexandria and in other Egyptian cities. It is a real phenomenon, surprising and new, that literally boomed in an urban context full of bans. In 2011, revolution graffiti and street art became a tool to foster an anti-regime peaceful guerrilla in many Egyptian cities. It brought to the streets a (rarely violent) counter narrative that could be reproduced an infinite number of times by using, for example, the stencil technique of fast execution. Often small and therefore adaptable to any space, stencils could also be used by everyone, even by those who were not artists. In the Spring of 2011 a series portraits of the victims of the revolution drawn on Mohammed Mahmoud Street (in Cairo) contributed to replace the face of Mubarak, not only on physical walls but also in the collective memories of the people. Today, graffiti and street art in Cairo are mostly spread around symbolic centers of power, even if not all of the works have a political content. This presentation places a selection of relevant murals, stencils, and texts, that recently appeared on Cairo walls, on an online interactive map of the city. Reproducing these works on their significant geographical locations engenders an under-explored narrative of how the ongoing dissent spreads in Cairo. And in which the current regime’s propaganda is not absent.

The Syrian uprising is increasingly shaped by religious language. Not so much the call for freedom and self-expression dominates the public sphere but rather attempts at religiously framing the conflict between the Baath regime and the Syrian people. Images seem to be a key instrument among the different actors in mutually contesting their interpretation of reality as they allow conveying information much more direct than lingual descriptions as well as to simplify complex contexts and do not pose as high a risk of objection as lingual communication does. These images, still or moving, can act as support for an ideology on a formal as well as structural level and thereby fulfil tactical and strategic purposes. They have to be regarded as (artistic) treatment of socially dynamic processes which shall create a personal relation of the audience with the depicted subjects. The paper will analyze the media representation of the “Islamic State in Iraq and greater Syria” (ISIS), an extreme Islamist (or Jihadist) group linked to al-Qa’ida by exploring graphics mainly distributed on the Internet. It argues that Jihadist groups are foremost able to operate for a long time in unstable environments like Iraq and Syria because they communicate effectively with their audience in and out of the battlefield-country. The paper will particularly analyze means of visual communication and look at which motifs, subject matters, themes and typologies the ISIS applies to access the horizon(s) of experience and the cultural memory of its recipients in manifold ways and poses its ideological framework as a basis for the interpretation of the ongoing violent conflict. It will show how specific traditions of motifs are rebuilt, reconstructed or even changed and how a convergence of image and word are employed in order to support the group’s ideology and political goals.