Duties Without Rights? The Protection and Rights of Former Military interpreters and other Locally Engaged Civilians
Researcher: Sara de Jong
© IWM HTF-2006-007-091 (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205215885)
This project investigates the claims to protection and rights by Afghans and Iraqis who have worked for Western military forces, as well as on the activities and strategies of their advocates, including veterans, lawyers and civil society activists. While this project has a substantive empirical research component, drawing on semi-structured interviews with former military interpreters and other Locally Engaged Civilians (LECs) and their supporters in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, document analysis of (social) media, reports, government statements, court cases and (participant) observations of several national and international political meetings on LECs’ protection and rights of LECs, it also engages with key political theory questions. One such question is the relation between duties and rights in the case of non-citizens, including the bestowal of citizenship status as a ‘reward’ for exemplary services or achievements. The other central theme that this project grapples with are competing relations of obligation, such as the tension between a collectivist military ethic that posits the duty to ‘leave no one behind’ versus more limited contractual obligations to former military interpreters or more extensive requirements of (reciprocal) hospitality to strangers.