Acts of Solidarity: Crossing and Reiterating Israeli-Palestinian Frontiers

In academic and public discourses on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict prevails still a ‘methodological nationalism’ based on a separatist imagination that overshadows the existence and role of Israeli-Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyzes micropolitical practices that cross existing frontiers both within Israel and between occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of ‘acts’, I read these ethnographic episodes in their intentional and performative dimension. What is the role of these ‘acts’? What are their effects on both the participants and the wider public? Through two interconnected cases, different functions of acts are explored. The first case relates to encounters between Israelis and Palestinian in the embattled city of Hebron in the occupied Palestinian territories; the second investigates moments of a Gandhi-inspired peace march at the ‘internal’ frontier of the Israeli Negev desert. The ethnographic perspective reveals what lies behind and beneath the acts, going beyond the obvious structures of power of the conflict. Acts function primarily as a valve of catharsis for the participants themselves, both overcoming and reproducing hegemonic discursive elements of the conflict. Paradoxically, acts of solidarity are often crucial in creating public knowledge about the conflict in more sectarian terms. 

Non-equilibrium properties of trapped ions under sudden application of a laser

Coherent quantum-state manipulation of trapped ions using classical laser fields is a trademark of modern quantum technologies. In this work, we study aspects of work statistics and irreversibility in a single trapped ion due to sudden interaction with the impinging laser. This is clearly an out-of-equilibrium process where work is performed through illumination of an ion by the laser. Starting with the explicit evaluation of the first moments of the work distribution, we proceed to a careful analysis of irreversibility as quantified by the nonequilibrium lag. The treatment employed here is not restricted to the Lamb-Dicke limit, what allows us to investigate the interplay between nonlinearities and irreversibility. We show, for instance, that in the resolved carrier and sideband regimes, variation of the Lamb-Dicke parameter may cause a non-monotonic behavior of the irreversibility indicator. Counterintuitively, we find a working point where nonlinearity helps reversibility, making the sudden quench of the Hamiltonian closer to what would have been obtained quasistatically and isothermally.

Lawyers & Truth Recovery Mechanisms: South Africa

Focusing on post-apartheid South Africa, the report explores the role of lawyers in truth recovery mechanisms.

The report was prepared by Dr Rachel Killean and draws on a series of interviews conducted in South Africa (with legal academics, ‘struggle’ lawyers, state lawyers, judges and human rights activists) as part of the wider Lawyers, Conflict and Transition project.

Dr Killean begins with an overview of the various roles the legal profession has played in South Africa, both during the apartheid era and post-transition.

The first half of the report then explores the role of lawyers as professional participants – firstly at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and secondly in the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.

The report then considers the notion of lawyers as subjects of truth recovery, looking in particular at the Special Legal Hearing on the legal profession as part of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In the concluding section Killean reflects on the extent to which lawyers influence the procedures and outcomes of truth recovery mechanisms and offers some concrete suggestions as to how the involvement of lawyers in such processes might be more effectively managed.

With regard to lawyers as subjects of truth recovery, she acknowledges the limitations of the South African model but posits that the endeavour must be applauded, not least because it demonstrated that it is possible to scrutinise the role of the legal profession in past conflict, and that it is worth wrestling with the associated challenges.