Early versions of this paper were presented at the Second Languages at War Annual Workshop, Imperial War Museum, London, 28 May 2010, and at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual convention, Chicago, 26-29 March 2011. The research was carried out as part of the project Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council, while I was employed at the University of Southampton. A British Academy Overseas Conference Award supported the presentation of this research at AAAL. Thanks are due to Louise Askew, Mona Baker, Hilary Footitt, Eric Gordy, Michael Kelly, and Simona Tobia, to discussants and attendees at the panels in London and Chicago, and to the editor of Slavic Review and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for comments that have improved it greatly.

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8. Burawoy, Michael, “Reaching for the Global,” in Burawoy, , ed., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley, 2000), 4.Google Scholar Ethnographers trained by Burawoy have studied groups such as U.S. shipyard workers facing casualization and Hungarian mothers affected by the postsocialist shift from universal welfare payments to means-tested benefits and have sought and explained “lacunae or anomalies” in existing theories of globalization. Burawoy, “Reaching,” 27-28.

9. See Footitt, Hilary and Kelly, Michael, eds., Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (Basingstoke, Eng., 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. These interviews are drawn from 52 oral history interviews with 51 people carried out for the University of Southampton's research into peacekeeping in Bosnia- Herzegovina as part of the comparative study Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict.

11. Because this individual had worked only in Croatia, his interview is not considered in this article.

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21. Kaldor, Mary, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, 1999), 6–9, 31-68.Google Scholar Nordstrom's and Duffield's demonstrations of the globalization of war are focused on the present, with Duffield in particular seeing it as a consequence of post-Cold War changes in international relations. The historian Tarak Barkawi, however, reminds us that the development-security nexus is only the latest form of globalizing war, which has depended on interconnection and transfers of resources for much longer than a presentist outlook on globalization would suggest. Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham, Md., 2006), 15. Understanding the global dimension of war requires an understanding of culture, which Barkawi incorporates into his history of war by showing how “cultural frameworks derived from wartime experience” accelerate globalization by forcing people toward an awareness of unfamiliar places (Globalization, 80-81). Language—the competence interpreters supply—is less central in his history, despite a section on language in the British empire's Indian army (Globalization, 92). One way to write language into the globalization of war is offered by Vicente Rafael, who has shown how the United States has instrumentalized foreign languages and trained Americans in languages of the Other in order to project its own power abroad: during the war and insurgency in Iraq, Rafael argues, the locally recruited interpreter becomes an object of suspicion by virtue of the very fact that translation can never represent the transfer of all possible meanings from one language to another: Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire,” Social Text, no. 101 (Winter 2009): 1-23. For an analysis of why the states that intervened in Bosnia-Herzegovina lacked mass local-language capacity among their own citizens and therefore had to rely on locally employed interpreters, see Kelly, Michael, “Issues in Institutional Language Policy: Lessons Learned from Peace-Keeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” European Journal of Language Policy 3, no. 1 (2011): 61–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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23. Under socialist Yugoslavia's ideology of “workers’ self-management,” social enterprises, run by workers’ councils, were the equivalent of state-owned enterprises in the Soviet bloc.

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28. Employers did not demand a languages degree, let alone a professional interpreting qualification, from their interpreters but usually asked them to pass some sort of test before their employment could be confirmed. Sometimes, interpreters’ prospective supervisors at bases desperate for language support would bypass their own force's policy and hire the interpreter on an informal basis, widi payment in supplies or no pay at all, until the formalities were complete.

29. A year or two after this last interviewee had started working, the divisional headquarters began enforcing a minimum working age of eighteen and reportedly terminated several young interpreters’ contracts.

30. Dubravka, interview, Banja Luka, 9 May 2010.

31. Zorica, interview, Pale/Sarajevo, 27 October 2009.

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36. E.g., one interpreter remembered that an UNPROFOR colleague injured by shrapnel had been funded to have surgery in western Europe. Yet whether liaison officers would stand up for their interpreters at checkpoints depended entirely on the whim of the officer concerned.

37. Gordon (air force officer), interview, London, 26 June 2009.

38. Fred (British army linguist), interview, Germany, 24 July 2009.

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43. As SFOR shifted its role from security to liaison, many SFOR bases closed and fewer night patrols were used. By 2010, this had converted many EUFOR field interpreter posts to office-hours positions.

44. Dubravka, interview, Banja Luka, 9 May 2010.

45. Larisa Jašarević, “Everyday Work: Subsistence Economy, Social Belonging, and Moralities of Exchange at a Bosnian (Black) Market,” in Bougarel, Duijzings, and Helms, eds., New Bosnian Mosaic, 279.

46. Many interviewees could still remember pay rates, e.g., a British battalion commander who served in 1993 thought his unit's interpreters had been on 400-500 DM a month; interpreters employed by British forces in the Republika Srpska around 2000 remembered salaries of 1,000-1,800 DM; UNPROFOR in Sarajevo paid $300-$400 in 1993 and two interpreters in Pale recalled receiving $600 and $800, respectively; the civil affairs team at IFOR/SFOR headquarters paid its interpreters $900 in 1996 and $1,100 in 1998; at Zetra, one woman began as a secretary at $600 a month and was later promoted to a language assistant at $750; by 2009, after a professionalization process at SFOR headquarters had started in 2000, a headquarters interpreter hired at the lowest NATO grade (LCH 4) could expect a starting salary around 1,500 KM with biennial increments during their first twelve years of employment.

47. Most interpreters in Bosnia-Herzegovina were employed by “national contingents” (foreign units deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina and funded by their national defense ministries) rather than directly through the force headquarters in Sarajevo.

48. International Crisis Group, Bosnia's Precarious Economy: Still Not Open for Business, ICG Balkan Report 115 (Sarajevo, 2001), 6. See also Pugh, Michael, “Postwar Political Economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Spoils of Peace,” Global Governance 8, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 467-82.Google Scholar

49. These included foreign military bases, duty-free shops for international workers, towns outside siege lines, and shops in Croatia where some UN units had their rear headquarters.

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52. Suljagić, Postcards, 38.

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54. Keith Brown, who has studied private military contractors recruiting Macedonians to work in Iraq, notes that, in this work, the category “foreign civilian” is further broken down into a hierarchy associating certain jobs with certain nationalities. He suggests that Macedonians “are placed or place themselves in a different occupational category from Serbs, Croats and Bulgarians, as well as western Europeans.” Brown, “From the Balkans to Baghdad (via Baltimore): Labor Migration and the Routes of Empire,” Slavic Review 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 834. The experiences of Bosnian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve research but were beyond the scope of this project.

55. At that time, a major Bosnian jobs portal was http://www.posao.ba/job.php?jobID=54919 (accessed 9 May 2011; no longer available).

56. While much more deserves to be said about gender and interpreting, a full analysis of how this work was gendered is beyond the scope of this paper.

57. Interpreter, interview, Pale, 27 October 2009.

58. Boba, interview, Sarajevo, 28 October 2009.

59. Jašarević, “Everyday Work,” 279.

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