Description
This paper has two interconnected but distinct aims. The first is to examine how the lexicon of “essentially contested concepts” has expanded to include until recently uncontroversial “technical terms.” This broadening of discursive contestation, the paper argues, has material impacts on the livelihoods of people living in conflict zones. The paper focuses particularly on the discursive contestation surrounding the terms “ceasefire,” and “child/children” in Israel and Palestine. The paper at the same time engages with the personal journey that brought me to this question. Here, I tell the reader why this matters to me. The aim is to reveal in narrative form the “psychology of discovery” – the reasons that push me to want to investigate the discursive contestation around child/children. It is far from an “academic puzzle” or a “research gap” and indeed, the children I have spent much of my time investigating the fate of – boys held in “rehabilitation centres” in Northeast Syria – are not a “case study” for me. The two narratives try to speak to one another. They are two sides of the same inquiry – an attempt to put the personal and the academic in an open dialogue.
