Description
A focus on the study of concepts, born of the linguistic turn, is increasing across historical IR and international studies more generally. Its benefits are manifold: concepts are useful pedagogical tools (Berenskötter 2016 and 2025) and allow us to interrogate core disciplinary categories (see Bartelson on 'sovereignty' or Wang 2025 on 'the international'). Studying the political nature of concepts, however, is often done by invoking contestation (Berenskötter & Guzzini 2024). Though depicting conceptual meaning as "essentially contested" (Gallie 1956) is not a problem in itself, "contestation" has come to function as a shorthand for actual politics. Assuming continuity between linguistic and political contestation fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between the two. Inspired by Sylvia Federici's understanding of "struggle concepts", I argue that what makes political language 'political' is not contestation in the choice of what concept to use, but the ability of concepts to politicise different surfaces of our lives. Conceptualising 1970's mass incarceration as a 'race war' allowed American activists to connect their individual struggles into an abolitionist movement. More fundamental than linguistic contestation, concepts represent an ability to ontologise an object and de-individualise an experience.
