When is a child a child, a ceasefire a ceasefire? Scholarly and personal struggles with expert language

This article 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 article argues, has material impacts on the livelihoods of people living in conflict zones. The article focuses particularly on the discursive contestation surrounding the terms “ceasefire”, and “child/children” in Israel and Palestine. This aim is developed in the article on the right column. In the left column, I tell the reader why this matters to me. Here, the goal is to reveal in narrative form 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 sides 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.