Dr. Roee Kibrik, chaired by Dr. Leonie Ansems de Vries, discussant: Dr. Filippo Costa-Buranelli
Tuesday 22 March 2016, 5pm, War Studies Meeting Room (K. 6.07)
Embracing the notion that concepts are a foundation of political behavior and that politics is at the base of conceptualization processes, researchers have focused on the political and social processes of attributing meanings to concepts. This work contributes to this effort by introducing the idea that the state of concepts can be an analytical tool which assists researchers and practitioners who delve into this field of concepts. It argues that a concept can be in one out of four states: stable, contested, essentially contested, or destabilized. The concept’s state derived from the specific historical context of relations and interactions between existing knowledge, socio-political structures and practices and experiences. The state of a concept has consequences in terms of the political actors’ ability to communicate and project a future act and execute it effectively. The paper takes the example of sovereignty in Jerusalem to demonstrate the political and epistemological advantages of recognizing that concepts have different states.
Roee Kibrik is an Israel Institute postdoctoral Fellow, and a visiting researcher at King’s College London, the Department of War Studies. He received his PhD. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the department of International Relations. His work has focused on the socio-cognitive processes that shaped the behaviour of the Israeli actor in the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He integrates insights from political theory, political psychology, language and history, in order to expose the complex relations between theory and politics and describe different dynamics of mutual construction and change. In the last years he served as a Neubauer Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel-Aviv, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow
RCIR: Research Centre in International Relations 