A roadmap to peace. Journey metaphors in political speeches on the Middle East peace process

This paper investigates the metaphorical conceptualization of peace by former leaders George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, and Mahmoud Abbas. Specifically, it examines how peace/the peace process is conceptualized via metaphors through the notion of JOURNEY and MOVEMENT. The corpus in this study comprises twenty speeches given by the three politicians over a four-year period (2002-2005). The corpus data is analyzed using a combination of different methods. The tools are mainly Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al. 2010), and Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004). Findings reveal that JOURNEY metaphors are a vital and common part of the three politicians’ political discourse. Overall, there are very few metaphors for peace unique to the individual politicians. The main differences observed lie not in which metaphors are used, but in what aspects of peace or the peace process they are used to highlight.