ABSTRACT
Within the discipline of international relations, silence preoccupied many leading scholars, ranging from Michel Foucault (1991) to Cynthia Enloe (2004). Tracing the lineage of this term within this literature demonstrates that it is frequently linked to the erasure of voice or the disempowerment of marginalised groups (Booth 2007; Fanon 2008; Galtung 1969; Said 2003 [1978]; Spivak 1988). It is also intimately linked to practices of violence, structural inequalities and ‘words that wound’ (Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado and Crenshaw 1993). Perhaps this is why most critical scholars are constantly looking for silences inside the ivory towers of the academy and in everyday life (Grayson 2010). Current thinking about silence is also influenced by those seeking to investigate an inability to fully comprehend, articulate and express traumatic events (Bargu 2017; Bell 2010; Edkins 2010; Fierke 2004). In such contexts and moments, silence can come to signify what cannot be spoken about. However, this chapter contends that such silences are not nothings. As Martin Heidegger remarked, ‘to keep silent does not mean to be mute. On the contrary, one who is mute still has the tendency to “speak”’ (2010, p.159). Elsewhere Susan Sontag argues that ‘silence is the artist’s ultimately other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world’ (2009, p. 6). Echoing a major theme developed in this edited volume, these latter accounts suggest that silence can be agential in multiple ways.
