ABSTRACT
Recent efforts to examine ‘silence’ as a meaningful concept for global politics were generally grounded in a fruitful, albeit mainly metaphorical and ideational, understanding of its possible value as political sign. Silence may be – in the most disparate fields – a telling expression of political repression, censorship, concealment, debasement, denial or ignorance. But also, conversely, the exact opposite, namely a form of conscious political agency, through which the politics of social resistance, dissent and contestation extends its semiotic repertoire (Hansen 2000; Bhambra and Shilliam 2009; Dingli 2015). That line of research convincingly underlines, through different analytical prisms, that the power of silence resides surely in its ‘inherent ambiguity’, as a form of simultaneous absence and presence through which power is exercised in all its modalities ‘whether for purposes of domination or of resistance’ (Achino-Loeb 2006, p. 3). This ambivalence of silence have been consistently examined in the most diverse fields of knowledge within social sciences and humanities, such as political philosophy (Le Breton 1997), social history (Aminzade 2001; Ben-Ze’ev et al. 2010; Corbin 2016), sociology (Beck 2002; Ferguson 2003; Parpart 2010; Wagner 2012; Sue 2015); gender studies (Ryan-Flood and Gill 2010), literary studies (Boldt et al. 2013), social anthropology (Achino-Loeb 2006), social psychology (Zielinski 1975), organization studies (Brinsfield et al. 2009) or communication (Noelle-Neumann 1985). The ambiguity of silence can be in addition examined not only in terms of the pragmatics of everyday language (Jaworski 1993; Tannen and Saville-Troike 1987; Thiesmeyer 2003; Nakane 2007), political discourse (Schröter and Taylor 2018), its rhetoric (Glenn 2004; Glenn and Ratcliffe 2011) or its emotional aspects (Thompson and Biddle 2013) but also in terms of the ethical challenges it entails (Billias and Vemuri 2017). For instance, a path-breaking study on sexual harassment published two decades ago explained not only how dominant groups silence marginalized members of society but also how sometimes marginalized groups themselves privilege or abandon another as well (Clair 1998).
