Description
The increasing attention on the study of violent non-state actors has forced us to re-think political authority as not only belonging to the state but also to other forms of actors. Especially, rather than a zero-sum game between state and non-state, questions of the construction of political authority call our attention to the relational production of both state and non-state. In turn, this requires us to re-think aspects of political authority, which are not necessarily state-centric or related to the traditional understanding of how political authority is constituted and established. This paper contributes to this debate, by looking at the role of silence in constructing claims to political authority. Silence has been traditionally viewed as the denial of authority, which needs to be acknowledged in order to exist. Both declarative and constitutive theories of state recognition rely on this very assumption of the link between authority and publicity. By contrast, in the analysis of the relationship between the Italian state and the Sicilian mafia, silence assumes the form of a denial of existence, which constitutes claims to an alternative form of political authority while simultaneously contesting state-modes of authority formation.
