Description
Silence and silencing have been of concern to scholars of international relations for at least three decades. Early works parsed the ways in which silencing constitutes epistemic, structural and institutional domination, while the latest literature has discussed the productive and resistive functions of silence and focused on communicative silences. Particularly, scholars examine how communicative silences manifest, what they ‘do’ in different communicative contexts and how they relate to existing power relations. This paper brings together the different strands of work on silence to theorise how silence constitutes the global. It discusses structural silences, communicative silence in institutional settings, like the UN, and processes like peacebuilding, as well as in diplomatic practices and the conduct of foreign policy. Finally, it examines silence as an ethical gesture in the context of movements for social, political and economic justice. The paper concludes that silence is certainly one of the most important forces in the constitution of the global in its ethical, micro and macro-political dimensions and one which we have still to pay adequate attention to.
