Description
This paper builds on previous research I conducted on the international community’s white silence on far-right terrorism. Here, I was looking at how global counter-terrorism - including P/CVE - can be approached as a discursive formation, composed of a spoken and an unspoken sphere. The present article will build on the analysis of the silent dimension, focusing specifically on the silences in far-right terrorism and extremism. Scrutinizing global counter-terrorism as a racialized formation, the article argues that these silences are produced and reproduced by whiteness. However, adding to this reflection, the present article want to take a stronger intersectional approach to the way far-right extremism is constructed at the intersection of various power dynamics - also (re)produced by silences in the discourse. Within the international community’s debates, whiteness gives rise to two kinds of silence – silence as the unspoken and the spoken as silencing. Examining them through the prism of whiteness, the article shows that these silences allow the maintenance of white privilege, but also gender and class constructions. This is the privilege of not being identified as a terrorist Other and not becoming the object of counter-terrorism measures while having this privilege silenced and hidden.
