Description
Historically, being silent or acting silently has been understood as an apolitical, if not antipolitical, way of being political; because of this, the ways in which being silent could be understood as relevant to international politics has been underappreciated. However, there has been an uptake of interest in how being silent, or silent protests, can be a political intervention rather than something antithetical to being political. In this context, research on when such moments of silent protest are seen as political have brought to the fore their connotated international dimensions. As such, becoming relevant in this context is the question that guides this paper: why is silence being seen as political, and whose silence are we representing as relevant internationally? By asking what makes such silence’s so political distinct from a speech-centric account of political agency, the paper hopes to illustrate the limits to present framings of silence as political, and thus the difficulty of discerning whose silence, exactly, is seen as relevant internationally when represented as political. The paper’s concern is that dominant structures may frame silence as relevant internationally because working akin to other dominant modes of (discursive) political agency, and thereby narrowing our perception of whose silence is political and has international resonance. Therefore, the paper aims to capture how international studies of silent acts reproduce dominant structures of power that (may) reduce the broader insights we could gain from witnessing silent political acts from an international perspective.
