Description
This paper contributes to the growing caucus of scholars who point to the need to think about the multimodal qualities of silence in international politics (Hatzisavvidou, 2015: Freeden, 2015; 2023; Dingli, 2015: Dingli and Cooke 2017: Vieira et al., 2019: Hansen, 2019). This is because theorisation of how silence relates to politics has moved away from thinking about silence only as the effect of violence or domination–in contrast, silence is theorised as something that cannot be absolutely abolished but a productive problematic that can be an important part of, rather than antithetical to, understanding how political agency is enacted. Here, on the one hand, there is a joint interest in thinking about agency in less disciplined and established ways and thus there is a turn toward seeing how silence can upset dominant disciplinary framings of how political agency can be expressed. However, on the other hand, a keyway that the political potential of thinking about silence in a way that undisciplines our accounts of agency–especially expressions of agency from marginal(ised) positions–has been to cleave to performative theory of agency to capture this process. There is thus, a move toward a performative theory of agency as an attempt to move away from a logocentric account of what silence does in politics. Subsequently, this paper engages with the promises of, and limits to, performative accounts of silence due to a concern that a performative theory of silence may not do justice to the ambiguous, undisciplined, and chaotic way moments of silence can upend existing accounts of how political agency can be understood, articulated, or enacted. In light of this point, the paper thinks through the politics of silence in order to more adequately address the challenging ways in which silence is entwined with international politics and moments of politicisation.
