Description
As of late (Lavender et al., 2025), the field of silence studies has substantiated Ferguson’s (2003), and now Vieira’s (2025), claim that “silence […] can be used to constitute selves and even communities”. Subsequently, scholars of silence are concerned with how silence can be constitutive to politics, and to this end said scholars have moved away from thinking about agency in logocentric and voluntarist terms. However, in shifting away from a logocentric and voluntarist account of agency, there is a notable absence in the silence studies literature regarding reflections on how engaging with the politics of silence transforms our understanding of what politics as a general activity involves. This paper attempts to, subsequently, do good on the calls within silence studies (Jung, 2021: Ferguson, 2003 and 2011; Rollo, 2017; Vieira, 2025) to think through how silence transforms our understanding of politics. In doing so, the paper proposes that the politics of silence can be transformational regarding how we understand politics in both domestic and international contexts in three ways: regarding, 1) how politics happens, 2) where politics happens, and 3) when politics happens. By relating silence to these axes of politics, the paper proposes that a promising way that silence challenges and transforms our thinking of what the activity of politics involves is by enabling us to think differently about what the choreography of politics involves. The paper therefore shows how the politics of silence relates to the choreography of politics to the end of transforming our understanding of what is involved in politics in both domestic and international contexts, a point that is substantiated in the context of how silence has been an explicit part of British pacifist politics in the 20th and 21st century.
