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ECPR

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The Politics of Silence

Conflict
Terrorism
Critical Theory
Power

Abstract

Particularly in the context of covert warfare, such as armed drone attacks, the concept of silence has gained increasing attention. Linked to questions of secrecy and the withholding of information by powerful actors on the one hand, silence has at the same time been studied through the inability of some actors to voice utterances and the exclusion of speaking by the subaltern (see Spivak 1988, Dingli 2017, Hansen 2000). This paper tries to move beyond the assumption of silence as the prerogative of powerful actors, be it through exclusion from speaking or withholding of information (see Kearns 2018). Investigating the discursive representation of current, covert bombing operations, such as armed drone attacks, the paper builds on critical security studies to analyse silence through the prism of three interrelated functions: (i) to hide and ignore, (ii) to create ambiguity and (iii) to acquiesce. Without making a claim as to the intentionality or meaning of silences, the paper takes the ambiguity of silence as a starting point for developing a framework to grasp the tension between silencing (the inability of making oneself heard) and silence-as-doing – and what this can tell us about current warfare.