Sophia Dingli – författare

Security studies and international relations have conventionally relegated gendered analysis to the margins of academic concern, most commonly through the ‘women in’ or ‘women and’ politics and IR discourse. This comprehensive volume contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. By foregrounding the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, the authors pay particular attention to frameworks which query their very existence. In doing so, the collection as a whole troubles the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, the book provides an approach that allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analysis of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation.

This book was originally published as an online special issue of the journal Third World Thematics.

Security studies and international relations have conventionally relegated gendered analysis to the margins of academic concern, most commonly through the ‘women in’ or ‘women and’ politics and IR discourse. This comprehensive volume contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. By foregrounding the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, the authors pay particular attention to frameworks which query their very existence. In doing so, the collection as a whole troubles the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, the book provides an approach that allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analysis of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation.

This book was originally published as an online special issue of the journal Third World Thematics.

The notion of ‘silence’ in Politics and International Relations has come to imply the absence of voice in political life and, as such, tends to be scholastically prescribed as the antithesis of political power and political agency. However, from Emma Gonzáles’s three minutes of silence as part of her address at the March for Our Lives, to Trump’s attempts to silence the investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, along with the continuing revelations articulated by silence-breakers of sexual harassment, it is apparent that there are multiple meanings and functions of political silence – all of which intersect at the nexus of power and agency.

Dingli and Cooke present a complex constellation of engagements that challenge the conceptual limitations of established approaches to silence by engaging with diverse, cross-disciplinary analytical perspectives on silence and its political implications in the realms of: environmental politics, diplomacy, digital privacy, radical politics, the politics of piety, commemoration, international organization and international law, among others. Contributors to this edited collection chart their approaches to the relationship between silence, power and agency, thus positing silence as a productive modality of agency.

While this collection promotes intellectual and interdisciplinary synergy around critical thinking and research regarding the intersections of silence, power and agency, it is written for scholars in politics, international relations theory, international political theory, critical theory and everything in between.