Global silences as privilege: The international community’s white silence on far-right terrorism

Abstract

Silences are not only absences in the spoken discourse or gaps in the discursive texture of international politics. They are important nodes of this texture and, as such, they constitute the political too. The said and the unsaid may work together to reify knowledge and shape international politics. Starting from this idea, this article scrutinizes global counter-terrorism as a discursive formation, composed of a spoken and an unspoken sphere. Within the silent dimension, the work focuses specifically on the silences in far-right terrorism and extremism. Scrutinizing global counter-terrorism as a racialized formation, the article argues that these silences are produced and reproduced by whiteness. Within the international community’s debates, whiteness gives rise to two kinds of silence – silence as the unspoken and the spoken as silencing. Examining them through the prism of whiteness, the article shows that these silences allow the maintenance of white privilege. This is the privilege of not being identified as a terrorist Other and not becoming the object of counter-terrorism measures, while having this privilege silenced and hidden. This work thus shows that, as gears of discursive formations, silences are racialized and may have colors – in this case, the color of white privilege.