Professor Aidan Russell recently published a new book on Truth, Silence and Violence in Emerging States. The edited volume examines the histories of silence that permeate episodes of political violence. In this interview, Professor Russell shares his insight on the importance and complexity of this topic.

What is the main argument of the book?

The book brings together a diverse set of perspectives on the place of silence in histories of political violence across the world. We are particularly concerned with recognising the role of silence beyond the frame of memory alone - silence can enter into political violence at every stage in its history, from the act itself and as a continuous ‘presence’ in life after the fact, not solely as something to be ‘broken’ in arenas of transitional justice or historical research. Thinking about silence particularly in its relationship to power, speech, and history itself, we argue that this complex and changing profile is best approached by thinking about ‘regimes of silence’: the diverse mechanisms, pressures and means of control (social, cultural, political or otherwise) that keep certain things out of normal speech.

Had that history been examined previously and, if so, what did you seek to add or examine further with this work, and with what results?

Issues of silence have attracted a lot of attention over the years, especially in terms of memory, memorialisation and transitional justice, in the work of different disciplines like linguistic anthropology, or in critical work on historiography such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s famous Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Individual historical cases have similarly placed silence at the centre - think of accounts of Indian Partition violence or Cold War ‘disappearances’ in Latin America. What our book seeks to do is to take ‘silence’ as a shared point of contact between these different experiences and perspectives, and so disrupt some of the assumptions and limitations in the ways we approach them. By going beyond any one point of departure (silence as a strategy of violent rule, or the retrospective silences of memory, for example), we show how the shared form of silence, and the diverse mechanisms for creating or enforcing it, constitute a critical common field for understanding the experiences of states emerging from colonial, military or other authoritarian rule across the late twentieth century.
 

Can we entertain an idea of a 'history of silence', and if so what would be its contours and what can it offer to our understanding of societies, peoples and state?

I find it a provocative and useful tool to think with, but also a dangerously misleading one. Importantly, as ‘expressive’ as silence can be, it can also be extremely deceptive - from the outside, we are rarely in the position to really know what is being kept hidden, and can easily end up assigning words to what we think people weren’t saying. This puts us - the historians - in the centre, rather than the people we claim to be writing about. With this in mind, in my chapter in the book I try to suggest how we might go about the task of telling the history of a silence, considering how people continuously refrained from talking explicitly about one act of violence in Burundi. But what this means practically is telling the history of how controls around speech (political or social taboos, the use and scope of euphemisms, the performative silence of memorials) can fluctuate and be used for different purposes by different actors. The 'silence’ stays the same, and so the history we can tell is the history of the words and acts around that silence, that seem to put it to different purposes and give it different meanings across time. Starting with a ‘history of silence’, we end up with history of a ‘regime’ of silence - if we’re lucky, that means uncovering a powerful and discomfiting underside of historical experience, getting a feel for the sensitivities, dangers and double meanings that lie behind the things that aren’t spoken, rather than all the words that go into histories as people and states want to tell them.