Occupied by non-violence: Exploring male Palestinian resistance activists’ use of strategic silences in (re)narrating the Palestinian struggle
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231166576 |
| Author | Emma Swan |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
International Journal
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231166576
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Occupied by non-violence:
Exploring male Palestinian
resistance activists’use of
strategic silences in (re)
narrating the Palestinian
struggle
Emma Swan
Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
Abstract
Liberal peacebuilding has had its fair share of critiques. Along with highlighting its
neo-liberal and Western-centric foundations, scholars have also drawn attention to
its disregard for Indigenous peace frameworks. Peacebuilding in Palestine is no
exception. Based on ethnographic research in the West Bank, this paper examines
Orientalist narratives of Palestinian men embedded within theliberal peacebuilding
framework and highlights the way that men engaged in unarmed resistance have
navigated this terrain through the adoption of public transcripts which (re)narrate
the Palestinian story/experience. I argue that this adoption can be interpreted as an
act of critical agency where the silencing of their own beliefs is turned on its head to
empower and further their agenda and goals. In this way, representation,
knowledge, and silence can be understood as not only tools of colonial control, but
also tools for Indigenous resistance to Western discourses, narratives, and
representations.
Keywords
Silence, hidden transcripts, Palestine, resistance, orientalism
Corresponding author:
Emma Swan, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, PO Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria,
British Columbia, V8W 2Y2, Canada.
Email: eswan083@uottawa.ca
2022, Vol. 77(4) 592–614
Scholarly Essay
What could be more empowering than raising your voice to “speak truth to power”?Or
using one’s voice to refuse subjugation and deny those more powerful the right to define
you, represent you, speak for you? For many decades, raising one’s voice to speak truth
to power was considered the gold standard of individual agency, proof of empow-
erment, and “the ultimate sign of power.”
1
The flip side of this, of course, is that
silencing or omitting one’s personally held beliefs, experiences, and preferences often
has been understood as a sign of disempowerment and weakness. As feminist scholars
such as Jane Parpart began to pull on the threads holding together these assumptions,
their unraveling provided new insights around the possibility that “silence was not
simply about being silent or silenced; it could also be a form of power.”
2
While Edward
Said famously drew attention to the way Palestinians have been denied the right to
narrate, tell their story, and represent themselves as a consequence of Orientalism, this
paper aims to explore the ways that Palestinian men involved in unarmed resistance
have found ways to navigate this assumed silencing. Knowing that power operates on
multiple levels, and that “where there is power, there is resistance,”
3
invites us to
question and seek out sites of resistance to the omnipresent power of Orientalism.
Doing so can help to identify examples and ways that individuals navigate these spaces.
Once we identify these, we can go deeper, to tease out and make visible the tools they
use to do so. This paper aims to do just that. Answering the calls of Parpart to reconsider
gender, silence, voice, and agency in a turbulent world,
4
this paper explores the use of
strategic silences, omissions, and hidden transcripts by Palestinian men engaged in
unarmed resistance in the West Bank. It argues that research participants silence, self-
censor, and omit their own Indigenous frameworks for understanding their resistance
activism and instead adopt frameworks, discourse, and tactics more closely aligned
with liberal peacebuilding actors and donors in order to gain access to opportunities to
(re)narrate their story to the world, to represent themselves in such a way as to be seen
as humans deserving of human rights, equality, freedom, and independence. This paper
therefore offers an agentic-focused approach which helps us see the surprising and
inaudible tools (strategic silences, omissions, and hidden transcripts) that individuals
employ to navigate and overcome structural inequalities and oppression. In doing so, it
also contributes to the broader scholarship on agency, silence, power, and voice by
providing a context-specific empirical account of what is missed when we rely on a
simplistic and binary understanding of voice as agency, and silence as oppression.
1. JaneParpart, “Rethinking silence, gender, and power in insecure sites: Implications for feminist security
studies in a postcolonial world,”Review of International Studies 46, no. 3 (2020): 315–324.
2. Ibid., 317.
3. MichaelFoucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978),
95.
4. Parpart, “Rethinking silence,”318. Also see Jane Parpart and Parashar Swati, eds., Rethinking Silence,
Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains: Beyond the Binary (London: Routledge, 2019); and
Jane Parpart, “Choosing silence: Rethinking voice, agency and women’s empowerment,”in Róis´
ın Ryan-
Flood and Rosalind Gill, eds., Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process(New York: Routledge, 2010).
593
Swan
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