In a new book, the Sociology of Law Department's Guest Professor Timur Dadabaev, and the University of Tokyo’s specially appointed professor Shigeto Sonoda, explore how silence, ambiguity, omission, and non-verbal practices function as absences in political communication and as meaningful social and diplomatic strategies that shape international relations and regional agency in Central Asia.
The authors write that strategic silence is "a way to resist domination without provoking confrontation, to preserve dignity and exibility, and to articulate identity through what is left unsaid. For [Central Asia], a region perpetually entangled with stronger neighbours and global pressures, silence is a language of survival and of subtle assertion. It marks agency in a world that often denies it."
Bringing together newly written chapters alongside substantially revisited earlier research, Dadabaev and Sonoda engages with broader questions highly relevant to sociology of law and socio-legal studies: how power operates through narratives, institutional language, selective visibility, and strategic non-articulation; how actors navigate asymmetric geopolitical environments; and how legal, political, and social orders are shaped not only by what is formally stated, but also by what remains deliberately unsaid.
Strategic Silences and Narrative Power in International Relations: Ambiguity and Non-verbal Diplomacy in Reframing Central Asian Agency is published by Routledge, and reflects the Sociology of Law Department’s continuing engagement with interdisciplinary research on governance, law, power, migration, regional transformation, and global inequalities.
Download and read more about the book on Taylor & Francis's website.