Abstract
In response to a proposed gap on silence identified by scholars in peace and conflict research, this thesis responds to the need for an empirical exploration of the prevalence and frequency of the concept of silence within academic texts. An analytic, corpus-based approach involving qualitative and quantitative research was used to determine the prevalence and frequency of silence within set corpora of journals within peace and conflict studies. The research aimed to establish an interdisciplinary and foundational understanding of silence and to create a framework that could be used to discuss silence, drawing on multi-disciplinary and polysemic understandings. Thirteen journals constituted the first part of the analysis, which used Boolean searches to examine the frequency of silence compared to other semiotic signs and whether those signs were likely to be in articles discussing concepts like peace and dialogue. Three of the thirteen journals, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Peace Research, and the Peace Review, were then reviewed using corpus and qualitative content analysis. The analysis focused on the frequency of the word silence across a range of active years by decade and looked more closely at articles published within a five-year period (2015 to 2019). Journal articles were analysed across publications and considered functions of time and publication type to identify whether there was a significant gap on silence in the literature and to understand how silence functioned conceptually in peace and conflict studies journals. Findings pointed to fewer mentions of forms of silence than voice and speech across thirteen journals. Results also indicated that when considering time as a function in a narrowed comparison and journal type, the type of journal was likely to impact frequencies of silence more than publication year. Researchers also tended to refer to silence in terms of Disclosure and framed it more in a conflict-centric manner. For researchers, these understandings can help frame future research on silence and other forms of communication in peace and conflict studies.