The Weight of Silence

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Silence is usually taken as absence — the lack of words, the pause between actions. Yet silence also speaks. It can protect, conceal, or resist. It can be imposed to stifle dissent, or chosen to withhold legitimacy from a system that demands participation on its own terms.

In my research, silence often appears not as a void but as a tactic. Survivors of violence sometimes use it to protect themselves, just as communities under oppressive systems have used it as quiet refusal. At other times, silence is evidence of harm — when people no longer believe that speaking will make a difference.

Understanding silence in this layered way matters. It reminds us that what is not said can be as powerful as what is spoken, and that true inquiry must account for both. To listen well is to hear not only the words but also the silences that surround them.

—Antony

On Governance and Fragility

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When people speak about governance, they often mean rules, policies, or institutions. But governance also has a more fragile dimension: the trust that people place in systems, and the willingness of those systems to act with integrity.

In South Africa, as elsewhere, the conversation about corruption is usually framed in terms of individuals who abuse their positions. That view is not wrong, but it can obscure the deeper reality, that corruption flourishes when structures themselves invite exploitation, when opacity is rewarded, and when accountability becomes optional.

The fragility is not only in leadership but in the very frameworks that claim to protect the public. Strong governance is less about new regulations and more about the disciplined application of clarity, transparency, and restraint. Without these, the law itself becomes another tool of manipulation.

It is in exposing these patterns that research has a role: not to moralise, but to reveal the ways systems bend, and to insist on alternatives that do not.

—Antony

Thinking in Layers

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Much of my work has led me to see knowledge not as a single block but as something layered. Each layer carries traces of the one beneath it, yet also opens new ground for interpretation and application.

This layered way of thinking is central to Stratad Theory. It resists the urge to leap to conclusions and instead demands precision: naming what is there, arranging it carefully, and then moving higher only when the foundation is solid.

The result is not just theory for theory’s sake, but a structure that can be tested, questioned, and used. In this sense, thinking in layers is not an abstraction but a practical discipline — one that reveals both the fragility and the resilience of ideas.

—Antony