The notion of third-party mediation can be traced back to ancient Roman accounts of the Sabine women, who according to Livy, had a high reputation for chastity and their role as peacemakers: thrusting their way between the embattled armies in the valley between Palatine and Capitol.

They] went boldly into the midst of the flying missiles with dishevelled hair and rent garments. Running across the space between the two armies they tried to stop any further fighting and calm the excited passions by appealing to their fathers in the one army and their husbands in the other not to bring upon themselves a curse by staining their hands with the blood of a father-in-law or a son-in-law, nor upon their posterity the taint of parricide. "If," they cried, "you are weary of these ties of kindred, these marriage-bonds, then turn your anger upon us; it is we who are the cause of the war, it is we who have wounded and slain our husbands and fathers. Better for us to perish rather than live without one or the other of you, as widows or as orphans."

Kindred or not, I very much prefer that the Sabine women did not cry out in such a way. In any case Jacques -Louis David's portrayal of their intervention in the painting above spooks me left, right and center. Can silence be a mediating force in the figural politics of third-party mediation? Does Echo’s peculiar (but overlooked silence) in the presence of Narcissus’ lament, as a “third party” in the famous scene of self-love, make for a reasonable model of mediation? Extending this idea of Echo’s “personal” mediation to the political-science framework of international conflict resolution and peacekeeping, how does one negotiate with the common perception that women are more peaceful in that they are less likely than men to support the use of international violence? Moreover, in keeping with the disciplinary questions of the feminism course that I'm taking this semester, how does one maintain an idea of collective action, affinity and sorority without succumbing to militarism? Or is the latter a necessary mediation of feminist debates in and of itself? Can feminist militarism be "silent"?