The Afterlives Network at the International Studies Association Conference
San Francisco April 2 - 6 2024
Panel One: WD73: Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:45 PM
The Missing, the Disappeared and the Dead: Reimagining peace and the politics of the ‘absent’ in global politics.
Chair: Kar Yen Leong
Discussant: Caroline Bennett
The continued political impact of the ‘absent’ in conflict—notably the missing, the disappeared and the dead —is essential for understanding the potential for sustainable forms of peace. What the absent means in this panel is distinctive to each context; are for instance the missing assumed dead, what is known of the disappeared, and for the dead is there an intact body or otherwise? The targeting of civilians in warfare, the execution of ‘enemies’ by the state, and the violence of colonial occupation might all be assumed to ensure an erasure of certain people and groups from political life. And yet the absent—whether their fates remain unknown or otherwise—can remain deeply disruptive and either hinder or enable the durability of transitions to peace. By emphasising relationality, this panel will examine the interactions and connections between the living-present (between survivors, families, civil society actors and states) as well as the ongoing and intergenerational relations between the living-present and those absent. In doing so the political consequences that the absent have for peace will be revealed in terms of gendered impacts, on the legitimacy of systems of governance, and in the ability to fulfil cultural obligations.
The politics of absence: Peacebuilding and missing persons after conflict
Simon Robins
Missing a loved one in armed conflict represents one of the most highly impacting of rights violations and as such is readily instrumentalised politically by those who seek to prolong conflict. Here, a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of having a missing relative on conflict and peacebuilding is presented, rooted in the ambiguous loss framework as a lens linking psychosocial impacts to collective and political responses. Preliminary empirical data are presented that show both the practical use of the missing issue as a collective trauma that can be used to drive political mobilisation against the other of conflict, as well as how the issue can also support peacebuilding efforts. The latter includes the building of solidarities between families of the missing on both sides of the conflict, in recognition of their common suffering, and the missing as an issue that drives engagement between states emerging from conflict despite continuing tensions between them.
Managing the missing?: Gender, agency and “the disappeared” in Bougainville
Nicole George
Accounting for Bougainville’s estimated 2000 missing persons in the wake of the 1990s civil war is recognised to be a challenge for durable peace. In this paper, I consider how gender shapes permissible relations towards “the disappeared” in media commentary, conflict accounts and International Red Cross reporting on this issue in the last decade. As I will show, when focussed on women’s experiences, these reports emphasise static and unchanging emotional connections to the missing; women who are burdened by their grief or scarred by violence if they have sought information. By contrast, depictions of men’s relationship to the missing denies them a capacity for emotional connection. Here the missing are more likely to be invoked as a motivation for male-led political advocacy campaigns or, as an embodied impediment to male-led projects of post-conflict reconstruction. I conclude with reflections on the ways that recent International Red Cross efforts to memorialise Bougainville's missing continue to “build-up” these longstanding gendered tropes.
The Space between ‘Bottom Up’ and ‘Top Down’: Strategies for the Identification of Disappeared People
Adriana Rudling and Natalia Bermúdez Qvortrup
This paper focuses on a specific device of state intervention for the preliminary identification of human remains used in Colombia since the beginning of the early 2000s known as Revista Rastros. Consisting of periodicals containing photographic evidence of the belongings found alongside the unidentified bodies, this documentation practice aimed to fulfil the interlinked goals of identification, dignified return, accountability, or memorialization. By placing these archives at the center of our investigation we show how the state intermittently supported the search for the disappeared and, by distributing them to civil society organisations, created a space between ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ in identification practices. By following the social life of these catalogues - their creation, their temporal and special movement, use, significance and what might become of them in the new bureaucracy of disappearance established with the 2016 Peace Agreement - we map the effects of this documentation practice in the global landscape of disappearance and missingness. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key actors on both sides of the process, we develop a better understanding of the intersection of interests and spaces between the state actors and victims and victims’ representatives involved.
Funerals with No Bodies: Rethinking Death and Mortuary Rituals in the Aftermath of Genocide
Hariz Halilovich
Amina Hadziomerovic
The Bosnian War (1992-1995) resulted in grave loss of human life and dignity, among which thousands disappeared and were categorized as the “missing”. These victims were killed and buried in mass graves at undisclosed locations, a process that resulted in disarticulation of bodies and commingling of the remains. To this day, the fragmentation and dispersion of victims continue to complicate the efforts of accounting for the missing. The “open-endedness” of the loss wrought on many sociocultural and spiritual levels creates challenges for the affected families and communities, including the disruption in traditional demarcation of the dead from the living. Concerned with conditions that suspend the traditional burial practices and mourning, we explore the improvisation of mortuary rites and rituals within the context of post-genocide Bosnia. Drawing upon our ethnographic research in Bosnia and in the diaspora, we discuss the complexities of disembodied loss through analysis of “repeated burials”, collective funerals and the ritual of the posthumous semi-consecration of the victims. We argue that the reinvention of mortuary rituals and associated cultural practices play the vital role in helping communities adapt to the conditions of social rupture in the aftermath of genocide.
The Global Dead: Contesting aggregation and anonymity in the reproduction of peace.
Damian Grenfell
It is common in the aftermath of war to see considerable effort put into determining the total number of those killed. Statistically anonymized, categorized and reproduced within a national scale, the aggregated dead are understood in this paper as an extension or adaptation of necro-politics; less a decision on who dies so much as a determination of how the dead are ‘kept alive’ for instrumental political purposes. Such aggregates, not like other measures, serve to buttress human rights agendas, justify transitional justice initiatives and underpin processes of state legitimation. And yet in contexts where the veneration of the dead is essential to the achievement of peace anonymity is an anathema to its realisation. While the ‘local’ remains vital, this paper argues that the globality of social relations offers ways of bypassing, potentially contesting and even reshaping the necro-political dimensions of peacebuilding and transitional justice. Spatial and temporal reconfigurations under globalizing conditions for example allow the transfer of resources, the disembodied co-presence in funerary rituals, and for new patterns of veneration to occur. At the very least, such forms of globally integrated relations provide alternative pathways for peace interventions and challenge the necro-political subsumption of the dead into aggregate form.
Panel Two: FC78: Friday 1:45 PM - 3:30 PM
Necro-Control and Contestation in the (re)politiziation of the Dead in global politics
Chair: Damian Grenfell
Discussant: Adriana Rudling
The human corpse—especially when existing in concentrated masses and as a result of untimely deaths—poses political risk when suggestive of a loss of control, of political decline or even social collapse. In this panel the dead of war, those executed by coercive states, and the deceased as a result of pandemics are each examined in terms of the elite narratives that variously seek to mitigate risk, control the still living, and mobilise the dead for political purposes. Necro-control becomes a political imperative to ensure human remains do not actually reveal what is wrong with societies whether that be masking injustices, social hierarchies, and ultimately the necro-political acts of determining which’ or ‘who dies’and how people die. And yet, via a consideration of aesthetics, of imagery and of text, of ritual and of the corpse itself, this panel examines relations between the living and the dead as complex interplays, intersections and mutualities that can have onward political consequences that belie easy analysis. Various and often overlapping outcomes are possible as certain relations may animate politics in deeply localised ways while others are reconstituted transnationally and even globally, challenging for instance attempts at nationally framed forms of necro-control.
Washing, Shrouding, Autopsying, Excavating: Mass Graves as Transnational Spaces
Jessica Auchter
Dead body management raises ethical, political, and aesthetic questions. I begin by localizing these questions through the novel The Corpse Washer, about an Iraqi man from a family of corpse washers who seeks a life as an artist. When American forces arrive and the body bags pile up, he returns to his family career, but begins to view death through his newly acquired aesthetic lens. The repetitive washing and shrouding is at odds with the increasingly horrifying corpses he encounters, from the severed head to the drug overdose, signs of conflict and the desperation of a society that has lost hope. The novel helps raise questions about the tensions, contradictions, and overlap between the aesthetic and the political in dead body management. The paper extrapolates these questions from the individual to the transnational, also exploring the paradoxical chaos and precision of the excavation of mass graves after atrocity, including the centralizing of evidentiary narratives and the often-public disaggregation of the dead as a mechanism of management. The ultimate aim of the paper is to understand graves as transnational spaces, and to consider how the management of the dead post-conflict functions as all at once a scientific, artistic, and political practice.
The global relations of genocide’s dead: a Cambodian case
Caroline Bennett
In this paper I will examine the global connections of the Cambodian genocide, with specific attention to relations to the dead. Globalisation was central to the Cambodian genocide, as well as to the way the Khmer Rouge regime is portrayed and remembered today. It is also central to how many of those killed are re-introduced into social worlds of the living, and thus made into political beings again. The dead of genocide are often the imagined others at the centre of globalisation. By positioning relations to the dead as central to contemporary and historical understandings of the Cambodian genocide, I will consider how networks of care extend across time and borders, and how through tourism, scholarship, art, and politics, individual global actors become involved in re-politicising those killed by the Khmer Rouge. Because who can re-politicise the dead expands from the state to the global community, both the living and the dead resist necropolitics on the global scale, and the Khmer Rouge regime is brought into new networks of understanding and experience that continually recreate its meaning and relations both in Cambodia and abroad.
Traces of Life: Visuality and the death penalty in Southeast Asia
Kar Yen Leong
Despite a decrease in the use of capital punishment, the Asian region continues to be a global ‘death row’. Many retentionist regimes can still be found in this region and no other states carry out more executions than the governments of Southeast Asia. As part of a project encompassing three countries within the region, this paper will be investigating the ‘addiction’ these states have towards the use of the death penalty by focusing on the island-nation of Singapore. This paper deviates from the usual statistical analysis focusing instead on narratives and visuality by analysing photographs taken of death row inmates before their executions by asking: what affects do these photographs carry amongst the living? In this paper, these photographs are taken to contain ‘traces’ embodied psychically, socially, and materially. How do these elements become part of the ‘after life’ as families and loved ones remember those executed? This paper aims to understand how photographs and other materials such as personal letters serve to undo the silence cast over the use of the death penalty and to bring to the fore the human face and stories hidden behind the discourse of law and punishment.
New York’s frozen Covid dead
Sally Raudon
Early in Covid-19’s first wave in Spring 2020, New York City’s death toll rose so fast that bodies were stored in freezer trailers on the streets. These mobile morgues signalled how the pandemic had disrupted rituals and mourning. Twelve months’ later, when cremation and burial slots were no longer log-jammed, hundreds of deceased New Yorkers were still held inside morgue trucks. Why would some families seemingly abandon their loved ones? Why not take up the offer of a free burial on Hart Island, the city’s massed grave for public burials? Morticians, politicians, and bereaved families had different understandings about how to care for the dead and, crucially, the right speed and schedule for doing so. The frozen bodies were metaphorical but overwhelmingly material and temporal. Death always prompts a time map of care, and when these predicted life course temporalities do not line up the problems can be social and spiritual as well as biological, because death care can be life sustaining. Frictions over the morgue trucks exposed another example of how Covid illuminated structural inequalities in some New Yorkers’ lives, and how this slow violence can persist after death.
The limits of necro-governmentality: socio-political practices around the dead and missing in Timor-Leste, Sri Lanka and Aceh
Lia Kent
This paper explores, through empirical cases, the power of ‘necro-governmentality’ (Rojas-Perez 2017: 257) and its limits. Necro-governmentality – the structuring of social responses to the dead – is a form of power that is prominent in the aftermath of political violence, a period when states seek to contain destabilising experiences of grief and loss. It operates through discursive and material strategies, enrolling the dead into linear narratives of suffering and recovery, remaking some dead bodies as sacrificial subjects, and delineating the grieveable from the ungrieveable. An examination of local practices of searching, recovering, reburying and caring for the dead and missing of political violence in Timor-Leste, Sri Lanka and Aceh reveals that necro-governmentality, while pervasive, is not all-encompassing. Attempts by political elites to structure social responses to the dead and missing frequently encounter other forms of power and sources of political ordering that disrupt and at times transform them. This includes the power of the dead and the missing themselves to provoke strong emotions amongst, and activate urgent responses from, the living. The dead and the missing are revealed to be unruly political actors who cannot be fully controlled and contained by the state.
Round Table: FD35: Friday 4:00 PM - 5:45 PM
Methods for Researching the Missing, the Disappeared and the Dead in the Context of Conflict and Crises
Chair: Simon Robbins
Discussant: Lia Kent
Adriana Rudling, Amina Hadziomerovic, Kar Yen Leong, Sally Raudon, Hariz Halilovich, Caroline Bennett, Damian Grenfell.
This round table examines methods and methodological approaches for undertaking research into the missing, the disappeared and the dead in contexts including state sanctioned executions, warfare, genocide and pandemic management. Research undertaken in these areas is often deeply complex as bodily remains, funerary practices and grieving survivors all ensure ethical and methodological complexity, as do often highly compressed sets of societal politics including the risk of continued violence. While the missing and dead have profound global significance surprisingly little exists in terms of consolidated accounts of research practice. In this roundtable, the pressing tension that will be addressed is how the subject of the research is accounted for while acknowledging their very absence. In responding to this, participants will be asked to reflect on the different forms of relationality that enable them to in effect turn the absence of the missing, the disappeared and the dead into a presence. Different disciplinary approaches as well as methods including archival research, ethnography and visual and textual analysis will be discussed, while comparative analysis will be generated as researchers reflect on work undertaken in a variety of sites around the globe.