Laura Huttunen is a social anthropologist, working with issues of migration and transnational communities, and she has conducted long-term ethnographic research among the Bosnian diaspora. For the last fifteen years, she has focused on issues related to missing and disappeared persons in various contexts. Her research projects include one focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the more recent research project ‘Governance and Grieving: Missing Migrants and Emerging Politics’ (DiMIg) funded by the Academy of Finland, focused on disappearances in migratory contexts. She is interested in the relationship between the disappeared and the state, and in the consequences of disappearances for the families and communities left behind, as well as in the multiplicity of social and political afterlives that the missing and disappeared have locally and transnationally.
Laura’s recent publications include:
Missing persons, Political Landscapes and Cultural Practices: Violent Absences, Haunting Presences (Manchester University Press, 2025). This book examines human disappearances anthropologically in various contexts, ranging from enforced disappearances under oppressive governments and during armed conflicts to disappearing undocumented migrants and, finally, to people who go missing under more everyday circumstances. Two focuses run through the book: the relationship between the state and disappearances, and the consequences of disappearances for the families and communities of missing persons. The book analyses both the circumstances that make some people disappear and the variety of responses that disappearances give rise to; the latter include projects focused on searching for the missing and identifying human remains, as well as political projects that call for accountability for disappearances. While providing empirical examples from a variety of places, with Bosnia-Herzegovina as they key empirical site, the book develops an analytic grip on the slippery category of the 'disappeared'.
An Anthropology of disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative ways of knowing (Berghahn Books 2023), edited with Gerhild Perl. This volume brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. It takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared.