Jessica Auchter’s research started with ghosts, specifically thinking through what it may mean to be haunted, by those lives and deaths that are so often part and parcel of a scholarly interest in international studies. Fundamentally a scholar of visual culture and politics, she is interested in how subjects such as death and the missing are visually represented or rendered invisible. She has written widely on human remains and their politics. See Jessica’s full bio and articles page here.

Simon Robins is a practitioner and researcher with an interest in humanitarian protection, human rights and transitional justice. His research work has focused on the issue of persons disappeared and missing in armed conflict, as well as dead and missing migrants. This work is driven by a desire to put the needs of victims of conflict at the heart of efforts to address its legacies, and this has led to his engaging with victim-centred and therapeutic approaches to histories of violence, particularly as they concern families of the missing. For a full bio of Simon’s work, including articles and websites, please click here.

Lia Kent is a peace and conflict studies scholar with a long-term research focus on Timor-Leste. My work has engaged with questions of social memory, transitional justice, and the social and political lives of the dead. I am especially interested in what emerges from the productive intersections between dominant international discourses of peacebuilding, performances of state sovereignty, and everyday practices of rebuilding communities in the aftermath of mass violence. Check out details of Lia’s projects, publications and areas of work here.

Natalia Bermúdez Qvortrup holds a PhD from Oslo Metropolitan University in Archives, Library, and Information Science. Her dissertation explored the information practices of the families of the forcefully disappeared in Colombia and how private archives are being created for social accountability. Her interests center around the information practices - the search for, access to and use of human rights documentation in cases of enforced disappearance and genocide. See Natalia’s publications and more about her work here

Asaf Ali Lone is a PhD student at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University. His research looks at the intersections of peacebuilding and redressal mechanisms in South Asia with a focus on missing persons in Kashmir and Punjab, India. In his research, he is trying to untangle missing state of persons especially in the contexts of conflict to understand the changing patterns of state violence to build a responsive mechanism to uphold state’s commitment to human rights and rule of law. Click here to learn more about Asaf’s work.

Caroline Bennett is a socio-cultural anthropologist, whose work addresses issues of genocide, mass death, and the treatment of human remains. She particularly focuses on the dead in post-conflict state and community building. With a background in forensic anthropology, her works extends to thinking about geopolitical interventions in the fields of conflict, violence, and disaster, including DVI and managing the dead, as well as what we do with dead bodies in science. More detail on Caroline’s research and publications can be found here.

Robin Reineke is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores social and political responses to deaths and disappearances. She focuses especially on forensics, and has conducted ethnographic research and forensic anthropological practice in the US-Mexico borderlands for over fifteen years. She is Assistant Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology, both at the University of Arizona. Further details of Robin’s research and selected articles are listed here.

Adriana Rudling is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Global Research Institute at William & Mary, USA. Her research interests center on the interactions between victims of massive and systematic human rights violations and measures and state bureaucracies established in (post-) transitional societies to respond to their harms. More of Adriana’s articles can be read here along with more detail about her research.

Damian Grenfell undertakes research on the dead and missing in conflict. Working at the intersection of security, peace and conflict studies and transitional justice he is particularly interested in the relational dimensions between survivors and the dead as well as the consequences of abstraction that occurs in the enumeration and recording of the dead and missing. See here for more on Damian’s research and a selection of relevant articles.

Chulani Kodikara’s current work explores the ongoing struggle for truth and justice waged by Tamil family members of the forcibly disappeared, the vast majority of them women, in post-war Sri Lanka, deep-seated impunity for such violence, and the state's response to the struggle shaped by Sinhala Buddhist ethno-nationalism and transnational human rights norms. Going on the premise that impunity is not merely a legal but an extra-legal phenomenon or inaction, Chulani is keen to understand the extra-legal moorings /stakes of the struggle and the discursive and material labour invested in erasing disappearances from history and memory. Moreover, she traces the modes, sites and scales of the women's struggle that is challenging this erasure. Chulani’s research and publications are available here in more detail.

Ram Kumar Bhandari is a scholar-practitioner, working on issues of the rights of conflict victims and survivors, with a focus on the issue of disappearances. He has been an activist in Nepal since the disappearance of his father by the state in 2001, seeking to drive a victim-centered transformative transitional justice process in Nepal and in international level. For more on Ram’s work on the missing please click here.

Joost Fontein is an anthropologist of Africa who has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe and Kenya. Over the last 25 years, his research has explored the nexus and entanglements of politics and stuff in a diverse range of contexts, ranging from landscape and heritage and the political materialities of land and water in southern Zimbabwe, to the ‘politics of the dead’ and the productive uncertainties and excessive potentialities of human remains across Zimbabwe to, more recently, urban materialities in eastern Africa. His recent book, The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020: Bones, Rumours & Spirits (James Currey 2022) is the culmination of two decades of research into the role of human remains and spirits in Zimbabwe’s contentious politics of commemoration. 

Tricia Redeker Hepner is a political and legal anthropologist with expertise in migration and displacement, transnationalism, human rights, transitional justice, militarism, and conflict and peace. Since 2012, she has been leading a long-term, collaborative team project in the Acholi region of northern Uganda analyzing the political, legal, spiritual, and material dimensions of improper burials from the 1986-2006 civil war, including mass graves and displacement camp burials. She has also worked with refugees and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa country of Eritrea for over 25 years. She is Professor of Anthropology and Social Justice and Human Rights in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University.

Mirak Raheem is a practitioner and activist working on issues of human rights and transitional justice, with a specific interest in the search for the disappeared. Currently, he works freelance and is using his experience of working in both civil society and as part of the Sri Lankan state to understand past efforts and the current impasse in tracing and identifying the disappeared. His research interest focuses on the intersection between the legal and institutional framework regarding mass grave investigations and to investigate disappearances and efforts by victims and civil society to search for the disappeared.

Mahmoud Kaba is in charge of the project "Mediterranean Cooperation of CSOs on Migration and Missing Migrants" within the organisation EuroMed Rights. A project that aims to promote and strengthen collaboration between different actors on the disappearance of migrants in the process of migration.

Tam T. T. Ngo’s research focuses on the roles played by and the intersection between religion and science in guiding social and political actions around the finding and identifying hundreds of thousands Vietnamese Missing War Dead.

Jill Stockwell is a Social Anthropologist with 20 years of experience connecting research and practice in humanitarian protection, transitional justice and community development. She currently works with the Central Tracing Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross, leading Research and Structural Support with the RCRC Missing Persons Centre on issues connected with separated, missing and deceased persons, and their families` needs. She particularly aims to understand the deeper positions, desires and wishes on the sides of the authorities, other stakeholders and affected families according to political, social and cultural specificities of a range of contexts that are still challenged to address long-term missing persons caseloads.