Social and political responses to the missing and dead: conflict, migration and beyond
December 5-8, 2022
Abstracts
Session One: Contestations and the political
Missing Pieces and Body Parts: On Bodily Integrity and Political Violence
Jessica Auchter
The twin dynamics of missing bodies and missing identities have long occupied military memory-making, as in the form of unknown soldier commemoration and the attempt to retrieve those missing in action. States have sought to project power through the management of gravesites both internally and abroad. Yet less attention has been paid to missing pieces of bodies, even though modern conflict tends to have the effect of maiming far more frequently than killing. In this paper, I seek to theorize bodily integrity as key to statecraft. I do so by examining those moments when bodies are shattered apart and rendered into pieces, pieces that sometimes go missing, cannot be collected for re-integration, are not necessarily recognizable as body parts, or are mixed with other materials in urban landscapes of war. Making bodies whole is a key part of military technology and of the biopolitical management of wounded bodies, but bodies cannot always be rendered whole, or what counts as whole is contested. The missing pieces, then, are coopted into particular political narratives that attempt to either weaponize their partiality or discursively or physically generate wholeness, often through memorial narratives or the technologization of bodies (as in prosthetics). Forensic archaeology seeks to resuscitate bodies as whole, and the politics of these moves can tell us something about dead body management and statecraft. Against the backdrop of a larger theorization of body parts using the lens of beheadings, which allows me to articulate the significance of bodily integrity in modern politics, I then focus specifically on several examples of missing pieces, including the forensic aftermath of suicide bombings, the missing body parts of 9/11, mass graves after large scale human rights violations where bodies become indistinguishable as individuals and are rendered into parts, the memorialization of genocide which is done by display of body parts and disaggregation of bodies into parts, such as in Rwanda and Cambodia, and battlefield amputation and military prosthetic programs. Using these examples, I make three key points: 1) bodily integrity is inextricably linked to statecraft and as such, state authorities seek to reconstitute bodies when they have been blown apart: physically, technologically, and politically, 2) the missing body part shatters conventions of recognition typically associated with political personhood; it is obscene in its partial nature precisely because the of the taboo that governs the disruption of bodily integrity, and 3) the dignity typically accorded to dead bodies becomes more complex forensically when it comes to body parts, often because such parts are not immediately and visually recognizable as human.
The ‘missing’, the ‘disappeared’ and political projects of making the disappeared re-appear
Laura Huttunen, Tampere University,Finland
A missing or disappeared person is always an anomaly in relation to the social and cultural order, and the liminality of the missing pushes towards the ‘re-appearance’ of the disappeared in one form or the other – alive, or as dead bodies or mortal remains, or sometimes in more symbolic forms. The public and political responses to human disappearances – i.e. projects to make the disappeared ‘re-appear’ – are always complex processes that weave together local and global discourses, intimate and public spheres, and attempts to name and categorize.
‘Missing person’ and ‘disappeared person’ are the most common words in English used to refer to people who are absent from their families and communities for a protracted period of time. Both are slippery terms, and they escape our attempts to create unambiguous, clearly demarcated categories and to fix them in place. Naming and categorization, however, embed the phenomenon in discourses that have histories, scopes of application and institutional connections, and consequently, evoke differing repertoires of interpretation and action.
In this presentation I explore the ways in which categories of ‘missing person’ and ‘enforced disappearance’ are evoked in two contexts: in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the armed conflict between 1992 and 1995, and in the context of undocumented migration in the Mediterranean at the moment. In Bosnia, 30 000 people were reported missing by their family members when the war ended; in the Mediterranean, according to the IOM, more than 24 000 people have died or gone missing since 2014 because of being exposed to deadly circumstances.
Relying on ethnographic data (by me and by my research team), NGO materials and research literature, I suggest that projects of making the disappeared re-appear – by finding the missing, identifying the unidentified dead and returning them to families – are complex projects that draw in different actors, ranging from families and grass-roots communities to NGOs, states and supra-state structures. Such projects create complex arenas for contestations over naming, categorizing and acting – contestations that take place between hugely unequal parties, often in highly challenging circumstances. Post-1995 Bosnia and the present-day Mediterranean provide two very different examples of such contestations – the intensive investment by the international community in the search and identification in Bosnia, and the fragmented scene of search and identification in the Mediterranean have produced vastly differing numbers of those ‘re-appeared’, i.e. found and identified missing persons. Moreover, they are framed in different discourses, and addressed by different sets of actors.
By taking a critical look at such contestations, we can gain understanding of the ways in which local and global discourses get intertwined in projects addressing disappearances, but also of the ways in which dead bodies and the transition from life to death is managed in such contexts, and how the management is connected with questions of political power and sovereignty (Stepputat 2014).
Necro-governmentality and its limits: socio-political practices around the dead, missing and disappeared Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste
Lia Kent, The Australian National University
In this presentation I would like to reflect on what we might learn from Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka about ‘necro-governmentality’ and its limits. Rojas-Perez has defined necro-governmentality as a ‘normalising’ form of power that is prominent in the aftermath of political violence, a period when states seek to structure social responses to the dead and missing to control and contain their destabilising potential (Rojas-Perez 2017: 257). It operates through discursive and spatial strategies, and on the bodies of the dead.
State practices in Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka reveal that necro-governmentality has different faces. In Timor-Leste, where the recent attainment of national independence has marked a significant break from the Indonesian occupation, necro-governmentality is at work in the resignification of ‘massive bad death’ as a sacrifice for the nation, the ascription of new ‘martyr’ subjectivities to (some) of the dead, and the spatio-temporal containment of the bodies of those martyrs in bounded heroes’ cemeteries. In Sri Lanka, where the political settlement that has been in place since the war’s brutal end reinforces a narrow Sinhala nationalist imagining of the nation, and where some members of the current political elite are thought to be implicated in enforced disappearances, necro-governmental techniques take on a more aggressive tenor. They involve territorialising strategies such as the strategic placement of monuments to military victories and sacrifices in Tamil-dominated areas and the deliberate destruction of the martyrs’ cemeteries (maaveerar thuyilum illam) of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). Government statements also attempt, periodically, to assign new subjectivities to the missing and disappeared, designating them either firmly ‘dead’ or firmly ‘alive’.
In this paper I will explore, through a focus on socio-political practices around missing bodies in Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka, how ‘the missing’ possess an unruly quality that has the potential to disrupt and at times transform necro-governmental logics. I will build on Joost Fontein’s ideas about the ‘emotive materiality’ of the human corpse and the immaterial ‘affective presence’ of the missing, which both drives urgent responses from the living and renders them contingent, never fully and finally complete (Fontein 2022: 32).
Session Two: The Social
The dead and the missing as members of communities: A social ecological approach
Simon Robins, University of York
Resilience, understood as good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development, has long been seen as an important lens on how victims recover from acts of violence. While both a dominant frame in international development and a natural approach to supporting victims of human rights violations, resilience remains however rooted in a highly individualized and neo-liberal approach. A social ecologies approach challenges this, understanding the importance of the person-environment interaction to resilience and emphasising the role social and physical ecologies play in developing positive outcomes. Here a social ecologies lens is used to understand how communities serve to both support and limit the individual and collective resilience of those dealing with death and disappearance, interrogating the extent to which the dead and missing are a part of communities that constitute social ecologies. This can be literal, in the sense that spirits of the dead are present or where the physical bodies of the dead shape social space in a community. It can also be discursive, in the sense that the relationship of the missing and the dead to individuals and to social ecologies is socially constructed within the communities that constitute such ecologies.
This contribution uses data from a range of contexts where persons have died or gone missing as a result of violence or migration, seeking to build a social ecological approach to understanding the meanings and impacts of such loss. These emerge from social ecologies that include the family, community and state, among others. This challenges longstanding approaches to death and disappearance which sees the family as the principal social ecology in which both meanings and wellbeing in face of adversity are constructed. For missing persons, for example, the framework of ambiguous loss sees the family as the central space in which ambiguity is both constructed and potentially resolved, whereas in practice the discursive spaces - here conceived as social ecologies - in which this actually unfolds are both broader and more diverse. This engages with social structures in the majority word where the nuclear family is often not a principal social building block and where larger social ecologies have a greater importance. As such, this represents a challenge to frameworks constructed on the basis of a Western ontology.
A social ecologies approach is presented as both a conceptual and practical necessity to understand and engage with the needs of the families of those who have died or disappeared as a result of violence. Conceiving the presence of the dead and missing in social ecologies, both in an embodied sense and discursively, permits the development of locally resonant and particular approaches at both individual and community levels, as well as in broader policy terms.
Communitarian weavings and cross cultural ontologies that claim the disappeared body
Carolina Robledo Silvestre, Catedrática Conacyt-CIESAS Ciudad de México
In a Rarámuri village in the Sierra de Chihuahua, Mexico, on June 20, 2022, two Jesuit priests and a man who worked in the tourism industry were gunned down in the town's church by a member of a criminal organization that rules the region. Their remains went disappeared. In response to the shocking incident, multiple community networks outside of blood kinship mobilized to recover the bodies and seek justice. The demand for the presentation of the two Jesuits was fueled by a complex web of ties, an extended family that included the church, the Rarámuri indigenous community, and national human rights organizations. This is in contrast to the thousands of disappeared people in Mexico, which are claimed by their families. Due to the extent of the case's politicization, the bodies were discovered two days after they were seized. While they were gone, there were numerous, sometimes contrasting, references to their absence. For instance, there were those who asserted assassination and those who claimed a disappearance. Additionally, they used the terms recovery and rescue of the bodies rather than the term search, which is a popular term in the political discourse surrounding the disappearance of people in Mexico. The religious community held a mass without the priests' bodies present at the time of the disappearance and mobilized their own ontological narratives about the priests' loss, such as martyrdom and divine grace; meanwhile, civil organizations established a language of rights around the return of the priests' bodies and the demand for justice. The Rarámuri community held a ritual with elements of Catholicism while the remains were still there. Finally, the bodies were laid to rest at the Cerocahui chapel where they had been attacked.
1. This is a translation of the term "tramas comunitarias" proposed by Raquel Gutiérrez in reference to the politicization of social and affective ties and actions that build the common
Contestations over a name: the significance of ‘Missing’ and ‘Disappeared’ in Sri Lanka
Mirak Raheem, Executive Director of the Collective for Historical Dialogue and Memory, Former Commissioner of the Office on Missing Persons (2018-2021), Sri Lanka
In June 2016 the Government of Sri Lanka presented a bill in Parliament to establish the Office on Missing Persons (OMP). This marked a historic juncture in the efforts to convince the State to substantively address the issue of the missing and disappeared; one that cuts across regions, ethnic communities and conflicts. The Bill was met by criticism from several quarters, but one of the most striking critiques was from the families of the missing and disappeared in relation to the proposed name of the institution.
This article will examine this response as reflected in the process of consultations carried out in parallel to the drafting the OMP Bill and its enactment. A significant proportion of submissions made to the Consultation Task Force for Reconciliation Mechanisms (CTF), mandated with ascertaining the public’s views on transitional justice mechanisms proposed by the Government, were from families of the disappeared and groups working on the issue. Particularly among Tamil families from the North and East the term kannamal ponna (missing) was objected to in favour of kanamal akka ponna(disappeared), while families of the Missing in Action from the Sinhalese community had little criticism of nathiwuwan (missing) but queried who else would be included in the mandate. The addition of a word to the name of the OMP was resisted by the Government and instead it went on to introduce a Certificate of Absence in September which provoked similar criticisms. Through re-examining the reports of the CTF and interviews that will be conducted with members of the Zonal Task Force members who carried out the consultations and other key stakeholders this article will attempt to better understand these responses.
The contestation has wider ramifications for how the government, civil society and international actors work with and across different groups of the disappeared. In questioning, contesting and acquiescing families were also challenging how they are identified and grouped collectively. Different sets of victims want to be seen as separate groups with specific needs, not to be collapsed into a larger collective of the missing and disappeared. Thus, this is a key issue requiring reflection and sensitivity within state entities, civil society organizations and internationals.
This article posits that the contestation over the name speaks to a larger debate in how the terms missing and disappeared are used, understood and contested among different sections of the universe of missing and disappeared in Sri Lanka. Particularly in challenging the passive and neutral term missing some families expressed hostility as they sought to question not just terminology but the political construction of the issue. In a highly polarized context such as Sri Lanka these terms carry significant symbolism, and are caught up in the struggle of families of the disappeared who over successive decades have sought answers and remedies from a State largely in denial about the scale and nature of this violation. Thus this contestation over terminology also relates to the struggles over justice, truth, compensation and memorialisation and the architecture of transitional justice.
The social life of unidentified corpses: interactions around the searching of disappeared people in Puerto Berrio, Colombia
Ana Guglielmucci, Universidad del Rosario (Colombia)
In Colombia, there are more than 120.000 people that were disappeared in the midst of the armed conflict that has been taking place since the 1960s. Human remains and corpses have circulated through rivers or have been buried in different places of the national geography. The localization and identification of disappeared people suppose specific personal, technical and political challenges for those who search for these people, these might include the families of the victims, as well as NGOs, state institutions and international organizations. Expert and forensic practices have established different relationships with vernacular practices and knowledges that deal with corpses of disappeared people in their everyday lives. For example, in Puerto Berrio (Antioquia), the National Institute of legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences (IMLCF) and the Unity for searching people recognized as disappeared (UBPD) have encountered the vernacular practice of choosing the souls of the purgatory that are embodied in the corpses with no name rescued from the Magdalena River. In this work, drawing upon the interactions between families of disappeared people, state institutions, international agencies and devotees of the animas of NN, I analyze the ways in which disputes between knowledges and practices around the corpses and remains of people with no identity take place, and how corpses of disappeared people are reintegrated to the existence of the living.
Justice, Cosmology and Forensic Science in Postwar Northern Uganda
Tricia Redeker Hepner, PhD, Arizona State University and Jaymelee J. Kim, PhD, University of Findlay
During the twenty-two year conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government, tens of thousands of people in the Acholi sub-region were abducted and massacred by rebel forces and the national military. In the name of protecting civilians, the government forced over 97% of Acholi people into squalid displacement camps where tens of thousands more died. When the guns fell silent and people returned to their villages, the omnipresent dead brought further disquiet. Mass graves punctuated the landscape, unidentified bones littered agricultural fields, and the remains lay left behind in former displacement camps.
While the government promoted a national transitional justice policy and initiated both international and domestic prosecutions of rebel leaders, survivors continued to live with the traumatic aftermath of war. Economic devastation and ongoing displacement combined with psychosocial and spiritual suffering have rendered peace and reconciliation tenuous. The dead, moreover, remind the living of multiple ruptures and losses: whether buried hastily in improper graves, away from ancestral homesteads without necessary rituals, or abandoned in the bush, their bodies and spirits refuse to be forgotten. Physical remains obstruct farming and development and remind the living of wartime atrocities, while restless spirits of the improperly buried dead afflict relatives through nightmares, hallucinations, and a host of physical and social ills.
Since 2012, our anthropological team has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda to understand the ways that different burial scenarios (mass graves, displacement camp graves, and unknown bush remains or surface scatter) have impacted survivors in the post-war context and to explore with local communities the potential and limitations of forensic intervention. Although the Acholi were overwhelmingly impacted by the war and suffered the majority of casualties, they are not empowered by war recovery efforts nor the draft transitional justice framework. The divergence between local needs, beliefs, and practices from government priorities is especially salient when addressing the role and impact of the dead and disappeared.
This paper examines the interface of Acholi perceptions of the role of the dead in the aftermath of armed warfare, government-driven policies for reconstruction and transitional justice, and international forensic norms. We interrogate what it means to conduct “survivor-centered” work as a dialogical process fraught with power imbalances, cultural contradictions, material urgencies, and ghostly impingements. Although many studies in forensic humanitarianism and transitional justice advocate a “survivor-centered approach,” few unpack the profound messiness of this work and the salient tensions among post-conflict reckoning, positivist science, conflicting community priorities, and culturally specific belief systems about the dead and disappeared.
Session Three: Spectrality and indigenous forensics
Anthropological Considerations on Grievance, Spirits and the Dead in Bougainville
Jill Stockwell, Udo Krenzer & Bhava Poudyal
The right to identity is a key component of a family`s right to know the fate and whereabouts of their missing relatives in armed conflict and is enshrined in numerous International law instruments and UN resolutions. With the development of innovative technologies over the last two decades particularly around forensic genetic testing, the potentials for identification of human remains has drastically improved, and with it has come international best practices and scientific standards to ensure families are reunited with their missing loved ones as reliably and credibly as possible. However, scientifically driven human identification efforts can be limited in some scenarios, such as when there are no human remains to recover and identify (Salado Puerto et al. 2021) but also where the capacities for forensic investigation and identification of deaths are non-existent and/or investigative practices may be culturally unacceptable.
The Bougainville conflict between Papua New Guinea and, what is now known as the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, erupted in 1989-1999, with the violence extending deeply into Bougainville communities, dividing families, clans and tribes and resulting in a significant number of deaths and missing persons. With the conflict officially ending with the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001, the fate and whereabouts of uncounted deceased and missing persons remains unresolved, leaving families to deal with associated social, economic, administrative and emotional consequences and a sense of belhat (literal meaning: belly is hard; or feeling upset, angry, sad) due to the issue still simmering within their communities, including the next generation. Being a relational society, reconciliation is key to restoring belisi (literal meaning: belly is easy; or a sense of peace) for the families and social harmony within communities. To achieve belisi, families need the perpetrator of a killing or disappearance to tell them where their loved one is buried, pay compensation and reconcile. Families then wish to recover the bones of their loved ones and to bury them on ancestral lands in accordance with their Melanesian customs. While important for the families to retrieve the bones and bury them, it is even more important that the spirit of their loved ones can rest, as it has an significant impact on the living.
However, the notion of a scientific process of forensic human identification, which would entail probing from bones, extracting teeth or taking remains to third countries for DNA testing, has categorically been rejected by families. Instead, they hold greater belief incustomary practices such as a spiritual connection to, and thus recognition of, the bones of their loved ones. To insist on scientifically driven forensic human identification endeavors to uphold international best practice and standards, would not only come at a high cost to the Bougainville authorities to build, from scratch, a comprehensive identification program, it would risk producing scientific identifications which could be outright rejected by the families themselves. This paper argues that supporting alternative approaches to identifying the dead need to be considered by the international community in certain contexts, to avoid disrupting customary mechanisms in place and further traumatizing families who seek to find resolution with their loved one`s spirit on their own terms.
Bones, ghost, DNA: Vernacular forensics versus DNA based forensics in grassroot war accounting in Vietnam
Tam Ngo (NIOD&MPI)
The war that Vietnam fought in the 20th century have cost millions of Vietnamese lives. Among the dead are 1.2 million are fallen soldiers recognized by the government of Vietnam as martyrs. Today, the remains of more than 200.000 martyrs are still missing while there are 300.000 others whose bodies have been recovered with identity unknown. To find and identify these martyrs has been a national concern in Vietnam for decades. In this contribution, I focus on “vernacular forensics”, a variety of locally and culturally informed knowledges and practices employed in spontaneous private bone finding missions assisted by spirit mediums specialized in finding and naming the war dead. In addition, ever since Vietnamese nationalism took a spiritual turn (Ngo, 2021), an overwhelming numbers of Soviet trained scientists have become leaders and practitioners of spiritual forensics. Based on ethnographic research and textual analysis, I argue that vernacular forensics in Vietnam are pushing back against the binary opposition between precision and the messiness of local circumstances while shaping citizenship and historical discourses. Unlike scientific forensics, which has lab-based scientific protocols and procedures, vernacular forensics is situated in geography and in connection with the land, which is at once deeply personal and highly transferable. As the “forensic turn” in Vietnam war accounting has hit a dead end recently, veterans, family of the missing, and spirit mediums, who lead civil society initiatives that employ vernacular methods to locate and identify the missing began to assert that their method is no more arbitrary than that employed by the scientists. Their claim of precision is based on the connection between practitioners and nature and on a moral commitment to find the missing, not the abstract and exact scientific protocol. To make this claim, sometimes vernacular forensics do need to put up some performance of authenticity and authority by adorning military uniforms and by delineating the social space (in direct connection with surviving family) and physical space (the location of ritual once the presence of the dead is located). This is necessary in order to minimize the possibilities of the state (bureaucracy and the cemetery) to intervene. Vernacular forensics is thus intimately located within the domestic space of familial and kindship relation, and within the overlapping shadow cast by science and spiritualism while linguistically it is expressed through the languages of and ritual for the dead.
The alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death in Zimbabwe
Joost Fontein, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg
This paper draws on material presented in The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020: Bones, Rumors and Spirits (Fontein 2020) to explore the uncertain and unfinished incompleteness of death by reconsidering the political significance of ancestors and spirit mediums in post-2000 Zimbabwe. Questioning assumptions often carried in scholarship on spirit possession about the over-determinations common to mediumship, I emphasise the uncertainties inherent to possession that confront not only politicians and others seeking ancestral legitimacy or guidance, but also mediums themselves. It uses two very different case studies - the famous story of the so-called ‘diesel n’anga’, Rotina Mavhunga, a medium who courted public controversy in 2007 with claims to procure refined diesel from rocks; and the little known case of Mai Melissa in rural Masvingo District, whose emergent possession by her own dead father, Sekuru Shorty, preceded her own death from an AIDS-related illness in 2007 - to explore the uncertainties and precarities inherent to mediumship and spirit possession, and the serious consequences as well as opportunities these can have for mediums. Both examples illustrate how the uncertainties of performance, agency and authenticity at the heart of mediumship turn, in many respects, exactly on the unfinished, incomplete and indeterminate nature of death.
Elsewhere I have examined how the excessivities of human corporeality - a kind of ‘alterity’ - animates their profound indeterminacy, so that processes of determination, constitution and stabilisation (of ‘remaking the dead’) are inherently incomplete, contested and contingent. Conversely, the argument presented here points less to the ‘alterity’ of the material than to the ‘alterity’ of spirit and the immaterial. In other words, there is an ‘otherness’ to the immaterial remnants of past lives that matches the ‘torque’ (Pinney 2005) of corporeality and similarly demands but always defies processes of stabilisation, fixing and determination, thereby accentuating the uncertainties that death reveals but rarely resolves. A key point here is that although ‘otherness’ could be (and often has been) construed as a kind of categorical fixing of opposing, polarised meanings and identities, the kind of ‘alterity’ we are concerned with here, deriving from the excessivities of stuff and the uncertain contingencies of how the material and immaterial are entangled, is marked exactly by the impossibility of any final determination, categorical stability, or completeness. This is illustrated by the way that the incompleteness of highly specialised efforts to ‘remake the dead’ through often contested, technical processes of exhumation, reburial, forensic pathology and archaeology are matched by the similarly contested, uncertain and ultimately incomplete practices of divination, spirit possession and mediumship through which the immaterial remnants of past lives are made known, present, fixed and authenticated. All this points to how the alterity of both the material and immaterial aspects of life, and the uncertainties of their entanglement, are foregrounded and revealed yet ultimately left unresolved through the rupture of death.
Session Four: Rights and TJ and the dead / disappeared
Secrets of the Dead: Understanding human rights through bodies and remains
Kar-Yen Leong, Associate Professor, Department of Global Politics and Economics, Tamkang University, Taiwan
This paper looks at the role of human bodies and remains in our understanding of human rights violations. Many regimes perpetrating such crimes often disappear those they deem to be enemies of the state and thus make invisible their crimes. More often than not, the groups most often bearing the brunt of the state’s brutality are minorities or groups which are socio-economically marginal. This paper will analyze how human remains either through exhumations or photographs of corpses, can be utilized to bring the dead back. Using concepts such as materiality and affect, I argue that the visible, physical presence of the dead have agency. The dead and their remains has the potential to affect a ‘witnessing’ amongst a population, forcing them from their complacency and towards acknowledging the atrocities committed by the state. To this purpose, this paper, through in-depth interviews and participant observation, will be focusing on the work of forensic anthropologists in Sri Lanka and photojournalists in the Philippines as they seek to make ‘visible’ the many instances of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings. This paper will also analyse the ways, methods and language that these groups use to speak on behalf of the dead. As such this paper has the potential to further expand the frontiers of human rights and transitional justice studies.
Combatting the Construction of Impunity: Tamil Families of the Disappeared's Activism in Northeast Sri Lanka
Kate Cronin-Furman and Mario Arulthas
Debates about the past are almost always debates about politics in the present. It is well understood by both scholars of transitional justice and politicians all over the world that decisions about accountability are often driven by the need to justify and bolster present-day distributions of power. What is less well-incorporated into discussions of transitional justice at the international level is that the avoidance of accountability is not inaction—impunity is an activity undertaken by the state and its powerholders.
Perpetrators and their allies who retain access to power build architectures of impunity that make justice harder to achieve in the future. They construct surveillance networks that impede victims’ ability to advocate for justice or document the crimes committed against them. In the military sphere, perpetrators left unvetted advance through the ranks, enhancing their control over the tools of repression and enabling them to destroy evidence and intimidate or disappear victims and witnesses. When occupying political office, they pursue the adoption of legislation constraining civil society, lobby against signing onto international human rights treaties, and use state media to shape public attitudes in favor of impunity. In the face of sustained international pressure, they often create institutions that mimic and subvert some of the features of transitional justice mechanisms to protect perpetrators from accountability.
But all too often, international engagement with post-atrocity states centers on formalistic calls for the creation of specific transitional justice institutions, failing to account for the fact that impunity in these cases is much more than the simple absence of justice; it is an active and self-propagating condition. At the same time, this is a fact that is deeply understood by victim-survivor communities, who often find themselves frustrated with international actors’ seeming failure to grasp the reality of impunity as a set of ongoing, intentional actions (as well as corresponding harms) rather than insufficient progress or attention to transitional justice. Consequently, their activism must do something much more complicated than petitioning and pressuring their state for truth and justice. It must work to both challenge and lay bare the state’s construction of impunity in the hopes of refocusing international attention.
We investigate these dynamics in the context of activism by Tamil families of the disappeared in Sri Lanka. Hundreds of Tamils, most of them women, have sat in continuous protest on roadsides in the country’s northeast for over 2000 days, highlighting the absence of truth and justice regarding their loved ones who disappeared in the custody of the Sri Lankan military. Throughout their years of protest, they have consistently addressed themselves to the international community, challenging its treatment of Sri Lanka as a good faith actor. Through participant observation and interview data collected between 2016 and 2022, our paper will examine how Tamil families of the disappeared have sought to disrupt international narratives about Sri Lanka and influence international actors’ engagement with their government.
From memory to action: Local memorialization of the disappeared as a route to victim agency in Nepal
Ram Kumar Bhandari, a social justice activist based in Nepal
This paper explores how the families of the disappeared in Nepal have commemorated their missing relatives, in the absence of any substantive state-led memorialization. It will report how they transformed memories into action in mobilizing family members of the disappeared and supporting victim groups to impact local political and social processes. This included ultimately successfully advocating with local government to advance local memorialization through official processes at the local level. This paper considers the idea of memory as a frame for action that can support victim agency and mobilization. This represents an operationalization of critical approaches to transitional justice that call for localization and a 'justice from below'. It explores informal victim-led memory practices that impact local government policy and enhance the role of victim groups as agents of social change. I seek to highlight how localized memory practices empower and mobilise victims, advancing their role as political and social actors in processes of social change. This paper will address three cases of how victim groups evolved, mobilised and contributed to local policy lobbying and translated their memory initiatives into tools for advocacy: 1) a small group of victims from a hill district in Lamjung who closely collaborated with local government to establish a memorialization policy and officially recognized memory work in Marsyangdi Municipality. They developed a physical space, and organised official commemorations at the local level that helped integrate victim families politically, socially and economically. 2) a conflict victims’ women’s group in Bhurigaun, Bardiya who formed a group of ‘daughters of the disappeared’ and created their own space to share their suffering and everyday life. They developed a local approach based on their needs and began a memory quilting project which trained their members and produced memory quilts to address their grievances. They have gradually become economically supported, which in turn helped them to mobilize their members, integrating them into income generation and becoming a strong women’s group. This is an example of a pioneering effort at local memorialization and collaborating with non-victims in their communities to socialize their agenda and localize the memory work. 3) The memorial park of the disappeared in Kumbher-adda, Bardiya. A local victim’s group organized and mobilized their members to influence the local authority who built the park that provided satisfaction and acknowledgement, both politically and socially. This has become the first officially recognized physical memory park of the disappeared in Nepal as a local memory site for the families of the disappeared. Such local initiatives have been linked and integrated into a national movement building process to organize and institutionalize a memorialization campaign in Nepal to impact policy and contribute to knowledge production from a victim perspective. This paper aims to draw key lessons from such local memory initiatives and their impact in the localization process of (transitional) justice, as an expression of resistance and developing a locally led approach to justice for victims.
To Know Where They Are: The role of gacaca in the discovery of mass graves in postgenocide Rwanda
Julia Viebach, University of Bristol
An estimated 800.000 to one million victims were killed during the Genocide. Many victims have not been found until today whilst others have been exhumed but not identified. Whilst the Genocide was planned and systematically carried out and therefore an intentional deposition of bodies given, there was surprisingly no overall strategy of invisibilisation or disposal of the dead.1 In addition, Tutsi were not killed at few dedicated killing sites as existed in Bosnia or Cambodia (e.g. the Killings Fields) but all over the country and at hundreds of road blocks which results in a complex landscape of mass graves across Rwanda. In the context of ante-mortem mutilation and post-mortem degradation of bodies, victims of the genocide suffered what is referred to in Rwanda as ‘bad death’ (bapfuye nabi).2 “Killers not only humiliated the ‘living bodies’ of their victims, but also their corpses”3 which made the individual identification of victims a daunting and often impossible task without advanced forensic techniques or DNA testing. Furthermore, a “culture of silence”4 prevented communication about the events during the Genocide but enabled Rwandans to find a mode of existence that was based on a “social amnesia”5 that made everyday life possible. Therefore many mass graves remained hidden until the community-led gacaca courts were established in the early 2000s. I argue that gacaca furthered the “truth-telling” about where bodies were thrown and broke with the prevailing culture of silence. It is especially important for survivors of the 1994 Genocide to know how their loved ones were killed and where they were put to rest.6 The restorative and participatory elements of gacaca were a vehicle in the discovery of mass graves even though at times messy and often incomplete. The literature on gacaca has mushroomed over the last decade but has failed to investigate the relationship between gacaca, discovery and exhumation of mass graves and survivors’ struggle to mourn and remember their dead loved ones. This however is significant as the repatriation of bodies, the care-taking of human remains and their affective force foster remembering and meaning-making processes in the aftermath of violence. The paper will draw out how Genocide victims were found, exhumed and (sometimes) identified through gacaca. In doing so, it draws on extensive fieldwork in Rwanda since 2014 and interviews with gacaca judges and survivors of the 1994 Genocide.
1 The terms ‘invisibilisation’ and ‘deposition’ are borrowed from Élisabeth Anstettt, ‘What is a mass grave? toward an anthropology of human remains treatment in contemporary contexts of mass violence’. In Antonius Robben, A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (Wiley Blackwell 2018), 186, 177-189.
2 Rémi Korman, ‘The Tutsi body in the 1994 genocide: ideology, physical destruction, and Memory’ In Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (eds) Destruction and Human Remains - Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence (Manchester University Press 2017) 226, 232.
3 Julia Viebach, ‘Mediating ‘absence-presence’ at Rwanda’s genocide memorials: of care-taking, memory and proximity to the dead’ Critical African Studies (2020) 12(2), 237-269; Rémi Korman, ‘Bury or display? The politics of exhumation in postgenocide Rwanda’ In Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (eds) Human Remains and Identification - Mass Violence, Genocide, and the ‘Forensic Turn’ (Manchester University Press 2015) 203, 205-206.
4 Bert Ingelaere, ‘”Does the Truth Pass across the Fire without Burning?” Locating the Short Circuit in Rwanda's Gacaca Courts’ The Journal of Modern African Studies (2009) 47(4), 507-528.
5 Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’ (2006) 76(2) Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 131, 144. 6Viebach ,‘Mediating absence-presence’.
Session Five: Text, art, objects, archives
Strangers no more: Text, resistance and the dead of war
Associate Professor Damian Grenfell, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies: RMIT University
This paper examines the significance of the written word in the practices of remembrance for those missing and known dead in conflict contexts. By drawing on long-term field work conducted in Timor-Leste, as well as the experience of survivors and the dead in other sites globally, three consecutively narrowing claims are made that begin with an examination of text and the dead per se, move to the missing in conflict and considers the process of ‘textual rendering’ in such instances, and then finally to those who have been killed as part of massacres and whose names appear on ‘lists’. In order to make its first claim this paper begins by reflecting on the various ways in which text (treated as a technology) is utilised by the still living in their engagement with the dead: in inscriptions on graves and memorials, on items left with the dead, in the prayers said and the religious ceremonies held, in petite and general histories, in social media posts and personal communications, and in the records, certification and legal documents as produced by the Church and State. Text in this way is central to forging a sodality between living and dead, mediating remembrance, of care for the spirit, and to legally confirm both identity and responsibilities of living descendants. In sum then, and as a first argument, such text holds the deceased to the still living in a way that sustains relations across either side of the mortal experience.
The second argument takes this general claim regarding text and rethinks it with regards to the missing and dead of war. There is typically far less opportunity for the missing to be textually rendered (where in fact they are presumed dead) in conflict contexts. This leads to the second claim that while in a post conflict context some textual recovery may occur—graves with inscriptions may be built without bodies inside, masses given where the names of the missing are read out and government certification produced—that it remains deeply uneven and unequal (within and beyond the site of conflict). As such textual interventions should be considered as part of peace transitions and the kinds of work undertaken by reconciliation processes. One exception to the immediate absence of textual engagement with the missing in conflict emerges with the ‘list’ of names that may arrive in the aftermath of massacres. In the case of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, such a list emerged via activist networks to counter the Indonesian regime’s false claims that only a handful of people had been killed.
Taking this list as one textual device, the third argument here examines how the assemblage of names in this form operates as a technology of resistance and in some senses compensates for the textual absences that might otherwise occur when people are missing in conflict. It will also be argued that it marks a kind of transition in cases where the missing may have been kinds of strangers given the demands for political anonymity and secrecy. While in any strict sense no one is a complete stranger, political support for independence was a clandestine act which, via the written list of missing following their execution, sees the political anonymity inverted as the names of the dead move from secrecy to public declarations of sacrifice for independence.
Uncanny Cambodia: ghosts, bones, and art in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia
Caroline Bennett, Associate Research Fellow, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Sussex
When the Khmer Rouge were deposed in Cambodia, they left an estimated 1.7 million people dead and either buried in mass graves dumped in wells and rivers or other pre-existing burial sites or left to rot across the fields where they fell after being killed. After an initial push to collect these remains in the early 1980s, there have been no excavations, the remains have never been individually identified, and there is no push, from the state or on the ground, to do so. In international conceptions of post-atrocity environments, therefore, almost 1.7 million people remain missing and unidentified in Cambodia. However, the dead have remained lively participants in Cambodian life, and have been central to the rebuilding of Cambodian society, and to its conception internationally, through the display of their bones, the interaction of, and care for, their ghosts by the living, and their depiction in art (including film and photographic displays). My research to date has centred on these mass-graves from the Cambodian genocide, and the dead they contain – looking at relationships at state and local levels, and the central place of the dead in the rebuilding of Cambodia.
For this workshop, I propose to continue this theme, focusing on the display of the dead in film, art, and photography related to the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia. Crucially, I will examine In this paper, I will focus on the display of the dead in film, art, and photography related to the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia, examining how the dead haunt art – they are highly visualised and central to artistic renditions to the Khmer Rouge period of violence –through their physical remains, the re-enactment of their living selves in film, and their (re)presentation in photographic exhibitions. It is partly through these depictions that the dead become known again after mass violence. However, as contemporary political realities and transnational aesthetics shape understandings of the dead (for example in transformations of how people describe ghosts and haunting spirits, or how skeletal remains are exhibited), they affect and shape understandings of the violence when circulated back in the countries of origin. The dead (re)presented, therefore, are uncanny versions of their previous selves who become part of the globalising neoliberalism of contemporary Cambodia. I propose drawing on theorists of haunting and the uncanny (such as Derrida (hauntology; Sime 2013; Moshenska 2006; Mitchell 2020), theories of embodied and lively/excessive dead (Behar 2012, Perez 2017, Guillou 2016,2021; Dzuiban 2017), and photography/embodiment and the dead (Klima 2002; Moore 2020; Pichel 2021; Sprague 2003 for example).
Objects as Sites of Protest for the Disappeared in Kashmir
Maumil Mehraj
Enforced disappearances have been used as a tool of collective punishment against Kashmiris who have challenged the Indian state. This has lifelong repercussions not just for the immediate victim, but also, the aggrieved family. The state-sponsored practice of negating the memories of the victim-families is part of the systemic violence of enforced disappearances (Fatima, Osuri, 2020). As families continue to pursue the disappeared, the state perceives it as confrontation and retaliates, creating an endless cycle of violence and intimidation. The Association of Parents1 of Disappeared Persons (APDP), as a movement finds its pertinence largely through its presence in the public sphere as a collective. A significant feature in their protests is the display of objects of remembrance (the photographs, birth or work certificates, ID cards etc. of the disappeared). The dead are mourned differently than the disappeared, and so, APDP’s is a mourning of an Endless Wait2 . My research will explore how the APDP protests utilise these materials, and how the nature and effect of these protests significantly differs from other forms of protest. The idea stems primarily from the works of Malhotra3 and Das4 , who have both sought to understand material as remembrance. The paper will deal with material as a tool to protest – what objects do the families bring to protests to actualise the disappeared5? The disappeared hold a public, tangible presence and are not simply contained in their photographs; they demand return to their families. Given that Kashmir is a place where dissent, especially in public spaces, is impossible, the APDP’s demanding acknowledgement and justice is a powerful political act of remembrance and reclamation. They also launch annual calendars that feature photographs of 12 disappeared persons annually, another way that material undergoes painful change to become a tool of protest
1 It is interesting to notice how it is the parents (largely) who are displaying material memory in protests. These memories were collected before the disappearance happened, and the intention of this preservation must have been positive and/or celebratory in nature. The nature of the possession of these photographs and perhaps achievements undergoes a terribly violent change, and are repurposed to demand justice.
2 As photographer Showkat Nanda has termed his photographic series on the victims of enforced disappearance. This ‘Endless Wait’ is for the return of the disappeared.
3 Malhotra, A. (2017). Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory. HarperCollins Publishers, India.
4 Das, S. (2018). India, Empire, and First World War Culture. Literature, Images, and Songs. Cambridge University Press.
5 I tread with caution here because the burden of proving the existence of the disappeared does not lie on the families, but I want to analyze the human effect of tangible objects, and what they might mean to those protesting and those witnessing the protests.
The archive of the dead and disappeared in Sri Lanka
Chulani Kodikara, University of Edinburgh
Since the end of the civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, hundreds of Tamil women whose family members disappeared during the war have been waging a struggle to find the whereabouts of their loved ones and demanding for truth and justice from the Sri Lankan state. They include those who claim that their family members disappeared after surrendering to the Sri Lanka army during the final days of the war. On the one hand, the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa who was responsible for militarily defeating the LTTE and ending the war responded to these demands by categorically denying all disappearances. On the other hand, the government appointed commissions of inquiry to hear complaints of disappearances and offered compensation to survivors, provided the disappeared were registered as dead. In this paper, I read these disparate interventions and the women’s counter responses to these governmental mechanisms together; I show how the women re-signified and subverted these mechanisms in the pursuit of truth and justice. I go on consider the implications of their engagement for the official archive of the dead and the disappeared in postwar Sri Lanka. This paper seeks to engage with the conference theme on localised social and political responses to the disappeared and the manner in which survivors negotiate with and disrupt or reshape them.
Session Six: The search for the missing & identification I
‘Drying The Tears of The Dead’ in a Shifting Political and Cultural Context: The Long View, 1998 to 2022 in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
Shari Eppel, Director, Ukuthula Forensic Anthropology Team
Zimbabwe in southern Africa has a long history of violence and repression that began in the colonial era. One hundred years of colonialism led to a fully-fledged guerrilla war by the 1970s, and to independence in April 1980. Two guerrilla armies fought the war, representing the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and these became increasingly ethnically aligned during the 1970s. Matabeleland, where the Ndebele minority reside, were aligned solidly with ZAPU, and other regions mostly with ZANU. Smouldering divisions led to genocide in the early 1980s, when the ZANU government sent a North Korean-trained brigade - the ‘Gukurahundi’ brigade - to rural Matabeleland. This brigade massacred around 20,000 Ndebele civilians between 1983 and 1984, and forcibly disappeared hundreds of others. In 1987, a Unity Accord dissolved and absorbed ZAPU into the ruling ZANU.
Many Ndebeles perceive that their persecution has continued in the form of economic, social and political suppression, alienating them from national belonging and intimidating victims from speaking out, even forty years later. The genocide is still largely denied politically: the same leadership responsible for the massacres remains in power in 2022. There has been lip service paid since 2018 to the need for ‘Gukurahundi’ to be ‘resolved’, but each apparent initiative has been started and then shut down by the state before it has achieved anything in terms of truth telling or restorative justice. This is now an intergenerational tragedy, with the children and grandchildren of surviving victims increasingly raising demands for accountability.
For the last twenty-five years, our organisation has quietly worked with traditional leadership and victims in the remote rural villages in Matabeleland, to document and understand the continuing impact of the massacres. The ‘angry dead’ haunt the landscape and the families of victims, with mass and single graves in schoolyards, business centres and caves causing deep distress. Families and chiefs see no cultural or legal solution in the context of deep political distrust. These are the dead that are ‘hidden in plain sight’, but cannot be spoken of, and cannot be honoured or remembered.
Our forensic anthropology team has since 1999 been ‘healing the dead’ by exhuming, documenting and returning for reburial, those killed during the 1980s. We have maintained contact with families, some for over twenty years, to track the impact of reburials. The exhumations have occurred in a complex and nuanced political and cultural context, where the very neglect of the region has offered strange gaps for such activities to take place, carefully and without publicity. Each exhumation presents new political challenges and different socio-cultural outcomes as the years pass. The complexity of ‘healing the dead’ is challenging, in what continues to be a politically polarised and repressive nation, facing economic turmoil, massive poverty and diasporisation. This paper will explore several recent case histories to illustrate that even while the broader context has shifted and decades have passed, the passionate desire for generations of families to honour the dead by burying them in accordance with family rituals has only grown with the passing years, as has the courage of traditional leadership who authorise the exhumations.
Without the right to be mourned
Oksana Mikheiveva, a DAAD professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany
With the start of Russia's aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the issue of missing persons was transformed from a police issue to a military one. As of today, there are 7200 missing people registered in Ukraine, 10% of them are civilians. An average of 3-5 new missing persons cases are reported every day.
Missing persons are people whose whereabouts are not fully known, their absence is seen by family and friends as unexpected and undesirable, having a significant risk to life. In the context of war in Ukraine, disappearances are linked to military action, occupation, captivity and forced migration. Missing people’s statistics only show the facts that have been reported. The registration of missing persons is often delayed in the case of occupied territories. Problems with telephone or internet connections make it impossible to record the disappearance of people in time. Relatives may not file a wanted notice or may refuse a DNA test because it is often perceived as an admission that a loved one has died. The situation of missing persons has consequences in almost all dimensions - psychological (the psychological condition of relatives and their reactions to what happened), legal (fixation of the fact of life and defining the status), administrative (the need for new administrative structures and mechanisms), social (the reaction of society at large to such facts, the attitude towards the nameless dead, awareness of the need to restore names and facts or lack thereof) and economic (various benefits for families of the missing).
In Ukraine, the situation is complicated by the fact that the search for missing persons takes place in the context of an ongoing war. Often the wounded and dead remain in the occupied territories and the transfer of bodies or the return of prisoners depends directly on the degree to which these issues can be resolved between the warring parties. The use of mobile crematoriums by the Russian side reduces the chances of finding human remains to almost zero. The situation with mass graves remains just as complex, with the identification of bodies highly dependent on the possibility of exhuming the bodies and the time after which such exhumation becomes possible. According to preliminary estimates by the Red Cross, in Ukraine it will be possible to identify 30-40% of those currently reported missing.
There is an algorithm for dealing with missing military personnel in Ukraine. The commander of the military unit informs the military registration and enlistment office (where the military person is registered). Within 7 days the enlistment office has to inform the relatives about this fact. An application for a search is then submitted. This can be submitted by the military unit where the missing person served, the enlistment office or relatives. The best option is when the relatives to submit an application, as they will have a DNA test and this information will be entered into a database for identification purposes. The data is then entered into the Missing Persons Database and a search begins.
The situation regarding the search for civilians turns out to be much more difficult. Due to the occupation of parts of the country, relatives and acquaintances are first faced with the problem of not being able to contact family and friends. This period of disconnection can last for several months. In such circumstances, people often simply do not have grounds to declare their relatives missing. Then a lot depends on the status of the territory. If it turns out to be occupied, relatives are forced to communicate about missing persons with the occupying authorities. Our life as well as our death are facts of life that require official confirmation. In the case of death, the evidence is the body or parts of it and DNA expertise. However, during the war, both prisoners of war and bodies of those, who were killed, often end up in occupied territories. This leads to situations where, for a long time, people whose fate is unknown acquire the status of missing persons. In these circumstances, the relatives of the missing find themselves in a very difficult situation. They experience a psychologically difficult state of obscurity, unable to realize their right to understand what is happening to a loved one whose death has not been confirmed.
Missing person status in most cases means that a person has died and is buried without being identified, or is a prisoner of war. With various structures in place to search for missing persons, the most effective search is still carried out by the relatives of the missing person. Relatives of missing persons search for and interview fellow service members released from captivity, monitor social media (as combatants may boast about their military successes, post videos, photos, mention names and facts).
The leading position of relatives in the search for missing persons creates a problem of inequalities related to different resources of the family, both material, but also, for example, educational or related to the position in the hierarchy of power. Poor and insufficiently educated relatives are often unable to carry out searches on their own and are therefore more dependent on search processes carried out by special structures (in Ukraine these are military units, the national police, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Reintegration, as well as civil society organizations).
Due to the ambiguous nature of the situation, missing persons are rarely the heroes of journalistic stories. In the representation of different segments of the people involved in hostilities, the dead (both warriors and civilians) receive the most attention. The Missing Persons problem remains more of a personal grief than a social issue. Behind this is often a difficult decision by relatives about whether to publicly disclose details of the situation or keep them secret. One of my interlocutors spoke about her experience of being imprisoned in the quasi-state entity DPR (Donetsk People's Republic) on the occupied territories. Publicity in the media often led to the deterioration of the prisoner's position (as it served as additional proof of the prisoner's value to Ukrainian society). On the other hand, the lack of publicity opened up the possibility of additional options for solving the issue of release (e.g. ransom). In such circumstances, relatives often fear publicity, believing that a missing person may be alive and in captivity. All this leads to the exclusion of the stories of the missing from public discourse, and to their social disappearance.
Also, when dealing with the consequences of disappearances, the focus is often on relatives who face both emotional difficulties and the phenomenon of postponed life, as well as the quite mundane consequences related to issues of official recognition of the facts life (death certificates, inheritance, benefits or etc.) However, we often talk about starting a search for a missing person in a situation where their relatives are safe. The disappearance of a loved one in a war situation can have a significant impact on the life scenarios of relatives who are in danger. For example, one of my interlocutors and her child could not leave Mariupol and were in the city under constant artillery fire because she had been searching for her husband for 10 days since he went missing and only left with the help of volunteers after his body was found and identified. Such situations can also have a significant impact on the financial situation of relatives of missing persons. Another interviewee recounted that she had to buy back her relative's body from the occupation authorities after they had exhumed and identified bodies buried near her place of residence, in the yards of residential blocks of flats.
Both the conceptualization of 'missing' and its categorization and detailing become necessary today. Its consequences manifest themselves both at the personal level (family, friends) and at the level of society as a whole. The large number of unidentified victims can maintain a sense of injustice in society, of the impunity of crimes against humanity. This makes the issues of missing persons, prisoner searches and exchanges, exhumations and identity verification important issues for the future restoration of normality in society.
The Space between ‘Bottom Up’ and ‘Top Down’: Strategies for the Identification of Disappeared People
Adriana Rudling, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Chr Michelsen Institute, Bergen Norway and a Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow at the Instituto Pensar, Bogota, Colombia and
Natalia Qvortrup, PhD candidate at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway
Recent reports by the Search Unit for People Presumed Missing, the main state entity emerging out of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forced of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP), place the number of conflict-related missing persons at more than 120,000. This paper focuses on a mechanism that materialized from previous legislation that carved out a space between ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ practices aimed at locating, identifying, and returning the remains of those forcefully disappeared to their relatives. Law 589/2000 generated an unique opportunity for interactions between victims, their organizations and state institutions and officials working in the disappearance space in two ways: first, through the creation of the National Commission for the Search of the Disappeared People (Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas Desaparecidas, CBPD), which included representatives of victims’ and human rights organizations; second, it established the first National Registry of Disappeared Persons (Registro Nacional de Desaparecidos, RND) as part of a comprehensive system that sought to respond to this harm. We turn our attention to a specific device of state intervention issued and distributed by the CBPD: periodicals containing photographic evidence of the belongings found alongside the unidentified bodies located. Based on cadaver information referred by the pioneering Information System of the Network on Disappeared People and Cadavers (Sistema de Información Red de Desaparecidos y Cadáveres, SIRDEC), itself managed by the National Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences (Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses, IMLCF) as outlined in Decree 4218/2005, these catalogues were then distributed to victims’ organizations to assist in the identification and eventual return of the remains of those forcefully disappeared. By placing these archives at the center of our investigation, we aim to show how the state intermittently supports the search for the disappeared through a crucial documentation practice of photographing and cataloguing the objects found in mass graves. This materiality of the Colombian state, present in the lives of those engaged in the search for the missing, bears witness to the disappeared, making their absence ‘present’ by reporting on their belongings. We ask to what extent does this documentation practice help fulfil goals of identification, dignified return, accountability, or memorialization. By following the social life of these catalogues - their creation, their temporal and special movement, use, significance and what will eventually become of them in the new bureaucracy of disappearance established with the Peace Agreement - we aim to map the effects of this ‘local’ and seemingly exceptional documentation practice in the global landscape of disappearance and missingness. We argue that this practice challenges the narrative that pathologizes states in the Global South as absent, being indicative of a state engaged in a learning process as a result of persistent organized socio-legal and political action by victims. 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
Tracing the ‘missing men’: the trail of disappearances and gendered histories of conflict in Kashmir
Asaf Ali Lone, Research Associate, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India
This is an autoethnographic account based on the oral narratives and life histories of the women who have experienced ‘disappearance’ of someone close in the family. I trace the experiences of the women in my immediate family and friends who have gone through the ordeal of locating one of their ‘missing’ male family member. Disappearances in Kashmir has been largely seen through a political lens. Here, I take a departure from the conventional use of ‘disappeared’ in the larger political discourse of Kashmir conflict. I trace the everyday struggles of women who experienced a case of ‘missing’ person during the last three decades of the armed conflict. The experience of missing someone is neither a permanent state of being nor a temporary, rather, it’s entrenched in the memory in such a way where even after finding the ‘missing’ person resuming life becomes difficult due to the trauma one endures. Mostly women have faced a unique situation where the gendered practices in the family push them towards a more vulnerable position as the ‘male’ member in the family goes missing. The women are dependent on the assistance from her immediate family, whether of the husband’s side or her parent’s side. Independently, she is not able to perform as the gendered practices won’t allow her to encounter the state directly due to the apparent stigma associated with women’s mobility.
In such cases, where women’s agency is restricted to independently look for their missing ones, the trauma and vulnerability increases. In some cases, women are able to break free of this shackle to actively participate in this struggle collectively. In a majority of cases, the struggle and everyday life of women with both society and state remains invisible. Another ironic case, is that in the political narrative, men who went missing during the conflict and some of whom survived the torture centers or encounters with security agencies have been treated either as martyrs or hero’s. Whereas same treatment is not given to women, who survive the everyday violence and struggles to keep their families going at the same time waiting for the ‘missing’ to come back.
In this paper, I borrow the ‘social disappeared’ (Gatti, 2020; Gatti and Blanes, 2021) category to look beyond the conventional categorization of missing in Kashmir. With it I merge ‘everyday’ (Kent, 2018) life of these women to see beyond the quotidian ways of their resistance and negotiation with their everyday struggles of the life. Through the ‘social disappeared’ I look at how in the initial days of the conflict men who became a target of either militants or from the military or pro-government militias stayed away from their families. How the women coped during these times? Through these accounts I aim to build an ethnography of the violence that women have braved during last three decades. How these everyday accounts of these ‘ordinary’ women have not been significantly captured and how it helps us understand the gendered struggles of living in a conflict zone to rebuild lives?
Session Seven: Borderlands and exile
Living with the Dead, the Disappeared, and Ghosts. Border Cohabitation and Collective Mourning
Carolina Kobelinsky, French National Centre for Scientific Research - Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative
A possible horizon, a material reality, a ghostly presence: death is a constant feature in lives at the borders for those trying to enter Europe without the necessary authorizations from nation-states. At the border between the enclave of Melilla and Morocco, it is common to share stories about migrants who have died violently while attempting to scale the fences that embody the EU-Africa boundary and whose bodies have mysteriously vanished. Similarly, it is not unusual to improvise a collective gathering paying tribute to those who have died in a shipwreck of which news has just been received by telephone. And it is commonplace to discuss the fate of dead bodies that had to be abandoned in the desert so that the journey could be continued or to experience forms of communication with the disappeared. This paper will deal with localised social responses to the dead and the disappeared. I am interested in examining how border crossers negotiate the disruption caused by daily exposure to disappearance and the deadly nature of the EU borders. My focus will be on the multiple ways in which border crossers relate both individually and collectively to the dead and the disappeared.
After border deaths, new beings emerge and engage in collective life. Many of these entities, which I refer to as ‘border beings’, come up in the narratives of the people I met, and exist in very real ways. Although they are not necessarily physically embodied, they account for particular forms of existence. Drawing on ethnographic material collected among male border-crossers from West African countries during fieldwork in the enclave of Melilla and its Moroccan surroundings between 2014 and 2018, as well as on the Spanish mainland and in France since 2014, I will document small-scale interactions about border beings and affective engagements with them. I will then examine how disappeared migrants, unidentified bodies, the ‘living dead’, ghosts, and the living all co-exist at the border.
By way of conclusion, I will argue that acknowledging the presence of these various border beings, talking about them, attributing a place in life to them, and caring for them, affords the possibility of taming the pervasiveness of disappearance and makes it possible to cope with the haunting qualities of border materialities and symbolics. I would like to suggest that engaging in life with border beings might also be considered a form of collective mourning.
Grieving and Mobilising for the Disappeared in Syria – at the intersection of personal, collective and transnational experiences in exile
Julie Bernath, Swisspeace and University of Basel
Enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention are emblematic of the political violence and conflicts that unfolded in the aftermath of the Syrian uprising. According to Syrian human rights organizations, enforced disappearance is affecting almost half a million of individuals in the Syrian context.1 This includes many of the Syrians who have been forcibly displaced since 2011 and live across varied geographies of exile, in informal settlements and dire humanitarian conditions in contexts such as Lebanon, or in European host countries with access to citizenship and other resources such as Germany. Over the last few years, survivor-led associations, which are operating transnationally across these various host country contexts, have been at the forefront of demands for the right to truth, the release of detainees, and justice. They are based on the mobilisation of family members of forcibly disappeared or detained persons, as well as former detainees and survivors of torture.
This paper explores how grieving and mobilizing for the disappeared in Syria takes place across these varied geographies of exile. It asks what a ‘localised’ social response to disappearance means in such a context of forced displacement. The paper examines how claims to address enforced disappearance are formulated at the intersection of personal, collective, and transnational experiences in home and host country contexts, with a focus on Germany and Lebanon. It further analyses how diaspora mobilisation for the disappeared intersect with globally circulating frameworks and globally shared experiences of transitional justice, in particular regarding the right to truth, but also innovative practices of individual criminal accountability. In this regard, it explores how survivor-led associations make spatial use of the trials that are taking place under the universal jurisdiction principle to disrupt notions of closure entailed in narratives of criminal justice; to question the normalization of the status quo in Syria; and to render visible ongoing practices of enforced disappearances. Finally, the paper reflects upon the politics of knowledge production on the disappeared in the Syrian context, in light of the institutionally crowded field of professionalized transitional justice actors working on Syria. The paper draws from qualitative interviews conducted with Syrian and international activists, members of survivor-led associations and non-governmental organisations conducted since November 2018, mainly in Lebanon and Germany; as well as from (non)participant observation of transitional justice events and workshops that have taken place in Lebanon, Germany, and cyberspace since November 2018.
The missing, the dead and the survivors: Liminal entrapments in the aftermath of genocide
Hariz Halilovich, RMIT University
By the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war more than 100,000 were killed and close to 35,000 individuals were reported missing (presumable killed)—some 7,000 of whom have still not been found or identified up to this day. The issues surrounding the missing and their exhumation, identification and burial are some of the lasting legacies of genocide in Bosnia, still affecting many individuals, especially war widows, their families and respective local communities. Dealing with the ‘ambiguous loss’, i.e. not knowing where the body of one’s loved one is, has made the grieving process of many surviving families much harder than it would be if they had been able to bury the victims. The gaps, absences and open-ended temporality the missing persons left behind also reflect upon the politics, culture and reconciliation within the broader Bosnian society and in the diaspora. In private domain, memory of the missing is kept alive through symbolic home memorials made of photographs and personal objects belonging to the disappeared, while annual commemorations, collective burials, remembrances and silent marches organized by survivors’ associations represent public performances of such memories. Based on a comparative ethnographic study of the genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ survivors in post-war Bosnia and in the diaspora—in Australia, the USA, and Sweden—the paper discusses how missing relatives who disappeared in the war continue to affect everyday lives, social identities and memories of the individual survivors and their fragmented families and communities.
The Poetics and Politics of Disappeared in Indonesian Timor
Andrey Damaledo, Affiliated Assistant Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.
This paper outlines the cultural politics of disappeared among the Tetun speaking people in Indonesian part of Timor. Living along the border of Indonesia and Timor-Leste, the Tetun people have involved in and experienced violent conflict since the colonial times. For most of the nineteenth century, for example, warfare and headhunting raids happened regularly among local rulers or between local rulers and the European colonial powers. Similar pattern of violence occurred to date where youth groups from a particular village attacking their neighboring village. In another case, dispute over land ownerships often resulted in violent conflict between communities in the region. With such a long history of violence, the Tetun has different terms attributed to death. However, when it comes to disappeared, they always refer to a single unitary notion of lakon - hasae an (disappeared and make presence). Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork between October 2012 and October 2013, and my subsequent visits and stay in the region since 2018, the paper begins with a historical overview of violence in Timor. It then moves on to examine the Tetun categories of death before it analyses the complementary ideas of disappeared and make presence, its recourse in the narrative of violence and conflict, and its application in poetic phrases during funeral ritual. Finally, the paper considers how ideas of disappeared navigate the Tetun people’s transnational mobility, alliance and obligation.
Session Eight: The search for the missing & identification II
The role of migrant communities in Sfax, Tunisia, as an informal intermediary between families of missing persons, authorities and international organisations
URRI FILIPPO: chercheur, Migreurop, Border Forensics and MAHMOUD KABA: EuromedRights officer Maghreb
Faced with the issue of dead and missing persons in migration, one of the major problems is the spatial, temporal and "material" gap between family searches in the countries of origin and the procedures for identifying the bodies of victims, when these can be recovered by the authorities. In particular for the dead and missing persons in the Mediterranean, the limited search capacities of the families (no precise information on the trajectories of the relatives, difficulty in obtaining visas, ... ) and the functioning of the disembarkation system after the search and rescue operations, whose priority is not the identification of victims and the search for the missing, do not facilitate the situation: according to a report by the ICRC, out of approximately 20,000 people dead or missing in the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2019 (IOM data), only 13% of the bodies have been recovered For Italy, only 23% of the bodies recovered have been identified.
A series of research studies conducted or currently underway on the "search practices" of missing persons in Melilla (Kobelinsky), Catania (Kobelinsky, Furri), Ventimiglia (Furri, Lestage), Sfax (Furri, Kaba), and Calais (Galisson) highlight how the people who play a fundamental role in these processes, and "in" this gap between search and identification, as witnesses, informants, and sometimes survivors, are members of diasporic communities: relatives who are not formally direct family members (and thus are often excluded from official procedures) but who constitute a fundamental connecting jersey between families and missing persons. This is true for diasporic communities in general, but it is even more true in "pre-border" contexts, where people in migration stop for days or months, form communities, create relationships, leave traces: and those who remain know, almost always, who has left.
We are currently working on a project of the organization EuroMed Rights, which has among its objectives to analyze and describe the procedures of management of bodies and burials of people who died in migration in the Maghreb, which should subsequently allow to map the number and location of these burials, which could integrate the report Counting the dead of the ICRC, which describes the situation for Spain, Italy and Greece. The ambition is to develop a project similar to that of mapping the graves of the cemetery of Catania (Kobelinsky, Furri), in the city of Sfax, thanks to the support of the municipality and the privileged contacts within the various migrant communities in the city.
The constant contacts with these groups and with the associations of the different communities (Ivory Coast, Guinea, ...), linked also to other activities of EuroMed Rights and based on a relationship of trust and support, highlight their fundamental role in the processes of identification of the deceased in migration and in the effort to attribute an identity to the missing persons, as well as in the contact and exchanges with the families of these persons. A role that is often misunderstood, maintained marginal and "not legitimate" also because of the precarious situation of these populations. Through the material collected during the surveys conducted so far and the study of some specific cases, we propose to illustrate the role of these actors, their capacity of informal "mediation" between the families of the missing persons, the Tunisian authorities and the international organizations, to underline the criticalities and the potentialities of their involvement in the search activities and the identification procedures.
The boat of 18 April 2015 shipwreck as relics of the modern: south Italian translation and management of border death
Giorgia Mirto, PhD student, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University in the City of New York
Over the past 30 years, Sicily, in southern Italy, has seen the burial of thousands of bodies of unidentified migrants who perished while attempting to cross the deadly external borders of the European Union (EU). Despite the fact that the deaths of these people are ultimately caused by necropolitics enacted by Italy and the EU as a whole, Italian law requires coastal municipalities to bury-and thus treat culturally (Favole 2012)-the bodies of migrants. While the bodies of living migrants are excluded, on the other hand the cultural management of mourning and work on the bodies of the deceased take place (Laquer 2016; de Martino 2008) so that border death are integrated within the community of the dead, the cemeteries. Yet, the bodies of migrants are not "just" buried, but are actually moved from one coastal municipality to another, disputed among different authorities, paid homage to and then buried with elaborate funerals (Last and Cuttitta, 2020). In short, they go through a work of reliquary translation (Geary 1990) that brings their deaths and bodies to be re-signified in a “reverse burial”.
Indicative in this regard are the events relating to the boat that remained after the maritime disaster of 18 April 2015. The disaster occurred in international waters between Italy and Libya and to date represents the largest mass death of civilians ever in the Mediterranean since World War II. After the prime minister's decision to resume the boat from the seabed and spend 22 million euros in an effort to "give a proper burial" to those who had died there, the boat went from being to a wreck of Italian neo-colonialism left to gather rust on a NATO base (Proglio et alia 2021) to a controversial work of art, Barca Nostra, to be exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale (Paynter and Miller 2019). Finally, it was won after a long tug-of-war between major Italian cities and is now displayed in the port of Augusta between a giant cross and the statue of Our Lady of Stella Maris. At each stage of the translation and re-signification of its social life (Appadurai 1986), the boat carries a political identification and moral positioning toward death in the Mediterranean. However, although the body of the boat refers back to the body of the deceased unidentified migrants, in its being a statue out of the earth (Verdery 1999) it fossilizes the narrative of this disaster in the anonymity of the unknown migrants who died there. The relic allows one to venerate the saint and not his executioner (Brown 1981).
In the paper I will present at the workshop I will discuss the social life of the boat and how and to what extent its reliquary translation turns it into a relic of the modern. I will then pause in examining how analyzing the boat as a relic of the modern allows us to grasp the social and political responses to the migrants’dead in Italy. In doing so, I hope to be able to emphasize how the "cultural" treatment of dead migrant bodies is intertwined with and dependent on their being unidentified.
Tracing the ‘Grandparenthood Index’: Citizen-led forensic innovations in Argentina and the politics of knowledge production
Arely Cruz-Santiago, University of Exeter
Forensic science in Latin America has developed as a form of layperson advocacy (Smith, 2016), mostly led by female relatives of disappeared persons. The work of these women has been described as human rights activism and their role within identification processes framed as either providers of raw information and/or the recipients of scientifically valid forensic identifications. Thus, not surprisingly, their forensic labour and contributions to knowledge have been unacknowledged from the history of science in favour of an expert-based ‘objective’ version of forensic truths (Cruz-Santiago, 2020). So far, feminist understandings of forensic science in the global south have been limited to the practice of experts (Rosenblatt, 2015; Sidhu and Candilis, 2018; Olarte-Sierra and Pérez-Bustos, 2020). To redress the omission and complicate our understanding of forensic science, this paper traces the emergence of the ‘Grandparenthood Index’ in Argentina as a form of citizen-led science. It then follows its socio-political life as it becomes entangled with State led campaigns and legal obligations in favour of victims of violence searching for their kin (Vaisman 2015).
The Grandparenthood Index was the first genetic technology developed in 1983 to prove relatedness between a grandparent and a grandchild in the absence of the parental generation. The development of this technology was the product of an international collaboration between the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and international geneticists such as Marie Claire King. A genetic technology, born from personal connections designed at the margins of the state to aid the ‘Abuelas’ in their search for their grandchildren, who the Argentinean military had kidnapped after their parents were disappeared and murdered, became the gravitational force that brought new infrastructures, ways of understanding and revealing kinship and identity, that shaped the promises of forensic science for decades to come. Through a series of interviews with key actors and documentary analysis, this paper analyses how the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo took the investigations into their own hands, gathered sensitive information in the middle of political conflict and death threats, and created systems of evidence that ran parallel and, many times, in opposition to those provided by the State. These citizen-led forensic efforts revolutionised victims’ identification and brought forth the power of grassroots forensic investigations. Simultaneously, by telling the story of the mainstreaming of ‘Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo’ techno-political agenda --and what seems to be the last decades of the forensic system created around them-- I complicate our understanding of infrastructures of care, science, and legal sanctions designed to reveal the identity of ‘Nietos’ (grandchild) sometimes event against their will (Vaisman 2015). My analysis intends to shed light on the attitudes, contingencies and struggles born from the Argentian experience that have nonetheless deeply shaped the horizons and techno-political imaginations of what is possible and desirable when searching for the disappeared in other Latin American scenarios.
Community-based forensics in the U.S Mexico Borderlands: a binational view
Robin C Reineke and Natalia Mendoza Rockwell
Within the context of the widespread occurrence of death and disappearance among migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, significant scholarly attention has been given to state practices of forensics, attending especially to questions of responsibility, infrastructure, citizenship, and care. Far less attention has been given to forensic practices performed by non-state officials in the borderlands. In our binational project, “Forensic Citizenship in the Borderlands,” we have researched the forensic practices of civilian volunteers on either side of the US-Mexico border, including Arizona-based groups such as the Ajo Samaritans and Armadillos Busqueda y Rescate who search for the dead north of the border, and Sonora-based like Las Madres Buscadoras who regularly locate mass graves on the Mexican side of the border. Despite significant differences in the patterns of manner of death on each side of the border—with most on the Arizona side the accidental deaths of migrants crossing a landscape constructed by the state to be deadly and most on the Sonoran side the homicides of young men murdered by members of powerful organized crime syndicates—there is both relatedness and relationality among and between these citizen forensic efforts.
In this paper, we draw on our broader research to specifically examine the ways of knowing that make the work of these groups successful. Among the US-based groups, many forensic volunteers draw on lived-experiences of migration, military service, or hiking in the Sonoran Desert to read the landscape for clues and signs of life and death. In Sonora, search groups are comprised primarily of female relatives of the disappeared who draw on their own experiences of grief, loss, and communication with the dead and disappeared to find sites of mass violence. In addition to such experiential and embodied forms of knowledge, forensic volunteers also employ established forensic techniques such as line searches, soil stratigraphy, and ground probing to locate the disappeared dead. These groups have regular success in locating the dead, each time compelling a response by state authorities. We argue that the expertise drawn upon by these groups, which is simultaneously emotional, embodied, place-based, and forensic, both impacts and changes state practices of forensics in the borderlands. When these groups are successful in locating or identifying the dead/disappeared, interesting collisions and collaborations play out with state forensic officials in ways that are uniquely revealing of the politics of forensics and the sociality of the dead in the borderlands.
Participant Bios
Jessica Auchter
Jessica Auchter is Professeure Titulaire (Full Professor) at l’école supérieure d’études internationales (ESEI) at Université Laval in Québec, Canada. Her research is situated within critical security studies, focused on visual politics. She is the author of Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (Routledge, 2014). Her work appears in Critical Studies on Security, Journal of Global Security Studies, International Affairs, Millennium, Journal for Cultural Research, Global Discourse, Human Remains and Violence, Review of International Studies, and International Feminist Journal of Politics, among others, and in several edited volumes. She is currently working on projects on the visual representation of sexual violence and on the politics of dead bodies in global politics. She can be reached at Jessica.Auchter@eti.ulaval.ca
Caroline Bennett
Caroline Bennett is a socio-cultural anthropologist, who works on politics and violence, with specific attention to genocide, human rights abuses, and the politics of death and the dead. Her current research examines mass graves and their dead in Cambodia, exploring relationships to those dead in contemporary Cambodia, and the use of political violence and mass death in projects of nation and state building. She also works on the treatment of human remains after mass death, research emerging from her previous training as a forensic anthropologist. Her research therefore intersects the practical and theoretical approaches to mass grave investigation and the recovery and identification of dead bodies. She is currently a Lecturer in Social Anthropology (Human Rights) at the University of Sussex, UK, and an Associate Research fellow at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.
Julie Bernath
Julie Bernath is a senior researcher at the practice-oriented peace research institute swisspeace and a lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research focuses on questions of agency, resistance, diaspora mobilization, inclusion and victim participation in transitional justice. Her research focuses on the Cambodian and Syrian contexts. Julie is also co-chair of the Standing Group on Human Rights and Transitional Justice of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).
Ram Kumar Bhandari
Ram Kumar Bhandari is a social justice activist based in Nepal, who has been actively involved in advancing victim-led transitional justice advocacy and building victim-led movements in the grassroots, national and international level. Ram is one of the foremost advocates for a system of transitional justice that addresses the needs of relatives, and one of the strongest voices at the federal level in support of victim-centered transitional justice and accountability efforts. Ram comes from a family directly victimized by forced disappearances. He has suffered imprisonment and threats as a result of his activism against the authorities responsible for the disappearance of his father, who was forcibly disappeared during the conflict in 2001. Ram has over fifteen years of experience organizing grassroots mobilization in Nepal and in South Asia. In the years since he has pioneered many of the techniques of grassroots activism, mobilisation, campaigning and networking. He has helped to launch the community Radio station, network of families of the disappeared (NEFAD), the Committee for Social Justice, the Conflict Victims Common Platform for transitional justice and the several community groups, and recently the international network of victims and survivors of serious human rights abuses (INOVAS). He has also led petitions to the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN working group on enforced and involuntary disappearances, and the Nepali Supreme Court. He has written extensively on disappearances, victim movement, transitional justice, human rights and nonviolent conflict in English and Nepali, and has a range of published and unpublished papers.
Kate Cronin-Furman
Dr. Kate Cronin-Furman is an Associate Professor of political science and Director of the Human Rights MA at University College London. She holds a Ph.D. in political science and a J.D. from Columbia University and has practiced law in New York, Cambodia, and The Hague. Dr. Cronin-Furman’s research focuses on human rights and on the prevention and punishment of mass atrocities. She is the author of “Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities” (Cornell University Press, 2022). She is also one of the conveners of the Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium, which provides methodological and ethics training and support to researchers working in violence-affected contexts.
Arely Cruz-Santiago
Arely Cruz-Santiago is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow within the Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology Department at the University of Exeter. Cruz-Santiago’s Leverhulme fellowship (2021-2024) Forensic Citizenship: Science and expertise in Latin America examines the governance and development of forensic grassroots technologies that have emerged in Latin America amid human rights violations. In 2014, she was one of the founders of ‘Citizen-Led Forensics’: The first forensic DNA database created, managed and governed by relatives of disappeared persons in Mexico. The project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council transformative research stream, is the product of a long-standing ethnographic engagement that has explored how families of disappeared persons become forensic experts in their own right. For ten years, her research has incorporated ethnography and Participatory Action Research (PAR) to analyse citizen-led forensic practices such as case file analysis, DNA sampling, GPS and drone mapping to aid in the search for the disappeared. Her research is the bedrock of a new agenda on citizen forensics and participatory research that challenges existing forensic investigation models. She holds an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice and a PhD in Human Geography from Durham University, United Kingdom.
Andrey Damaledo
Andrey Damaledo, Affiliated Assistant Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
Shari Eppel
Shari Eppel is a Zimbaxsbwean who lives and works in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. A forensic anthropologist, she has been involved for more than twenty years with exhumation and reburial of those murdered in the 1980s in her region, by the post independent state. Also a clinical psychologist by training, Shari has tracked the socio-cultural and political impact of exhumations and reburials on families and communities over more than two decades. In recent years, this has increasingly become work with the next generation of survivors, as transgenerational memory and trauma is now a reality.
Joost Fontein
Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Previously he taught anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (2007-2014) and worked as Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi (2014-18). He has conducted extensive field work in Zimbabwe and more recently East Africa since the late 1990s. His third monograph, entitled The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020: Bones, Rumours & Spirits (James Currey), was published in 2022.
Damian Grenfell
Damian Grenfell is an Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is currently the Program Manager for the Master of International Development and the Master of Global Studies, teaches in security, development, gender and peace at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, and is formerly the director of the Centre for Global Research (2013-2017). In terms of research Grenfell takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the patterns and consequences of conflict, particularly in relation to forms of identity in post-colonial states and in recent years has been focusing on the social significance of death in contemporary Timor-Leste.
Hariz Halilovich
Hariz Halilovich is Professor of Global Studies and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne. His research has focused on place-based identity politics, mass atrocities, forced migration, and human rights. His publications include the books Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War–torn Communities (2013/2015); Writing After Srebrenica (2017); and Monsters of Modernity: Global Icons for Our Critical Condition (co-authored with Julian C.H. Lee et al) (2019). In addition to academic writing, he has also produced multimedia exhibitions, works of fiction and radio and TV programs.
Tricia Redeker Hepner
Dr. Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University. Her research on Eritrea, Eritrean diasporas, and Northern Uganda focuses on migration and displacement, transnationalism, human rights, transitional justice, militarism, and conflict/peace. She has published four university-press books and more than twenty peer-reviewed journal articles or chapters. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the US Fulbright Scholars Program.
Laura Huttunen
Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Tampere University, Finland. She has worked extensively on issues of migration and transnational communities, and she has conducted long-term ethnographic research among the Bosnian diaspora since 2001. More recently, she has worked with the anthropology of human disappearances. Her previous research project focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina; currently she is leading the research project ‘Governance and Grieving: Missing Migrants and Emerging Politics’ (DiMIg) funded by the Academy of Finland, with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts. Currently, she is working on a monograph on human disappearances across political and cultural variations, and on an edited volume on the anthropology of disappearances with Gerhild Perl (University of Trier).
Mahmoud Kaba
Mahmoud Kaba is Guinean and has been living in Tunisia for more than ten years. He is the Regional Project Officer (Maghreb) on Migration and Asylum at EuroMed Rights, the organization aims to protect the rights of migrants and refugees in the Maghreb region and support the work of civil society organizations on this issue. He was coordinator of migration projects within the Arab Institute for Human Rights and in charge of a project for the protection of victims of human trafficking between Tunisia, Ivory Coast and Senegal within Terre d'Asile Tunisia.
Mahmoud specializes in migration issues, including the identification of missing or dead persons during their migration, migration policies of the Maghreb States and the EU, and the protection of victims of trafficking. EuroMed Rights is working on the development of a mapping of actors and procedures for the identification of deceased/missing migrants in the Maghreb.
Lia Kent
Lia Kent is an Associate Professor/ Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. An interdisciplinary peace and conflict studies scholar, Lia is interested in the myriad ways in which individuals and communities make sense of legacies of state violence and protracted conflict. She has examined these issues through long-term ethnographic research in Timor-Leste (since 2004) and more recent research in Aceh (Indonesia) and Sri Lanka. Lia’s current research project involves a comparative ethnography of localised socio-political practices around ‘the missing’ in Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka and their intersection with the responses of states, international actors and NGOs. The aim is to bring local epistemologies, needs and practices to the centre of scholarly analysis and reshape dominant understandings of ‘the missing’ in peace and conflict studies.
Jaymelee Kim
Dr. Jaymelee Kim is an Associate Professor of Forensic Sciences at the University of Findlay and a Forensic Anthropologist for the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office in Detroit, MI. Dr. Kim's applied research assists victims and survivors of diverse forms of violence, such as human trafficking in Ohio, warfare in Uganda, Indian Residential Schools in Canada, and interpersonal/structural violence in Michigan. Dr. Kim collaborates with non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and government agencies to provide consultation and policy recommendations in the US and abroad. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the AAFS Humanitarian and Human Rights Resource Center, and the National Institute of Health Minority Health International Research Training Program.
Carolina Kobelinsky
Carolina Kobelinsky is an anthropologist, research fellow at the French National Scientific Research Centre (Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology). Her current research deals with border deaths. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, she studies the material and symbolic treatment of dead border-crossers at the Southern borders of Europe (around the Spanish enclave of Melilla and in Catania, Sicily). She is the co-editor of Les futursrêvés des morts. Migrations, traces, mobilités (Paris: Petra, in press).
Chulani Kodikara
Chulani Kodikara is a feminist researcher and activist. Her work explores women’s struggles for justice and equality at the intersection of law, politics, and nationalism with a focus on Sri Lanka. She is currently an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, having completed her PhD in January 2022 on the struggle for truth and justice being waged by Tamil family members of the disappeared in Sri Lanka. Prior to commencing her PhD, she has worked as a researcher with the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, the Muslim Women's Research and Action Forum and the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process in Sri Lanka.
Udo Krenzer
Udo Krenzer is a Physical Anthropologist, graduated in Germany, with practical experience of forensic investigations in the fields of search, recovery, examination and identification of human remains in Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Udo is currently working with the International Committee of the Red Cross as Regional Forensic Manager in Asia and the Pacific, overseeing forensic programs that aim to strengthen the medicolegal system and to protect and manage the deceased in armed conflicts and emergencies.
Kar-Yen Leong
Dr. Kar-Yen Leong is currently as associate professor at Tamkang University’s Department of Global Politics and Economics. He teaches courses on democratic politics, human rights as well as on culture, politics and history of the Southeast Asian region. He graduated from the National University of Singapore’s doctoral degree program in Southeast Asian Studies but also has postgraduate and undergraduate degrees in human rights and political science from the UK as well as the United States. Having spent more than a decade teaching at universities in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, Dr. Leong’s passion continues to lie in the Southeast Asian region. With a keen interest in the burgeoning field of memory studies, Dr. Leong’s research is prompted by how it intersects with the history and culture of the region. Dr. Leong is currently working on a project which looks at human rights in general and more specifically the role human remains plays in how individuals and communities deal with the aftermath of violence.
Asaf Ali Lone
Asaf Ali Lone is a Research Associate at Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi where he explores various aspects of urbanisation, internal migration, livelihood, incrementality, ghettoisation and marginality in Indian cities. Prior to joining CPR, he was part of the Housing Discrimination Project (HDP), a three-year empirical research on urban rental housing discrimination in India. He has completed his BA (Hons) in Arabic from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, MA in Society and Culture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat and the Urban Fellows Programme from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. His research interests are urban politics, housing and migration; urban sociology and segregation; cultural anthropology and digital humanities; men and masculinities; memory and violence; religion, postmodernity and postcolonialism; war, conflict and law; Kashmiri folk literature and protest songs.
Maumil Mehraj
Maumil Mehraj is a student researcher from Kashmir. Her work majorly revolves around material memory of conflict and how tangible objects seek to resist erasure. She is also a creative writer associated with the International Writing Program, University of Iowa.
Oksana Mikheieva
Oksana Mikheieva is a DAAD professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She is also professor of sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In the spring semesters of 2020 and 2022 she was visiting lecturer at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). She has also participated in more than 20 sociological research projects, in 10 of which she was a principal investigator. Mikheieva has over twenty years of research and teaching experience. She researches a wide range of areas, including the historical aspects of deviant and delinquent behavior, urban studies, paramilitary motivations, forced displacement, migration. In 2016 she was a visiting professor in Ukraine European Dialogue at the Institute for Human Science (Vienna), and in 2015 she was Eugene and DaymelShklar Research Fellow Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute.
Giorgia Mirto
Giorgia Mirto is a researcher and anti-racist militant from Sicily, Italy. She has spent the past 11 years researching Italian procedures related to the management of the bodies of migrants who died in the Mediterranean. She pursued this political and intellectual endeavor contributing to the creation of the official-based Border Death Database at VU University in Amsterdam. With the Mediterranean Missing Project at the University of York, Giorgia investigated both the impact on families of having a relative missing, and the law, policy and practice around the identification of bodies of dead migrants in Italy. Accompanying the ICRC as a consultant, Giorgia participated in a pilot study aimed at identifying the victims of the largest shipwreck known, that of April 18, 2015. Giorgia then supported family members of the missing and their collectives in the both shores of the Mediterranean in the process of seeking truth by accompanying them in the search and standing by their side in the struggles. This led her to question what it means to memorialize the death of migrants. In 2018, she won a research grant at the University of Bologna to study the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of Italians in regard to death and dying. With the goal to analyze how Italian funerary practices are translated towards the subsumption of those who die in the Mediterranean and the political role of the dead migrants’ bodies., Giorgia is currently a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York.
Tâm T. T. Ngô
Tâm T. T. Ngô ( Ngô Thị Thanh Tâm, PhD in Social Anthropology, 2011) is a senior researcher and associate professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (The Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam) and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Goettingen, Germany). Her research and publications cover various social developments in postwar Vietnam, such as commemorative politics, the entanglement of religion and sciences, the search for Vietnamese missing-in-action, and state-society relation in negotiating processes of social healing. At the NIOD, she is leading a research project, “Bones of Contention: Technologies of Identification and Politics of Reconciliation in Vietnam,” which investigates the use of spiritual and DNA forensics to find and identify war dead in Vietnam and its implication for the country’s reconciliation politics. Since 2016, she has provided consulting work for BioGlobe (Hamburg, Germany), Vietnam Institute for Biotechnology, and the International Commission for Missing Persons in the process of building Vietnam’s capacity in DNA-based forensic technology used for the Vietnamese government’s war dead identification program.
Bhava Poudyal
Bhava Poudyal started his professional work with the Centre for Victims of Torture, Nepal in 1995 after he completed his Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He has worked in West Africa, South East Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia with various international organizations. He currently works for the International Committee for the Red Cross as a Regional Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) Specialist for Asia and Pacific.
Natalia Bermúdez Qvortrup
Natalia Bermúdez Qvortrup is a PhD candidate at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway researching the information practices of the families of the disappeared in Colombia at the department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science. She has also researched and written about the role of Norwegian archives in documenting the Armenian Genocide, has a background in librarianship, and has an MA in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex, UK.
Mirak Raheem
Mirak Raheem is a researcher and activist working on issues of human rights and transitional justice, with a specific interest in disappearances, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Currently he is the Executive Director of the Collective for Historical Dialogue and Memory, a specialized institution working to interrogate, document and preserve forgotten and neglected aspects of Sri Lanka’s complex past. Previously he served as a commissioner on the Office on Missing Persons, an independent state body mandated to address the issue of disappearances (2018-2021). He was part of the first board of the OMP that was tasked with establishing the office and implement its mandate, including to set out a list the missing and disappeared in the country. Prior to that he served as a member of the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms (CTF) in 2016, established by the Government to carry out island-wide consultations to ascertain the public’s views and recommendations on transitional justice, and to compile a report based on these findings. He has also authored publications on internal displacement, human rights and transitional justice and coexistence in Sri Lanka. He obtained his Undergraduate Degree in International Relations and History from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (UK), and a Master’s Degree in Peace Studies from Notre Dame University (USA).
Robin Reineke
Robin Reineke is a sociocultural anthropologist with specializations in transnational migration, science and technology studies, human rights, forensic anthropology, and the anthropology of death. Her research and fieldwork are focused on the US-Mexico border region, especially the Sonoran Desert. From 2006 – 2020, she worked closely with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner. In 2013 she co-founded the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, which she directed until 2019. Dr. Reineke is Assistant Research Social Scientist at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, and Affiliated Faculty in the School of Anthropology. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, “Caregivers of the Dead: a political and moral economy in the US-Mexico borderlands.”
Simon Robins
Simon Robins is a practitioner and researcher with an interest in humanitarian protection, human rights and transitional justice. For the last decade he has combined academic research with a consulting practice focusing on evaluation and programme support with international agencies, including the UN and NGOs, with an emphasis on states emerging from conflict and violence. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York. His recent publications include: Transitional Justice in Tunisia: Innovations, Continuities, Challenges (2022), published by Routledge, and From Transitional to Transformative Justice (2019), published by Cambridge University Press, both of which he co-edited.
Adriana Rudling
Adriana Rudling is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Chr Michelsen Institute, Bergen Norway and a Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow at the Instituto Pensar, Bogota, Colombia working on issues relating to the interactions between victims and transitional justice mechanisms.
Jill Stockwell
Dr Jill Stockwell is a Social Anthropologist with experience working and researching in the fields of transitional justice, humanitarian protection and diplomacy, and community development. Jill currently works with the Central Tracing Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) supporting the humanitarian response to missing persons and their families.
Julia Viebach
Dr Julia Viebach is a Senior Lecturer in the School for Social Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. She researches violence, memory and transitional justice with a focus on post-genocide Rwanda and more recently South Africa. Previously, Julia spent more than eight years (2013-2021) at the University of Oxford both at the Faculty of Law and the African Studies Centre where she taught on the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice and the MSc in African Studies. She is the curator of the award-winning photographic exhibition Kwibuka Rwanda and case display Traces of the Past at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. She has published widely on transitional justice, memorialisation and human rights archives including two edited books. Julia has worked as a consultant on transitional justice and memory for various development aid organizations and German government bodies. She holds a PhD in peace and conflict studies from the Centre for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg.