Disappearance: new perspectives

Enforced disappearance is now firmly established as both a discursive and legal framework for understanding the phenomenon as a violation, a criminal act and an experience of families of the disappeared. This represents how disappearance, which was made visible only by the action of affected families, rooted in dissidence and political activism, became something discussed primarily in the language of law and human rights, and prosecuted in courts around the world. This legal formalization has occurred even as scholarship has demonstrated both the multiple forms that disappearance takes and the broad range of experiences of the families of the disappeared. As a result, the codification of enforced disappearance in law has been shown to be not the end of the potential for intellectual and practical work around the issue, but rather a foundation that can be built upon: disappearance remains a rich area for the development of novel perspectives. Here, current understandings of disappearance are reviewed and from there some avenues that an emergent ‘disappearance studies’ could take in terms of potential research directions are examined. A number of representative thematic areas are explored, examining the psychosocial impact on families of having a disappeared relative, and the intersection of disappearance with mobilization and activism, technology and peacebuilding. It concludes with a discussion of innovative work that sees disappearance as a phenomenon that has broader lessons for society.