In this volume’s subtitle, I claim that absences created by human disappearances are always violent, in one way or another. Sometimes they are violent in a literal sense: they are produced by intentional acts of violence, perpetrated by the state or by other actors striving for power. In other cases, the violence is of a different kind: sometimes disappearance takes place in conditions that expose people to dangerous circumstances and make them susceptible to violence; in yet other instances, something in the disappeared person’s life propels them to leave without informing those around them. With my choice of title, I also argue that, whatever the reason behind disappearance, from the point of view of those left behind, there is always something violent in the unaccounted-for absence. It creates voids in social relations, with practical, emotional, social and sometimes also political consequences, and it disturbs deep-rooted cultural practices around the transition from life to death. The empirical material that I have discussed in this book, both my own ethnographic material and other researchers’ data, shows the diversity that exists in the violence of absence in different locations and contexts. The quality, intensity and political significance of violence varies hugely, but in the experience of those left behind, there is always something disruptive in the unaccounted-for absence of a loved one.

At the same time, the title claims that human disappearances create presences that often have a haunting quality. People cannot just vanish, or cease to exist – those left behind need explanations, rituals, bureaucratic procedures and personal processes of making sense, and those who disappear leave behind both powerful voids and traces of their existence. This haunting, or insistent presence-in-absence, takes many forms, as Chapters 4 and 5 of this book argue. First, it gives rise to a great variety of projects that focus on searching for the missing and invest in identifying them, if found dead, and reconnecting them with their families and communities. Secondly, it gives rise to a plethora of symbolic reappearances, ranging from private mementoes to state-run museums, from artwork and media spectacles to ghosts and restless spirits haunting both places and individuals.

Juxtaposing absence and presence in this way urges us to think about human disappearances in dynamic terms and to pay attention to processes that connect disappearances and reappearances with each other. At the heart of my understanding of the violent force of disappearances is Gabriel Gatti’s (2014) argument that disappearance cuts individuals off from their social worlds, from their families, kinship connections and communities, and from their histories. It creates bodies without identities and voids in social worlds. Both investment in the search for and identification of the missing and symbolic forms of reappearance emerge to fill these voids and to repair and restore the relationships that have been so violently severed.

I have emphasised throughout this book the importance of embedding every case of human disappearance, and reappearance, within its social, cultural and political context through careful ethnographic work. Beyond this, I suggest in the introduction that we need to place both disappearance and reappearance within a historical frame; the significance of presence and absence, personhood and the individual, the role of the state and of the state-based international system, ways of memorialising, and ways of identifying both living and dead individuals have all changed significantly over the course of human history, some of them over just a couple of decades. All this suggests that human disappearance is a phenomenon that varies across time and location. Analytically, this urges us to both map variation and simultaneously ask questions about similarities and continuities across this diversity.

Anthropology of disappearance, or towards theorising disappearances in social sciences

In this book, I have suggested ways to develop anthropological, or more generally social-scientific, approaches to human disappearances across political and cultural differences and geographical contexts. The key axes along which I have approached the issue are disappearance and reappearance, life and death, state and kinship, and intimate and political. My focus is on anthropology, but I believe that my suggestions make sense for a variety of humanities and social sciences.

Throughout, I argue that the missing are liminal figures between life and death. Even though in many places the probability is that missing persons are dead, without a body there is no certainty, and the indeterminate state continues, often becoming a chronic condition that affects the lives of the families and communities left behind. Moreover, in many places there are people who are violently killed and buried in undignified ways, and the families or other community members know where these unproper graves are situated. These dead are not missing in the strict sense of the word, as their whereabouts are known by their families, but the state of not being properly buried assigns these remains to the category of the liminal, and in this sense akin to the disappeared. Such liminality is an unresolved state of being that reverberates through communities and societies in countless ways.

One of the book’s key arguments is that, in order to understand the dynamics of human disappearance and reappearance in today’s world, we need to look at both the politics that make some people disappear (Chapters 1 and 2) and the politics that allow some of the disappeared to reappear either alive, or as dead bodies or mortal remains (Chapter 4). There is a dynamic relationship between the two: the circumstances of disappearance affect the form that reappearance takes. Both disappearance and reappearance take place in historically unique circumstances; Argentina, Bosnia and the Mediterranean have served as key comparative points for analysing such dynamics and I have brought in other places and contexts as well, to illuminate the complexity of the phenomena being discussed.

Moreover, I argue that understanding the varied role of the state, or states, in relation to disappearances is crucial. In Chapter 1, I provide examples of contexts where the state has purposefully targeted its citizens or residents within its territory, often killing them and simultaneously hiding the act to create a political landscape of fear and submission. The practice of enforced disappearance is often an individuating strategy that targets individuals because of their political allegiances, their ethnic, racial or religious background, or a combination of these. In Chapter 2, I argue that, in the contemporary world, people forced to migrate without proper documentation, along irregular routes, are exposed to circumstances in which they are highly disappearable, that is, they are positioned outside state protection, in circumstances in which they are exposed either to being individually targeted or to the forces of the natural environment, such as the sea or the desert. In this context, states along migratory routes emerge as imbued with indifference, abandoning people within their territory or jurisdiction to an unprotected state of being. In many cases, this practice is not individuating in the same way as ‘classical’ modes of enforced disappearance, and who ends up dead or disappeared is a more random matter. However, there are also examples of state complicity in targeting individual migrants, which makes the picture more complicated and alerts us to the need to critically examine the role of the state in each case.

In Chapter 3, I suggest that in (more or less) stable democracies based on the rule of law, the state recognises its role as the protector of missing citizens and others (legally) within its jurisdiction. Emotionally strained situations often give rise to criticism about the shortcomings of police work in missing person cases, and about the indifference of authorities when faced with families’ pain. However, it is crucial to understand the difference between such rule-of-law societies and the cases discussed above: in rule-of-law–based democracies, the protocols and structures of search are there, and people expect the state to apply the protocols and invest in finding the missing person, while other contexts are often characterised by a profound mistrust of the state and/or a lack of adequate channels via which to report a missing person or to initiate the search process. However, more research is needed to explore the limits of the guardianship of the state in places that are, in principle, governed by democratic standards: how do gender, social class, ethnicity, racial profiling and other forms of distinction affect a state’s commitment to finding the missing and to effectively investing in search and identification?

States are often involved in various ways in projects aimed at making the disappeared reappear as living persons, dead bodies or mortal remains – even though in some cases, they persistently try to hamper search efforts. In today’s world, however, especially after mass atrocities and natural disasters, the local state is just one actor, and various supra-national, international and non-state actors participate in the processes. Moreover, the language and terminology with which the events – both disappearances and projects of making reappear – are talked about are circulating globally. The anthropology of disappearance, or the social-scientific approach to disappearances, should be attentive to the range of configurations of actors and discourses, local and global, that come together in various ethnographic sites, and to their significance for local communities and for the ways in which these projects are carried out.

The projects of making reappear take place in constantly changing circumstances, as technologies, both those enabling the search for human beings and biomedical identification techniques, are developing rapidly. These developments give rise to many challenging questions: where and when should expensive techniques be applied? Who should be in charge of the projects? Who should invest in them? How should local understandings of death, corporeality, cosmology and the transition from life to death be taken into account? How are Western ‘scientific’ techniques understood and signified by local actors? Are there local ways of approaching questions of identification, exhumation and reburial? The anthropological approach to human disappearance and reappearance should be sensitive to such challenges, and should also serve as a reminder that in most cases there is no single ‘local’ view – in fact, there are often several competing ones – regarding how the search, exhumation and identification should proceed.

While states – embedded in complex geopolitical situations and global networks of state, supra-state and non-state actors – have a key role in creating the politics around disappearances and reappearances, intimate relations and everyday communities are the sites where the void of disappearance is most acutely encountered, with all its consequences. The anthropology of disappearance should be attentive to the ways in which disappearances and reappearances are signified locally, and how they disrupt, and often create new, social relations and cultural practices.

The productive power of disappearances becomes tangible in the variety of ways in which the disappeared reappear symbolically when they are found neither dead nor alive. As discussed in Chapter 5, symbolic reappearances (and continuities) often take place in the private and intimate spheres, in the cherishing of photographs or artefacts that have belonged to the disappeared and have touched their body, or in ghost-like encounters and experiences of haunting. These private agonies are often translated into public projects, demonstrations and movements, and also into memorials and museums. Anthropological analyses of disappearance and reappearance could further develop our understanding of the ways in which the intimate and public dimensions on the one hand and the material and symbolic ones on the other are intertwined, how they feed into each other and what their significance is in local social and cultural worlds.

Finally, I suggest that anthropology of disappearance is a fruitful project in many ways. It challenges ways of thinking about the state, citizenship and exclusion, life and death, personhood and community, knowledge and knowledge production, protection and vulnerability, presence and absence, and rupture and continuity. As such, anthropological studies of the missing and disappeared can enrich the discipline, and social sciences more generally, in significant ways.

Human disappearances represent a heavy research topic that has taken me into deep waters, in many cases to face extremes of human suffering and human cruelty – and this is certainly the case for anybody working with the subject matter. However, within this landscape of violence, loss and uncertainty, inequality and abandonment, I want to end by placing the spotlight on the insistent emergence of modes of care. The myriad search and identification projects, the private and public acts of engaging with the disappeared and reconnecting them with their social worlds, remembering and commemorating the absent and the acts of concretely redignifying violated bodies all suggest that compassion and care stubbornly emerge in places of death and violation, and that hope and compassion are persistent human capacities with a productive force of their own.