The high number of persons lost, missing, or dead without confirmation of decease in the Euro-Mediterranean in the context of migration and seek of asylum pose a challenge to the technical and conceptual tools available in order to account for their lives. This article explores the reach and possible uses of the category of enforced disappearance. The genealogy of enforced disappearance in Latin America in the 1970s is presented and discussed in terms of its legacies and teachings, like the importance of distinguishing disappearances from deaths. The recent incorporation of “disappearances in context of migration” as a matter of concern in explorative studies of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances is subsequently exposed and analyzed. Indirect, outsourced, or externalized state agency, creation of spaces of abandonment from the states, and emergence of spaces of indeterminacy between life and death are some of the aspects related to migratory routes to Europe tackled by the recommendations of the Working Group. Finally, the text explores the affinity between migrants’ disappearances and other contemporary forms of exclusion or expulsion which may be subsumed under the category of “social disappearances.”
AgambenG. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2.
AlbahariM. (2015). Crimes of peace: Mediterranean migrations at the world’s deadliest border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
3.
Amnesty International. (1981). Disappearances: A workbook. New York, NY: Author.
4.
BaumanZ. (2004). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
5.
BonafiniH. (1997). Vientres [Wombs]. In GelmanJ.La MadridM. (Eds.), Ni el flaco perdón de Dios. Hijos de desaparecidos [Not even God’s Poor Forgiveness. Children of the Disappeared] (pp. 53-64). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Planeta.
6.
ButlerJ. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York, NY: Verso.
7.
CitroniG. (2017). The first attempts in Mexico and Central America to address the phenomenon of missing and disappeared migrants. International Review of the Red Cross, 99, 735-757.
8.
DeleuzeG. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3-7.
9.
DuhaimeB.ThibaultA. (2017). Protection of migrants from enforced disappearance: A human rights perspective. International Review of the Red Cross, 99, 569-587.
10.
DziubanZ. (2017). Introduction: Forensics in the expanded field. In DziubanZ. (Ed.), Mapping the “forensic turn” (pp. 7-35). Vienna, Austria: New Academic Press.
11.
FoucaultM. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976. New York, NY: Picador.
12.
GattiG. (2014). Surviving forced disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and meaning. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
13.
GattiG. (2017). Prolegómeno. Para un concepto científico de desaparición [Prelude. Towards a scientific concept of disappearance]. In GattiG. (Ed.), Desapariciones: Usos locales, circulaciones globales [Disappearances: Local Uses, Global Circulations] (pp. 13-32). Bogotá, Colombia: Siglo del Hombre Editores/Universidad de los Andes.
14.
GattiG. (in press). The social disappeared: Genealogy, global circulations, and (possible) uses of a category for the bad life. Public Culture.
15.
HellerC.PécoudA. (2020). Counting migrants’ deaths at the border: From civil society counterstatistics to (inter)governmental recuperation. American Behavioral Scientist, 64, 480-500.
16.
KalirB.van SchendelW. (2017). Introduction: Nonrecording states between legibility and looking away. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 77, 1-7.
17.
KobelinskyC. (2017). Exister au risque de disparaître: Récits sur la mort pendant la traversée vers l’Europe [Existing at risk of disappearing: Narratives on death during border crossing]. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 33, 115-131.
18.
LaqueurT. (2015). The work of the dead: A cultural history of mortal remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
19.
MountzA. (2011). The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands. Political Geography, 30, 118-128.
20.
MountzA. (2013). Shrinking spaces of asylum: Vanishing points where geography is used to inhibit and undermine access to asylum. Australian Journal of Human Rights, 19(3), 29-50.
21.
RiquelmeH. (1994). Era in twilight: Psychocultural situation under state terrorism in Latin America. Bilbao, Spain: Instituto Horizonte/Freiburg Foundation for Children.
22.
SalterM. (2008). When the exception becomes the rule: Borders, sovereignty, and citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 12, 365-380.
23.
SalterM. (2012). Theory of the / : The suture and critical border studies. Geopolitics, 17, 734-755.
SassenS. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
26.
SchindelE. (2012). La desaparición a diario. Sociedad, prensa y dictadura, 1975-1978 [A Daily Disappearance. Society, Press, and Dictatorship, 1975-1978]. Villa María, Argentina: Editorial Universitaria de Villa María.
27.
SchindelE. (2015). “Blowing off” the boat: The sea border crossing to Europe, a navigation on the nature/culture divide. Mobile Culture Studies, 2015, 199-216.
28.
SchindelE. (2018). The role of “nature” at the EU maritime borders: Agency, ethics and accountability. In PaasiA.ProkkolaE.-K.SaarinenJ.ZimmerbauerK. (Eds.), Borderless worlds—for whom? Ethics, moralities and (in)justice in mobilities (pp. 212-223). New York, NY: Routledge.
29.
SchindelE.Figari LayusR. (2013). Verschwindenlassen [Enforced Disappearance]. In GudehusC.ChristM. (Eds.), Gewalt: Ein handbuch (pp. 170-175). Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler Verlag.
30.
TassinE. (2017). La desaparición en las sociedades liberales [Disappearance in liberal societies]. In GattiG. (Ed.), Desapariciones: Usos locales, circulaciones globales [Disappearances: Local Uses, Global Circulations] (pp. 99-117). Bogotá, Colombia: Siglo del Hombre Editores/Universidad de los Andes.
Vaughan-WilliamsN. (2009). The generalized bio-political border? Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power. Review of International Studies, 35, 729-749.
33.
Vaughan-WilliamsN. (2012). Border politics: The limits of sovereign power. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
34.
WeberL.PickeringS. (2011). Globalization and borders: Death at the global frontier. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
35.
WeizmanE. (2014). Introduction. In Forensis: The architecture of public truth (pp. 9-32). Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press.
Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. (2017b). Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on enforced disappearances in the context of migration (A/HRC/36/39/Add.2). Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Human Rights Council.
