"Rituals of Disappearance" by Roddy Brett (Keywords: Disappeared Bodies; Genocide; State Terrorism; Erasure; Rituals)

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

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Modern usage of the terms 'disappeared' and 'disappearance' emerged during the Cold War, when the Argentine dictatorship kidnapped and killed those it perceived as a threat to its operational and ideological foundations. During the 1970s and 1980s, across Central and South America, military and paramilitary organisations subsequently innovated their typically visible murder and torture strategies by wiping their opposition from the earth, leaving no visible trace of them, and hence no possibility of being held to account for the murders of thousands of people.

Since Latin America’s meat-packing glitterati, as Pink Floyd termed them, patented their martial cruelty, disappearance as a strategy has been widely employed by state and non-state armed actors alike across the globe, often in the name of liberty, freedom and moral rectitude.

While the origin of the story of modern disappearance emerged out of the Cold War, enforced disappearance has been perpetrated systematically and for diverse rationale across the globe over centuries. As such, enforced disappearance is a constituent element of violence, historically linked to wider political, economic, and cultural processes, including slavery, colonialism, the egregious political violence perpetrated in diverse settings during the Cold War, the kidnapping of women and girls for sexual slavery and the silencing of opposition to ecological and environmental activism.

Enforced disappearance has been perpetrated systematically and for diverse rationale across the globe over centuries.

Today, enforced disappearance is considered a serious human rights violation and a permanent form of torture, while also being classified as a crime against humanity. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance entered into force in 2010, with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances celebrated on 30 August. The United Nations has a Special Rapporteur and holds a Working Group and Committee to examine and develop advocacy and policy on the theme. The juridical framework and international guidelines for disappearance have become increasingly consolidated over time. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about how the relatives, communities, and societies of those who are disappeared live this permanent form of torture, including in terms of its embodied, psychological and everyday impacts. Moreover, despite international attention given to disappearance as a crime, particularly since the Argentina case, disappearance is still not afforded the same attention and consideration within academia and policy/practice as other, more spectacular forms of violence, such as warfare, terrorist attacks, massacre and torture.

On the contrary, enforced disappearance is habitually subordinated to and outranked by other, more spectacular forms of egregious political violence, such as massacre and torture, relegated by practitioners and policymakers as one element within the terrorism and political violence toolkit. However, enforced disappearance represents a unique form of violence, which wields a profound impact at individual and societal levels. It also evokes a deep psychology of suffering that requires us to ask deeper questions about its origins, why it is so effective, and the ritualistic behaviours its implementation induces. 

Disappearance is still not afforded the same attention and consideration as other, more spectacular forms of violence, even though it represents a unique form of violence.

For example, Jimena's son was the victim of forced disappearance in the early 2000s in Colombia, most likely perpetrated by the country's far-right paramilitary forces within the context of the country's broader internal armed conflict. Jimena has lived for over two decades with the uncertainty of what happened to her son, with his living absence, his physical invisibility. Every morning, Jimena prepares the breakfast table for herself and her son, placing upon it her son's favourite breakfast, before eating her breakfast alone. She then spends the day engaging with the state institutions mandated to search for her missing son and for the hundreds of thousands of other disappeared Colombians. Her lunch and dinner follow the same patterns as her first meal of the day. She cooks for herself and her son, and anxiously waits for him to come back as she eats, hoping this will be the last day of his disappearance, a plate left on the table, once a week, replete with her son's favourite food. At night, before bed, she lights a candle, and leaves a cup of hot chocolate on the mantlepiece, in the hope that this will be her last day of not knowing where her son is, or whether he is dead or alive. How we address and understand Jimena's living engagement with her son’s disappearance is crucial. Do her actions represent symbolic gestures aimed at bringing her son home, forms of making meaning in a world now devoid of understanding and rules? What have been the consequences of her son’s disappearance on Jimena’s physical and mental wellbeing and health? These questions should be central to a newly reinvigorated engagement with such a horrific form of violence. What do these rituals reveal? As Freud might suggest, what do they normalise and what do they seek to transgress?

Three further questions remain of certain interest for me as a scholar and practitioner. First, there is an urgent need to understand the role the enforced disappearance of bodies might play as an integral component in state terrorism. As we know only too well, terrorism by definition is violence used to threaten with the political aim of producing terror or fear within an audience. It has a crucial psychological dimension. The communicative character of terrorism hopes to maximise political communication and achievement and is, of course, more obvious when human bodies and egregious acts of violence are visible: in short, when violence is spectacular. However, enforced disappearance is, of course, concealed and surreptitious. The horrific impact of the violence of disappearance is no less cruel than the violence visited upon human bodies that are present. Moreover, the terror that systematic enforced disappearance is employed to spread remains as forceful; however, the terrorism of enforced disappearance is communicated through the absence of the body. Enforced disappearance can then tell us much about the strategic deployment of acts of terrorism by armed actors and the denial of bodies becomes a weapon of war that prolongs the suffering. This is also ritualistically deployed.  

There is an urgent need to understand the role the enforced disappearance of bodies might play as an integral component in state terrorism

Secondly, searching questions need to be asked of why and when actors employ enforced disappearance. Until now, scholars from many fields have explained the use of enforced disappearance from the perspective of plausible deniability. In other words, armed actors deploy enforced disappearance in order to allow them the capacity to deny their involvement in the act, and, in fact, often to allow them to deny that a crime has in fact taken place. This places it directly into a juridical landscape. Plausible deniability may, of course, continue to be relevant to some contexts, such as it was during Argentina’s brutal Cold War and, more recently, Colombia’s five-decade-long armed conflict. However, what is interesting here is that military, paramilitary and insurgent actors frequently combine the deployment of their strategy of enforced disappearance with the use of overt egregious violence to terrorise their adversaries. Such a combination suggests that enforced disappearance plays a very specific role and possesses specific objectives as a mechanism of horror and political violence. My concern is to reach beyond the reductionist explanation of plausible deniability. We need to understand the horror motive, which demands political, juridical and philosophical engagement.

Finally, pushed to its collective extreme, we need to confront how enforced disappearance may offer insight into how we comprehend the logics that drive genocide. For example, during the recent high-profile trials in Guatemala, of the country’s former de facto president General Efrain Rios Montt (1999-2013), the focus of investigation was very much upon the bodies that had been found, including in the multiple mass graves of indigenous civilians in the country’s western highlands. These present – not disappeared – bodies were, in fact, central in the “body of proof” that led to the genocide conviction against Rios Montt in 2013. Proving that the military followed an intentional strategy of group destructive killing, through its military doctrine, was contingent upon Montt’s being found responsible for killings, acts of physical and mental harm, displacement, the transfer of children/adults to another group, measures intended to prevent births, and so on.

We need to confront how enforced disappearance may offer insight into how we comprehend the logics that drive genocide.

The crime of enforced disappearance was not included in this count. Significantly, Rios Montt’s conviction was, nevertheless, based upon both the presence of bodies (principally through massacres) and the concept of erasure, specifically, the disappearance of hundreds of villages and of the indigenous Maya lifeworld individuals. In other words, the military pursued the intentional goal of writing the indigenous Maya out of and erasing them from history; in short, disappearing an ethnic group through the bombing of sacred places; forced sterilisation/rape; forced converted identity of indigenous by imposing Spanish language and prohibiting indigenous religion; the transfer of children to military bases or urban centres where their names were changed. While the specific crime of enforced disappearance did not play an overwhelmingly crucial role in this particular crime and conviction, disappearance was key to the genocide on diverse levels. There is a continuum of disappearances that, through partial erasure, leads to genocide. 

In the end, it is fundamental to develop our understanding further, which can better inform policy, and practical responses and strengthen existing scholarship around the complex psychological and physical consequences that enforced disappearance might impose upon individuals, families, communities and societies. In the case of many communities that have been victims of enforced disappearance, this impact is not only embodied through the absence of a body but also lived in a profound, systematic and constant manner. Families living in rural and urban areas often traverse landscapes that they suspect conceal bodies of their loved ones. In other cases, and particularly for tribal and indigenous societies, eliding proper funerary practices wields an enormous impact on family members and the disappeared person themselves. We must engage more meaningfully with the questions raised and honour our debt to victims, their families and their organisations.

Roddy Brett is Professor of Politics and Director of the Global Insecurities Centre at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. His latest book is Victim-Centred Peacemaking: Colombia's Santos-FARC-EP Peace Process, which is published by Bristol University Press (2024).

First published online on 22nd June 2025

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