Forced Disappearance and Governmentality Conference

The Social Study of Disappearance Lab at Columbia University's Anthropology Department will host a one-day conference on February 6, 2025 addressed to the phenomenon of disappearance as a problem for theories of governmentality. Though Achille Mbembe’s conceptual extension of biopower to necropower might take us some way into those aspects of sovereign power which subjugate life to the power of death, the special dynamics of disappearance require further specification, and conceptualization. This is because disappearance is not only the production of disposability, though it may rely on that: it centrally concerns the production of uncertainty by way of subtracting a person both from their social world and from governmental accounting, administration and regulation. Moreover, although forced disappearance is commonly associated with Cold War politics and military dictatorships, forced disappearance today frequently occurs through the acquiescence of government officials to the actions of non-state actors. Does state acquiescence to forced disappearance enacted by criminal organizations constitute a failure or a limit of governmentality, or something else? What is the relationship between disappearance, performances of sovereignty and the state's administrative and regulatory apparatus? Our hope for this event is to think together empirically, theoretically, and comparatively about forced disappearance and what it illuminates about forms of sovereignty in the contemporary world.

Breakfast

Opening Remarks

Emily Hoffman & Claudio Lomnitz

Session 1

• Elena Azaola: State Strategies to Hide the Disappearance of People in Mexico City
• Kevin O’Neill: ¿Dónde están? Pretrial Detention Centers in Guatemala
• Ather Zia: The Disappearance of Enforced Disappearance in Kashmir

Session 2

• Naor Ben-Yehoyada: Conservative seizure: kidnapping and the establishment of pax mafiosa in 1970s Sicily.
• Louisa Lombard: Loss Without Disappearance: Violence and Knowledge in Central Africa
• Natalia Mendoza: Disappearance as Social Contract: Reflections on the Victim--Searcher--Perpetrator Triad in Sonora

Lunch

Session 3

• Nadia Abu El-Haj: TBA
• Isaias Rojas-Perez: (Hand)Writing the Aftermath: Fieldnotes for an Anthropology of the Disappeared in Post-conflict Andean Peru
• Rita Laura Segato: Violence as a message of a belowground order

Break

Session 4 & Closing Remarks

• Rosalind Morris: The Underground, The Invisible, and the Disappeared: The Siege on Informal Mining in South Africa
• Marcela Turati: TBA
• Claudio Lomnitz: Closing Remarks

Notes:

• Registration is required.
• Breakfast and lunch will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

Host or Publisher Social Study of Disappearance Lab