Uncertainty as Statecraft: Family Movements Contesting Disappearance

Abstract:State violence, particularly in the form of enforced disappearance, is designed to terrorize publics and quell organized forms of dissent. Most fundamentally, however, disappearance as a form of violence operates to disrupt family and kin-based bonds. In this article, I outline how family has emerged as a mobilizing framework to contest enforced disappearance, driven largely in response to how states produce a pervasive sense of uncertainty and liminality for women and their families living in the aftermath of a relative's disappearance. Drawing on an interdisciplinary literature that foregrounds Butler's (2006) notion of "grievability," I detail how the effects of disappearance lay the groundwork for social movements to mobilize under the rubric of family to dispute state-based assertions that the disappeared are "unmournable." Family-based social movements against disappearance highlight the contradictions between the valorized position of "family" in many state ideologies and the disruptions to families wrought by state violence.