The terms 'disappeared' and 'disappearance' emerged into prominence during the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s, when the Argentine state kidnapped and killed those it perceived to be a threat to its operations and ideological foundations. As a strategy, disappearance has since been widely employed by state and non-state armed actors. However, enforced disappearance has been perpetrated systematically and for diverse rationales across the globe for centuries. As such, enforced disappearance has been a historical constituent element of violence linked to wider political, economic and cultural processes, including slavery, colonialism, statebuilding, 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. 

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Today, enforced disappearance is considered a serious human rights violation and a permanent form of torture. 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 then have become increasingly consolidated over time. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about how the relatives, communities and societies of those that are disappeared live disappearance, including in terms of its embodied, psychological and everyday impact upon them. 

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Despite international attention given to disappearance as a crime then, disappearance is still not afforded the same attention and consideration within academia and policy/practice as some other forms of violence, such as warfare, genocide, terrorism, massacre and torture. It has then remained marginalised as a subject of study, despite its tragic, long-term effects upon individuals and societies.

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Furthermore, beyond significant evolution in the juridical realm and formalised institutional mandates to search for the disappeared, measures aimed at offering a meaningful response to disappearance are relatively underdeveloped in comparison to other post-conflict reconstruction initiatives. Within the legal and humanitarian spheres, states have developed limited mechanisms to investigate the disappearances they themselves frequently carried out, while international actors (such as the UN) have struggled to work towards solutions in what is a global environment of limited state political will and where families and victims tend to carry the greatest burden.

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Co-hosted at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, as the first international conference of its kind, Addressing the Legacies and Challenges of Confronting Human Disappearance will bring together leading voices from the policy sector, academia and world of arts to centre “disappearance studies” as a new core research field in politics, international relations and legal studies and in conflict, violence and peace related programmes.

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Seeking to conceptualise disappearance – including understanding the why, when and how of disappearance – by drawing upon the latest thinking in many applied fields, the conference will open spaces to discuss trans-disciplinary approaches that address the specificities and commonalities to disappearances across space and time. With the participation of those affected by disappearance, policymakers, practitioners and scholars, the conference will consider historical understandings and experiences alongside new ethical and conceptual frameworks, research agendas and policy responses with the objective of launching Disappearance Studies as a sub-field of policy-relevant research and practice in its own right.
 

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