Introduction

Missing Persons as an Analytical Lens on Human Rights Practice

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12930366
AutoresSimon Robin (0000-0002-6445-2159, autor de correspondencia), Laura Huttunen (0000-0003-1455-9588)
Año2025
Volumen17
Número3
Fecha de publicación2025-07-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Human Rights Practice (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1757-9619 • E-ISSN: 1757-9627
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jhuman/huaf035
OpenAlexW7117548156
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas28

As a violation of rights, disappearance is unique in being defined in terms of what is not known rather than what is, and this both shapes why and how it must be approached differently from other violations and gives it a particular analytical power in understanding rights practice more broadly. Human rights practice in response to missing persons has long emphasized victims of enforced disappearance, where a legal framework that emerged from the activism of the families of the disappeared, guides action. Yet formal responses to the missing, as a part of transitional justice processes and beyond, are often critiqued as overly legalistic and technocratic, with a rhetoric of ‘victim-centrism’ often coexisting with practices that sideline those most affected. This special collection utilizes the phenomenon of missing persons as an analytical lens to examine, and potentially transform, broader human rights practice. The articles foreground the affective and experiential dimensions of ambiguous loss, emphasizing the subjectivity and relational nature of victimhood, with impacts—including in social spaces and communities—far beyond those engaged by judicial and state-centric mechanisms. Contributions explore how the emotional uncertainty of disappearance both fosters collective mobilization and solidarity—forming affective communities that drive activism—and informs powerful practices of memorialization that resist the erasure of personhood. By analysing engagements with formal processes and grassroots organizing across diverse post-conflict contexts (Sri Lanka, Nepal, Syria, Colombia), the collection demonstrates that victim agency must be understood through these self-organized, affectively grounded forms of action. Ultimately, this collection suggests that integrating relationality, affect, and subjective experience into rights frameworks can build a more human, resilient, and victim-centred future for human rights practice

Agency (philosophy · Economic Justice · Experiential learning · Foregrounding · Grassroots · Human rights · Power (physics · Rhetoric · Subjectivity · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Law in Society and Culture · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration