Abstract
The issue of missing persons as a humanitarian challenge has received little academic attention, with the dominant analytical lens being that of disappearance: a violation of international human rights law that is the subject of a convention dedicated to its prevention. Disappearance, however, is a narrative restricted to those persons actively made to disappear by a state and imposes a legalistic narrative on the phenomenon; as a result, both responses to and discussions of the issue are dominated by a rhetoric of ‘truth and justice’ in which the judicial is pre-eminent, rather than the broader needs of the families left behind. Most of those missing are not disappeared, they are separated from families by war, displacement, forced recruitment or migration or are killed in conflict by non-state actors. Rights discourse and the judicial emphasis also serves to depoliticise the issue and abstract it from the environment that led to the persons going missing; politics ultimately determines how and whether the missing are discussed and the issues are addressed. This book then is a refreshing change to dominant approaches, dedicated as it is to the issue of missing persons and with the express intention of interrogating the politics that underlies the issue.
Jenny Edkins aims to survey the landscape of missing persons, through chapters discussing the September 11 attacks on New York City, the displaced in post-Second World War Europe, the London terrorist attacks of July 2005, British soldiers missing in action and the desaparecidos of Argentina. Seven chapters have a geographical or thematic orientation, while the last focuses on psychological approaches to the impact of disappearance, notably that of ambiguous loss. Edkins’ goal is to understand how forms of governance that objectify the person can be challenged: families of the missing seek the truth about their particular relative, while political systems recognise only categories of persons to be administered. She seeks to use the issue of the missing to interrogate the politics of the person. At the heart of her argument is that the missing are the objects of administration, their subjectivity denied by the apparatus of governance; individuals and their unique connections to others are ignored, they are counted for what they are not and who they are. The missing are in contrast defined by their social context, it is the fact that someone misses them that makes them so.
Edkins begins her book in Manhattan, recounting the stories of those who simply vanished in the ruins of the twin towers when they fell on 11 September 2001. She talks of the need for families to ‘restore personhood’ to those who are missing and of the collective rituals of the photos of the missing posted around the city and the gatherings in Union Square that demonstrated the collective nature of New Yorkers’ trauma. This echoes the therapeutic demands of ambiguous loss, a model for understanding the impact of disappearance on a family, to which Edkins refers. Collective demonstrations that seek to value the missing, such as the sharing of photos or experiences, create positive meanings for families that aid coping, honouring the missing without the need to deny the ambiguity of their fate. This is the first place Edkins refers to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, the idea that those beyond law are reduced to a condition where their lives can be taken without consideration (Agamben, 1998). Agamben introduced the term with reference to the victims of Nazi concentration camps, and it seems misplaced here; the vast majority of those who died in the twin towers have been eulogised, memorialised, compensated and celebrated. Many remain missing, but huge efforts have been made to find and identify their remains, as Edkins describes. Families have been assured of the value they have, not least their political value to the US state. It can be argued that far from being ‘excluded from politics’, as Edkins maintains, the missing from September 11 have been put at the heart of it. Bare life, a life without value, would seem to be a far more appropriate description of those who died in the Western response to September 11, the Iraqis and Afghans who died in huge numbers, unidentified and uncounted by their killers.
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the issue of what Edkins calls the displaced, more properly those separated from their families, in Europe in 1945, and efforts to ‘trace’ their relatives. There is almost no academic treatment of the issue of tracing that is at the heart of efforts to both prevent people going missing and restoring contacts when they are, so this discussion is most welcome. The book provides a history of the efforts of the victorious allies in Europe to trace missing relatives, which imported the priorities of the victors and devalued ‘enemy citizens’. Edkins criticises those administering this work for perceiving it as a problem of managing populations, where it is the individual that is missing. For those who do such work (and indeed did it in the 1940s), primarily various components of the Red Cross movement, tracing is known as the ‘restoration of family links’ and would thus seem to intrinsically focus on the person, as a humanitarian response is obliged to do. This work is always subject to efforts by states to politicise it, but tracing is simply about putting people in contact with each other, and so to describe this as work that loses sight of the individual seems unfair. The scale of the task, whether in post-war Germany or on the borders of Libya in 2011, demands an approach that can address the hundreds of thousands in need of tracing; regardless of the scale, however, tracing is necessarily about individuals.
However, what mostly seems lacking from this historical treatment is that tracing work continues globally, with the Red Cross movement continuing to work to ensure that families separated by conflict or otherwise are reunited. Even in Europe, in the 21st century, tracing remains an urgent task, dominated by the needs of migrants who find themselves detained or living a clandestine life. Political challenges are still enormous: in Italy, the state is trying to criminalise efforts to support illegal migrants – including through tracing – and in the United Kingdom, the authorities are attempting to instrumentalise the international Red Cross tracing network, by insisting that all unaccompanied Afghan minors submit a formal request to trace relatives at home, to facilitate deportation (UK Court of Appeal (2011), DS (Afghanistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWCA Civ 305). This demonstrates the relevance for contemporary politics of the issues of tracing and missing persons, and it is a shame that the book does not attempt to engage with the issues of far greater relevance than those of seven decades ago.
Chapter 4 addresses the issues arising from the London bombings of July 2005, emphasising a narrative of the needs of victims’ families being deprioritised relative to security demands. As a result, many of the missing were not confirmed dead for up to a week after the events. Whilst this is distressing for relatives, Edkins’ demand that the dead be identified visually represents a common underestimation of the challenges faced when bodies are often in poor condition and family members tasked with identification are traumatised. In the Balkans, this lesson has been tragically learnt as DNA technology has permitted confirmation that a significant number of bodies identified visually by families before such technology was widely available have been misidentified. The appalling result of this is families giving up bodies they have honoured in family graves for a decade or more. Such outcomes seem a high price for families to pay to receive a quick answer; surely putting persons before politics demands that families are given answers about loved ones that are definitive, even if this delays transmission of information?
Chapter 6 discusses the treatment of unidentified British war dead (‘missing in action’), charting the change in attitudes from mass burial at the site where combatants fell in the two World Wars to a current policy of bringing remains home for identification and civilian burial. The extreme contemporary case is the role of the United States in the Vietnam War, where $1.2m is spent per set of recovered remains of missing servicemen from the war of the 1960s and 1970s, who can now be identified through DNA testing. Although unsaid by Edkins, this appears to represent the fetishisation of the individual body and a politicisation of a family’s loss; bodies are recovered not only to address the needs of families but to assuage the political stain on the United States that the Vietnam War represents. One crucial point not made in this book is the equivalence of all the missing that would seem to be a logical conclusion of prioritising individuals over the objectification and politicisation of missing persons. Whilst huge resources are devoted to recovering US war dead from Vietnam, millions of Vietnamese remain missing from what they call the ‘American war’, with few resources available to retrieve or identify them. This surely represents the most extreme example of the missing as a category rather than individuals; a humanitarian response is to equate all the missing, rather than to elevate those from one side over the other. This typifies perhaps the greatest lacuna of this volume: all the cases discussed come from the rich world, while most contemporary missing persons are in the low income states of the global south. The most visible politics around the missing appears to be the division between those in the west who are grievable and the victims of conflicts in post-colonial spaces, such as the missing of Vietnam, Congo, Iraq or Afghanistan who remain individually unacknowledged. For a book to discuss the politics of missing persons and to avoid entirely this moral cleavage, appears a serious oversight. Whilst the issue of missing persons has been thrust into the spotlight as a result of wars and terrorism in Europe and America, the greatest challenges remain in places where the missing as an issue is yet to be acknowledged.
Despite this critique, this book will be of use to both academics and practitioners working on issues related to missing persons or with their families. It can be hoped that this is the beginning of efforts to bring a truly inter-disciplinary approach to the phenomenon of the missing, not restricted to the use of rights or psychological perspectives, but driven by the breadth of needs of the families left behind.