More than 40 participants from around the globe paid a visit to the University of Notre Dame on Sept. 29-30, attending a first-ever conference dedicated to disappearance studies and the launch of a new academic journal focused on the discipline.
The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, both within the University’s Keough School of Global Affairs, hosted the gathering. The event represented the culmination of nearly three years of work by academics at both Institutes and their colleagues at the University of Bristol, Durham University, and Ulster University.
The gathering also aligned with the Keough School of Global Affairs’ mission to translate research into actionable policy, offering new frameworks for how governments and institutions might address disappearances in conflict and post-conflict settings.
“Northern Ireland has long struggled to reckon with the trauma of The Troubles, the 30-year conflict that took the lives of approximately 3,700 people, many of them civilians,” said Colin Barr, the Thomas Moore and Judy Livingston Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute, who offered opening remarks on the first day of the conference.
“While the Irish experience of political disappearance is relatively well known, other regions have longstanding experience with it, too — Colombia, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Nepal, and Cyprus, among them,” Barr said. “What my colleagues at the Kroc Institute, at the University of Bristol, and elsewhere convinced me of was the need for disappearance studies to stand on its own as a subject of independent inquiry, and not simply subsumed into the wider field of political violence.”
The Notre Dame conference was the result of what started as a workshop at the University of Bristol in 2023 led by Roddy Brett, a professor in peace and conflict studies there and the co-editor-in-chief and founder of the Journal of Disappearance Studies. Said Brett, “The workshop pointed us clearly in the direction of establishing a new field of study: disappearance studies. We realized that disappearance and enforced disappearance, while clearly egregious violations, had always played second fiddle to other forms of political violence, and this needed to be redressed.”
A gathering at Queen’s University Belfast the following year, hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace at Queen’s, brought together leading voices from the policy sector, academia, family members, and the artistic community. Together, they assessed disappearance studies as a sub-field of policy-relevant research and practice in its own right. It was at the Queen’s event that the launch of the new academic journal was proposed as a specific objective.
“Over the past two years we’ve witnessed a growing enthusiasm, and this contributed to the Notre Dame conference and the launch of this new journal, representing our collective efforts to establish disappearance studies as an important subject of research,” said Barr.
Added Josefina Echavarría Álvarez, director of the Kroc Institute’s Peace Accords Matrix and part of the conference organizing committee, “We received proposals from all over the world and invited academics at all stages of their careers, from graduate students to senior scholars, and from the Global South and North, to participate virtually and in person. This produced a truly global conversation centered around understanding the phenomena and emphasizing the search, from the technical details to human-centered approaches.”
The two-day conference offered a variety of sessions — panels, keynote presentations, and a book launch for The Disappeared: The Hidden Victims of Northern Ireland's Conflict by Sandra Peake and Orla Lynch. Conference attendees represented scholars, practitioners, policymakers, families of the disappeared, and those from advocacy organizations who wanted to explore the socio-political, cultural, and economic dimensions of disappearance.
In addition to advancing scholarship, the conference generated policy-oriented discussions about how governments, international organizations, and advocacy groups might respond more effectively to enforced disappearances, including through accountability mechanisms, reparations frameworks, and institutional reforms.
Meanwhile, the first issue of the Journal of Disappearance Studies was launched at the conference, with many of the associate editors, members of the editorial advisory board and contributing authors participating. The editorial plan is to publish two issues per year, with each issue offering sections for original research, policy and practice intervention, and creative/artistic response.
“The journal will support this new field of disappearance studies, one that is interdisciplinary but that hasn’t been able to wrap itself around a larger discipline,” said Brett.
“It will focus on the collective dimensions of human disappearances, especially enforced disappearances, and on its consequences at human, cultural, and environmental levels,” he said. “In doing this, we hope to put a ‘human face’ on the discipline, creating a connection for readers.”
‘A voice from every corner’
Among the conference speakers was Luz Janeth Forero Martínez, director of Colombia’s Search Unit for Missing Persons, who gave the opening-day keynote, which was moderated by Echavarría Álvarez. Forero Martínez was trained as a surgeon, obtaining a specialization in epidemiology before earning her Ph.D. in sociology of law and political institutions. Throughout her life she witnessed diverse forms of violence that ravaged Colombia because of its long-running civil war. It was those experiences that inspired her to make the jump from surgery to forensics and devote herself to investigation and analysis.
“I always wanted to do forensic medicine,” Forero Martínez explained, “as it’s really about research. I’ve been able to make the connection between violence — accidents, criminality, homicides, and suicides — and the disappearances in Colombia at the end of the 1990s.”
Echavarría Álvarez and Forero Martínez have a longstanding work relationship. The Peace Accords Matrix is charged with monitoring implementation of Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement; as a result, the program monitors the implementation of the commitments by Forero Martínez’s agency, supporting its efforts to search for more than 120,000 disappeared persons.
“Disappearance is a topic we need to talk about, around the world, because of the denial about it,” said Forero Martínez. “It’s important to have a voice from every corner speaking about it; there are still those who don’t believe that it takes place in Colombia.
“Academics should engage with this topic and do so in a direct manner, and that hasn’t happened until now. It’s critical for academics to validate the construction and creation of our work, and to share that with the world. That’s why this conference and the Journal of Disappearance Studies is so important,” she said.
The conference featured a range of speakers with different areas of expertise. Simon Robins, a humanitarian practitioner and researcher with an interest in transitional justice, humanitarian protection, and human rights, offered the second-day keynote. Speaking on “Disappearance as Individual, Social and Political Trauma,” Robins addressed “humanitarian space” and the accompaniment of families of the disappeared — the indirect victims. He also spoke to the psycho-social impacts of ambiguous losses, such as when someone’s whereabouts are unknown to their family, and that person has been reported missing in connection with an armed conflict, other situations of violence, natural disasters, or migration.
At the conclusion of the conference, Barr reflected on the event and conversations and connections that took place over the two days.
“We’ve made great progress, thanks to the leadership and support of our many partners here and around the globe, taking what was an idea and nurturing it into the event we just hosted and the launch of the journal,” he said. “We’re looking forward to what’s ahead as we continue to grow our work. This really is just the start.”
Read more about the new Journal of Disappearance Studies, published by Bristol University Press.