Dissertation Project
Weaponizing Uncertainty: The Politics of Disappearance in Latin America
Why do states and armed groups perpetrate disappearances? Existing research explains enforced disappearance as a tactic used to evade blame for violence against civilians, but blame often comes even to those whose victims vanish. In my dissertation book project, I address why rulers use the tactic when it is not effective for avoiding blame. I show that, through disappearances, rulers express information about their political projects to internal and external audiences. Internally, hiding some aspects of violence while revealing others helps rulers maintain control by weaponizing uncertainty: creating terrifyingly destabilizing uncertain environments. Externally, it facilitates friendly observers’ ability to turn a blind eye to rulers’ human rights abuses, providing benefactors with plausible deniability more so than the rulers themselves.
Rulers emphasize different kinds of disappearance – and different manners of weaponizing uncertainty – within their repertoires of violence to balance their need for domestic control with their need for external approval. When rulers’ monopoly on violence is consolidated, they perceive a civilian uprising as their primary domestic threat and use disappearances to force quiescence, perpetrating disappearances with a higher degree of uncertainty: what I call indefinite disappearances. When their monopoly is contested by another armed organization, rulers are more concerned with civilian support for the enemy, shaping their disappearance patterns. Finally, the more sensitive they are to external approval, the more likely they are to put a legalistic sheen on their disappearances by perpetrating overt abductions (e.g., arrests), displacing guilt onto the victims.
I use process tracing and discourse analysis techniques to illustrate what ruling state and nonstate actors in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico meant to express via disappearances, working from a corpus of primary source material collected over ten months of fieldwork. I delve into primary sources as well as the broader historiography of my cases to demonstrate how internal and external conditions changed throughout my periods of interest, in turn changing the dynamics of campaigns of disappearance, causing some types to be emphasized and others to cease to be. I accompany this process tracing of within-case variation with cross-case comparisons.
Why do states and armed groups perpetrate disappearances? Existing research explains enforced disappearance as a tactic used to evade blame for violence against civilians, but blame often comes even to those whose victims vanish. In my dissertation book project, I address why rulers use the tactic when it is not effective for avoiding blame. I show that, through disappearances, rulers express information about their political projects to internal and external audiences. Internally, hiding some aspects of violence while revealing others helps rulers maintain control by weaponizing uncertainty: creating terrifyingly destabilizing uncertain environments. Externally, it facilitates friendly observers’ ability to turn a blind eye to rulers’ human rights abuses, providing benefactors with plausible deniability more so than the rulers themselves.
Rulers emphasize different kinds of disappearance – and different manners of weaponizing uncertainty – within their repertoires of violence to balance their need for domestic control with their need for external approval. When rulers’ monopoly on violence is consolidated, they perceive a civilian uprising as their primary domestic threat and use disappearances to force quiescence, perpetrating disappearances with a higher degree of uncertainty: what I call indefinite disappearances. When their monopoly is contested by another armed organization, rulers are more concerned with civilian support for the enemy, shaping their disappearance patterns. Finally, the more sensitive they are to external approval, the more likely they are to put a legalistic sheen on their disappearances by perpetrating overt abductions (e.g., arrests), displacing guilt onto the victims.
I use process tracing and discourse analysis techniques to illustrate what ruling state and nonstate actors in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico meant to express via disappearances, working from a corpus of primary source material collected over ten months of fieldwork. I delve into primary sources as well as the broader historiography of my cases to demonstrate how internal and external conditions changed throughout my periods of interest, in turn changing the dynamics of campaigns of disappearance, causing some types to be emphasized and others to cease to be. I accompany this process tracing of within-case variation with cross-case comparisons.
Working Papers
Habeas (Non) Corpus: A Typology of Disappearance
This paper introduces my typology of enforced disappearance using examples from a variety of cases within and beyond Latin America.
"Por Algo Será": Disappearances in Authoritarian Argentina
This paper is an article version of the overall dissertation argument with evidence from Argentina's military regime (1976-1983), which is often referred to as a "quintessential case" when studying disappearances.
"Subversives" and "Delinquents": Disappearances as a Form of Social Cleansing
This paper discusses how disappearances are targeted and which types are typically used by whom and against whom using evidence from Colombia's civil war, particularly 1985-2005 when paramilitaries were the principal perpetrators of enforced disappearance.
This paper introduces my typology of enforced disappearance using examples from a variety of cases within and beyond Latin America.
"Por Algo Será": Disappearances in Authoritarian Argentina
This paper is an article version of the overall dissertation argument with evidence from Argentina's military regime (1976-1983), which is often referred to as a "quintessential case" when studying disappearances.
"Subversives" and "Delinquents": Disappearances as a Form of Social Cleansing
This paper discusses how disappearances are targeted and which types are typically used by whom and against whom using evidence from Colombia's civil war, particularly 1985-2005 when paramilitaries were the principal perpetrators of enforced disappearance.