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This book explores the connection between the politics of missing persons, or what happens when people go missing—as a result of war, political violence, genocide, or natural disaster as well as under more everyday circumstances—and the ways in which personhood is regularly produced under current forms of political order in the West. More specifically, it considers the politics of the person as missing and how practices of search and protest in the aftermath of disappearances demand and produce that politics. It also discusses the politics of unmissed persons and persons-as-such. In addition, the book examines the objectification of missing persons and how protests on behalf of displaced, missing, and disappeared persons produce an interruption of the social order, the form of order that philosopher Jacques Rancière calls a police order. The book argues that missing persons as such demand a politics that takes into account the person-as-such—a politics of the person as missing.

This chapter examines the daily routines of policing France's growing urban world. Prostitution, illegal gambling, notorious drinking spots, the brawling rivalries between groups of artisans, or compagnons, the surveillance of ex-convicts, and the search for missing persons were part of the expected work of policemen. But there was also the unexpected, as commissaires de police confronted the tragedies of fires, suicides, infanticide, and child abandonment.

This chapter examines the official and unofficial tracing services that were set up in Europe in the aftermath of World War II as well as the tensions and disagreements that the demand to trace the missing produced in the various military, civilian, and voluntary agencies. It considers the attempts of senior women in the British Red Cross and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to bring a particular sort of order to the chaos that was Europe. It shows that the authorities prioritized the control of populations on the move rather than the business of tracing missing persons. It also highlights the conflict between the politics of who should be helped and the concern of voluntary agencies to help everyone, even former enemies.

This chapter examines cases of people who walk out on their families and the impact of this on those left behind, along with the continuing search for answers by those whose relations disappeared for some reason after World War II, and by children who were separated from one or both of their birth parents. It begins by focusing on people reported missing in the United Kingdom, such as asylum seekers, and the evolution of systems to help relatives trace them. It then discusses the way in which British authorities moved from a refusal to engage with missing persons, except where a crime is suspected or in the case of minors, to a more active engagement of police in quotidian cases. It also looks at debates that reflect differing assessments of the right to disappear versus the right of relatives to know what has happened. It shows that relatives of missing persons suffer what Pauline Boss has called “ambiguous loss,” a particularly distressing form of loss.

This chapter examines the search for missing persons in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan in 2001, with particular emphasis on relatives' attempts to find out what had happened to family members and the production of posters appealing for information about the missing. It considers the contrast between the efforts of relatives of missing persons and the response of the official authorities, how as persons we are in some sense already “missing” in contemporary politics, and how the search for the missing became a demand for a different form of politics. It also explores the meaning of posters that remained on display in New York for many weeks after the collapse in relation to lives disregarded by those who organized the events of 9/11, as well as lives rendered invisible by the objectifying imperatives of corporatism and public policy. This chapter argues that the persistence of posters of missing persons constituted a demand that the lives of the missing be recognized as persons-as-such.

This chapter examines the disaster identification protocols used after the London bombings of July 2005 and argues that they served more as a tool for the authorities in their search for suspected terrorists than as an aid to relatives of missing persons. It also highlights the tension between professionals dealing with the aftermath of disaster and those looking for people they know as it arose in the search for the missing in the London bombings. Aside from the apparent indifference of the authorities, whose hands were shackled by systems and protocols, the chapter considers the experiences of people on the bombed trains staying for hours to sit with the injured and dying. The inquests into the deaths caused by the bombings provide a stark contrast to the actions taken by authorities in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

This book has explored a different kind of the politics of missing persons, one that does not objectify the person but works with uniqueness and singularity, through a detailed study of missing persons and their treatment. It has discussed posters of missing persons produced in New York in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, interpreting them as a form of political dissent; how displaced persons in concentration camps in the aftermath of World War II were treated; and how the authorities responding to the London bombings of July 2005 concerned themselves with what the missing were rather than who they were. It has also highlighted the struggle between two different politics: contemporary politics, which can be seen as a politics that instrumentalizes the individual, a politics that misses the person, and a politics of the person-as-such. The book concludes by considering what it means to think of the person as missing, and what a politics of the person as missing might look like.

This chapter examines the procedures for forensic identification that were developed in the wake of the September 11 attacks. It begins by exploring accounts by those who were involved in the Family Assistance Center and goes on to discuss the procedures for DNA identification used at the disaster site. Despite the reinscription of the missing as the dead on the one hand and as heroes on the other, the focus for those working on the forensic identification of remains was to reassert the significance of the personhood that had been so disregarded, and to reclaim, if not the lives, at least the deaths of those who perished. The chapter shows that the attempt to identify missing persons after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers can be seen in part as an attempt to overcome death, to assert human control, to reinstate order. But it is also a recognition of the significance of persons-as-such, as well as the need for those searching to be able to retrieve at least some remains, however small.

This chapter examines women's activism and activities concerning disappearances in Argentina. It shows that the political activism of women in Argentina was hugely influential not only in making the disappeared persons visible but also in changing the political landscape more generally. It looks at the case of the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, who took the platitudes of the regime at face value and demanded that their children be recognized as political subjects, their arrests admitted, and their supposed offenses proved. It considers the demand that the disappeared be returned alive, and a refusal to allow them to be reconstituted as merely the dead, as an encircling of trauma. It also highlights the stark contrast between a politics of relationality and generationality, or a politics of the person-as-such, and that of objectification, or a politics that misses the person.

This chapter tells the history of the Three Strikes proposal and provides a summary of its terms. What makes the story of Three Strikes unusual in the annals of state government is that California's Three Strikes proposal originated from marginal pressure groups without any powerful constituency in the legislative or executive branches of state government. Yet it became law without any significant amendment. This chapter begins with a capsule history of the Three Strikes initiative in California from a proposal to legislation to an initiative adopted by the voters. A second section lists a few of the objections that can be made to the penal approaches of the initiative. The third section takes more space to describe the two sets of “missing persons” in the California legislative process.

Olga Weisfeiler, sister of the Pennsylvania State mathematics professor who disappeared in southern Chile in 1985, was horrified to find information about her brother's disappearance in some of the documents the U.S. State Department had declassified in 2000. She read and reread the documents, which suggested the U.S. embassy had neglected to pursue the case. A lawyer for the Weisfeiler family was able to get the case reactivated, with Judge Juan Guzmán presiding. Olga, accompanied by her two children, traveled to Chile for the first time at the end of 2000, meeting with Guzmán and U.S. embassy officials, who promised full cooperation and support for the investigation. For two years Guzmán worked on the investigation, along with a sizeable backlog of other cases of Chileans missing or killed during the military regime. Even as U.S. officials raised the issue with their Chilean counterparts and the government of President Ricardo Lagos professed its support for the investigation, the judge encountered so many obstacles that he was unable to rule out any hypothesis in the case.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Eric Robertson Dodds. Missing Persons was the title eventually chosen by E.R. Dodds for his autobiography, published just two years before the end of his long life (1893–1979). The title was intended to bring out the disconnections and discontinuities of his life and the range of his interests. His deep engagement with modern poetry makes it unsurprising that his Bacchae commentary is still unsurpassed for bringing out the beauty and artistry of the Greek. The earnestness with which he took political issues and any public role matches his choice of the Gorgias as a subject, a dialogue that wrestles with the fundamental issue of ‘how one should live’. Ultimately, the fascination with human psychology is seen across the whole range of his interests. Indeed, through all his work runs that overwhelming interest in the people and their minds, not just their words.