Convocatoria a sesión en el congreso de la ISA: Social Disappearance: Expanding a Category of Human Rights Law

Social Disappearance: Expanding a Category of Human Rights Law

Session Organizers:

Gabriel GATTI, University of the Basque Country, Spain, g.gatti@ehu.eus
Maria MARTINEZ, University of California Santa Barbara, USA, maria_m_g@hotmail.com

Enforced disappearance has been confirmed in the last 20 years as a juridical category of human rights law and has circulated transnationally. Several countries have adopted the category in their legislation, including nuances due to the specificities of the phenomenon. In that process of circulation and transnationalization, we can identify two expansions from the original definition: the first one —mainly juridical— touches the perpetrator, including today not only agents from the State but other organizations; the second one —which is more sociological— affects the victims, subjects and populations that are considered “disappeared”, opening the category to profiles that are far away from the referent of the category in human rights legislation: the disappeared of Latin American dictatorships in the 70s. Nowadays the category can be used to analyze, for example, migrants in transit or populations excluded or invisible. They are the social disappeared.

This regular session aims to articulate a debate among international specialists about the opening, transnationalization, circulation and differential landing of that category. We are interested in works that analyze those processes (circulation, transnationalization) as well as studies that engage with the possibilities and limits of the category when used for situations distanced from the original. What elements of the juridical category are maintained and which ones modified in its transnationalization? How are the demands to include more subjects articulated? What subjects are included? What are the limits and the possibilities of its opening? What elements connects the social disappeared with other notions such as precarity, vulnerability, expulsion?

Fecha límite para el envío de propuestas: 30 de septiembre

https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/wc2018/webprogrampreliminary/Session8922.html