It is used to talk about migrants that cross the border, also for citizens that go missing, for those who were murdered during the Spanish civil war and the following dictatorship, it is also the name used to call those erased of the registers in Dominican Republic or Mexico, and sometimes it is how people refer to uncontacted tribes of the Amazonian… The name for those and many others is disappeared. None of those situations correspond, nevertheless, to what the law qualifies as “enforced disappearance”. This Special Topic considers the uses of the category disappearance looking mostly into the social, rather than the savantes, uses. The five articles gathered in this Special Topic show how the category disappearance is exceeded and its potentiality as a tool to analyze subjects expelled, pariahs, the precarious, the vulnerable, abandoned lives.
