The Development of US Regimes of Disappearance: The War on Terror, Mass Incarceration, and Immigrant Deportation

Abstract

Following 9/11, hundreds of individuals in the USA were detained on suspicion of engaging in terrorism and subjected to a “hold until cleared” policy which permitted their indefinite detention while authorities vindicated them of terrorist connections. However, these experiences of detention are not unique to the post-9/11 era. Drawing on a critical analysis of prominent Supreme Court cases concerning the War on Terror, mass incarceration, and immigrant deportation, I argue that the US state has developed a series of institutions that operate to effectively “disappear” people from public and political life. While discussions of disappearance often focus on a specific type of state violence, several important features of state-enforced disappearance characterize all three of the cases considered here. First, disappearances focus on particular communities on the basis of sociological categories such as gender, age, race and ethnicity, and religion, among others. Second, disappearances foster a sense of uncertainty regarding why someone has been disappeared, and render it difficult to ascertain information about the individual. And lastly, disappearance has protracted and extended effects—psychological, social, economic—on the families and friends of the disappeared person. In the USA, capitalism plays a critical role in the development of institutions that disappear individuals.