Unit for Global Justice event

‘Therapeutic’ Regimes of Governing Trauma and the Dea(r)th of the Political:
Politics of Missing Persons and ICMP’s “Bosnian Technology”

Dr Jasmina Husanovic

3 March 2009
Warmington Tower Seminar Room A
4pm – 6pm

This seminar reflects on the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in following through its mission – 'telling the story of a mass grave' and 'mapping a genocide' in the regions of former Yugoslavia. It situates it within some wider technological/discursive practices where this story-telling and mapping has unfolded in relation to the dominant master-narrative of 'therapeutic' or 'transitional' justice and operative (inter)national regimes of governance/power. Mass grave is a metaphor for human waste produced by political power and violence. We might be, as potential or actual human life/waste, already missing, both depoliticised and saturated with sovereign power, with the administration of life and death enacted (upon us) through languages of law and science, nation and religion. But these languages do not (politically) fill the ‘emptied out’ worlds around us after mass atrocity, where we once again live multiple depoliticisations through being mathematised (science), codified (law), culturalised (ethnicity/nation) and metaphysicised (religion).

The seminar’s focus on ICMP’s work is a way of introducing a set of important questions: What is 'harvested/extracted' by the politics of witnessing to trauma of the missing persons (re)produced through the ICMP’s so-called ‘Bosnian technology’? How do the absolute indices of signification (constituted through 'mathemes of reassociation' and 'bar-codes' used in ICMP’s forensic and bioinformatic method of work) fix identity to the remains of the missing, whereby this identification reinserts the missing back into the orders of state and nation? What are the political implications of this and which political imperatives are upon us if we are to move from depoliticised 'bar-codes' towards repoliticised 'stories/faces/bodies' and acts of emancipatory politics as witnessing to trauma? Telling the story of a mass grave and mapping a genocide implies asking in whose name and for the stakes of what kind of ethico-political gesture this is to be done, especially in the context of dominant national and international forms of political authority and governance constituting our political, symbolic and material life/death (biopolitics, biocapital, biocitizenship…).

Jasmina Husanovic is a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Tuzla, and a visiting fellow at the LSE Centre for the Study of Global Governance. She currently works on issues of memory, trauma, biopolitics, and emancipatory politics, and has published widely on these topics.