About the Project
This project seeks to deepen understandings of relational harm, understood in the project as harm that individuals and communities experience through the targeting and control of intimate relationships.
The project centres care, interdependence and family life both as sites of meaning and security and of vulnerability and harm. We examine how family, care relationships, and family life are targeted and, in some cases, altered and rebuilt during war and counterinsurgency.
The project focuses on forced familial separation as a significant manifestation of relational harm, particularly in the context of state enforced disappearances. While existing research has examined the vulnerability of children on their own and the long-term impact of separation on minors, less has been written about the experience and impact of separation on families and communities left behind. We focus on everyday lived experiences and legacies for affected families and communities. The project examines the longer-term political, social, and economic consequences of ambiguous loss and gendered and intergenerational dimensions.
The project maps state practices of forced separation and the targeting of youth. We look at the instrumental usages of familial separation and disappearances and their link to reproductive and other harms.
Finally, we follow a range of formal and informal practices to address relational harms. These include evolving formal legal and institutional practices at the global, regional, and domestic levels and informal community commemoration and activism.
The project examines a mix of contemporary and historical case studies. We draw on archival research on longer-standing cases of forced separation and reunification, particularly during the Second World War. The project includes four contemporary case studies: Sri Lanka, the Rohingya community (living in Bangladesh), Guatemala, and Peru.