The scars of ambiguity: Terrorism, disappearance, and the search for life in contemporary Africa

Abstract (Counter)terrorist violence has precipitated an upsurge in cases of missing persons across conflict-affected societies, with severe impacts on the lives and livelihoods of numerous families and communities who are victims. However, the long-term impact of (counter)terrorist operations on victims has received minimal scholarly attention in terrorism research, which tends to prioritise perpetrators rather than victims. This research article addresses this gap in the terrorism literature by underscoring the long-term impacts of conflict-related disappearance on victims in the context of (counter)terrorism operations. Drawing on ambiguous loss theory and feminist security studies, which analyse the pathological grief associated with disappearance, and on forty-five (45) in-depth phenomenological interviews with families of the disappeared and survivors of (counter)terrorist violence in Nigeria – the state with the highest number of disappeared persons in Africa with more than 25,000 disappearances, due in large part to the violent activities of Boko Haram terrorists and state agents in the Lake Chad region – I examine the patterns of disappearance that stem from the activities of both state and non-state armed actors, the search for the disappeared, and the long-term impacts – sociological and psychological – of (counter)terrorism on the families of the disappeared. In so doing, this research article foregrounds victims’ everyday experiences of security in contexts of (counter)terrorist violence, which has received minimal attention in terrorism studies.