Forced securitisation: disappearance, kinship, and family-based governance in Syrian Druze communities

Enforced disappearance is usually analysed as the elimination of an individual from the political field. This article asks what disappearance does to those who remain. It introduces the concept of forced securitisation: a relational governance process, produced through a configuration of mutually reinforcing practices, by which authoritarian regimes convert families and kinship networks into objects of security attention and, under identifiable conditions, into instruments that regulate the conduct of their own members. The concept is developed through the case of Druze communities in Sweida governorate, where disappearance and disappearance-like uncertainty became embedded in bureaucratic suspension, communal intermediation, and conscription pressure, and where the same relationship that could threaten families also, at times, mediated for their benefit. The July 2018 ISIS abductions of Druze civilians are read not as evidence of regime design, but as a diagnostic episode exposing features of a governance relationship that already existed. Working from secondary documentation, the article distinguishes practices that are directly documented from effects that are analytically inferred, and separates evidence documented for Syria generally from evidence specific to Sweida. It contributes to disappearance studies by theorising the family, rather than the disappeared individual alone, as a primary unit of governance, and by specifying how security practice, kinship obligation, and the erosion of dignity become joined within a single governance process.