Search and sovereignty: the relatives of the Lebanese disappeared in Syria

Abstract

ABSTRACT During almost three decades of Syrian army presence in Lebanon, the Syrian military security in collaboration with local militia leaders and with the blessing of many postwar politicians abducted and transferred hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians illegally across the border to Syria. Based on interviews with the relatives of these victims and on participant observation at the permanent sit-in at the protest tent in downtown Beirut where they regularly gathered, I discuss the search practices of these families since the early 1980s. I throw light on several of their activities to resist the political, legal, and public erasure of these disappeared. I suggest that relatives have acted as ‘informal lawyers’ of the absentees to protect them from being blamed for their own abductions. Furthermore, I argue that after the Syrian army withdrawal in 2005 there has been a clear transition from what Thomas Blom Hansen calls the de facto sovereignty of transnational shadow networks (such as in this case of Syrian and Lebanese military security) to the de facto sovereignty of global humanitarian and human rights regimes. I claim that members of both of these transnational networks engage in a set of discourses and practices to decide over the life and death of these victims.