Human rights human remains: forensic humanitarianism and the politics of the grave (360G-Wellcome-205488_Z_16_Z)

This project advances a pioneering analysis of the ‘forensic turn’ in humanitarianism. This denotes the effort to establish forensically the identities and causes of death of the mass victims of atrocities such as enforced disappearance, torture, genocide and war crimes. It has flourished in diverse settings such as Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Rwanda, South Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Spain and Libya. In such contexts exhumations and forensic identification carry enormous social force. They represent a powerful way of establishing ‘the truth’ about what happened. Yet forensic identification is a social act. It interacts with legal, political and humanitarian imperatives which include facilitating accountability, combatting political and cultural denial, and returning the dead to families to assist psychological ‘closure’. The project examines the emergence, social complications and implications of forensic investigations of atrocity. It provides the first (global) history of the forensic turn in humanitarianism, investigates challenges to, and innovations in, the forensics field via an original analysis of the case of Mexico, and explores the hypothesis that as a result of the forensic turn we can now argue that the dead have human rights. In so doing, the project aims to change the way we think about forensic action and about human rights.