Meet the lab tackling the global forced disappearance crisis - Incite at Columbia University

Forced disappearance has become one of the most pressing human rights crises of our time.

In Mexico alone, over 130,000 people have been disappeared since the country’s 2006 declaration of a war on drugs; similar crises of disappearance have unfolded around the world. Yet two constraints limit the public’s response to forced disappearance: we understand it through outdated frameworks that poorly account for state acquiescence, and we discuss it through individual, high-profile cases rather than examining the broader social contexts enabling it.

The Social Study of Disappearance Lab, founded at Columbia University in 2023, takes a different approach. The Lab examines disappearance as a social phenomenon—exploring how disappearance reveals shifting state capacities, the influence of criminal networks, and the relationship between armed violence and local economies. Through interdisciplinary research and pedagogy, the Lab provides a platform for faculty and students to collaboratively examine the structures enabling disappearances, utilizing diverse methodological approaches—from digital ethnography to historical analysis.

Led by director Claudio Lomnitz, (Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology), editorial and curatorial manager Emily Hoffman, and assistant director María Beatriz Sabater Núñez, the Lab takes a comparative approach to understanding how disappearances reveal shifts in state power and governance strategies. Since launching, the Lab has carried out critical work and publications on Mexico, and it has organized conferences on disappearance and governmentality, and on forced disappearances in Mexico and in Syria.

We are pleased to announce that the Social Study of Disappearance Lab is joining Incite Institute, which over the next three years will provide financial and administrative support to help the lab expand its geographic scope, secure external funding, and achieve sustainable long-term operations. This partnership builds on a relationship that began in 2024 when Incite supported the Lab's Mexico-focused work through the Breakdown/(Re)generation Project.

“The Social Study of Disappearance Lab is proud to be a part of Incite Institute, a space that is justly known for its commitment to creative experimentation, scholarly innovation, and community engagement,” says Lomnitz. “Our Lab's incorporation to Incite will greatly enhance its ability to understand disappearance as a pressing—and deeply disturbing—phenomenon that shapes communities, governance structures, and migratory networks globally.”

Peter Bearman, director of Incite Institute, adds, "Although the idea of the disappearances is often fixed to specific places and times—most notably the Cold War in Latin America—recent experience from Syria to Mexico to Afghanistan tells us that disappearance is a very current and global technique of terror and control.” The disappearances lab, he says, "promises to help us understand how to identify the social and political contexts in which disappearances occur, the first step towards addressing the scale and impact of terror by states and other actors in the world today."

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