Introduction
The issue of missing persons constitutes a profound and persistent challenge resulting from armed conflict, fundamentally linked to the dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction and sustainable peacebuilding. The unresolved fate of the missing leaves families suffering from “ambiguous loss”,Footnote 1 a state of chronic psychological and social uncertainty that impedes the process of mourning, obstructs communal recovery and structurally undermines the fragile foundations of stability after armed conflict. In this article we investigate the complex relationship between the phenomenon of missing persons and the trajectory of peacebuilding after the end of active hostilities, arguing that families of the missing can be crucial – and frequently unacknowledged – agents of conflict transformation, pioneering grassroots reconciliation processes.
The phenomenon of the missing is an almost universal result of contemporary armed conflict, and its humanitarian consequences are to create in the families a state of profound psychological anguish that is distinct from conventional grief. This ambiguous loss, defined by the physical absence and psychological presence of the loved one, prevents the emotional, social, spiritual and legal processes of closure. The “present absence” of the missing person – neither confirmed dead nor alive – is readily instrumentalized by political actors, allowing grievances to be sustained indefinitely and undermining the often fragile foundations of stability at the end of active hostilities. The ambiguous loss of families of the missing functions as a powerful, collective societal anchor, tethering populations to the traumas of the past and inhibiting the forward-looking outlook necessary to consolidate peace.
The analysis presented here is grounded in empirical data derived from three distinct contexts: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Nepal. These case studies offer a robust comparative perspective on how the individual, social and political trauma of missing persons is managed, instrumentalized, and potentially overcome through the collective action of families of the missing and their organizations. The analysis suggests that addressing the trauma of missing persons transcends a purely humanitarian or psychosocial remit; it is an essential component of building confidence across the divides of conflict, and a prerequisite for long-term social stability and reconciliation. The experiences of family associations in these diverse settings reveal a consistent pattern: the necessity of obtaining truth compels groups to forge relationships across the conflict divide, building solidarities and human connections that challenge the foundational logic of ethnic or political separation.
This article understands and operationalizes peacebuilding beyond formal peace agreements to encompass the long-term, multi-level processes of relational repair, institutional reform and the transformation of structural inequalities that undergird violent conflict. The central finding is that the quest for truth regarding the missing compels families of the missing to forge cross-community alliances, which directly undermine the divisive narratives propagated by some political elites and thus may contribute tangibly to conflict prevention and social cohesion across ethnic and political divides. The work of the family associations reported here addresses the critical nexus between transitional justice, human rights and social reconciliation, demonstrating that peace is contingent not merely on the absence of violence (negative peace) but on the presence of justice and relational repair.Footnote 2 Justice here, for families, means firstly knowing the truth about the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones, but many also demand accountability, not least as an essential contributor to non-repetition.
The conceptual underpinnings of this study centre on Pauline Boss’s notion of ambiguous loss. Where a family member’s absence is unexplained, the lack of knowledge about the loved one gives rise to a challenge to transform the experience into one with which the family can live.Footnote 3 Ambiguous loss occurs where a family member is psychologically present but physically absent and is one of the most stressful types of loss precisely because it is unresolved. Ambiguous loss denies the family the certainty necessary for restorative grieving, with the ongoing uncertainty being compounded by the social, administrative, economic, emotional and legal limbo that families endure. This unresolved state is not only personal but communal, collectively fixing both the families and the communities from which the missing come in their conflictual past.Footnote 4 This is highly conducive to renewed ethnic or political antagonism, as the affective transmission of traumatic memories of disappearance continues to operate as a source of political and social division, shaping individual and collective subjectivities that can result in the impairment of a prevailing sense of community and a blow to the basic tissues of social cohesion.Footnote 5
The political utility of ambiguous loss resides in its ability to serve as an unending symbol of grievance: as long as the missing remain unaccounted for, the conflict is, symbolically, never over. This status quo benefits conflict entrepreneurs, whose power relies on maintaining a state of perceived threat and ethnic or political division. The political leveraging of the missing as symbols of collective suffering is a deliberate strategy through which leaders claim exclusive ownership over the narrative of victimhood to solidify power and seek to obstruct cross-community collaboration. Conversely, the agency of the families of the missing is rooted in their collective capacity to disrupt this status quo. Their demand for certainty – a basic humanitarian need – becomes a de facto political demand for peace, as they correctly recognize that the cessation of violence is incomplete without the resolution of their loss. The resolution of ambiguous loss is therefore a prerequisite for a healthy transition from a war economy of political trauma to a stable peace ecology.
This article begins by discussing the literature linking victims of conflict and peacebuilding. It then outlines the qualitative methodology of the study, wherein data were collected in interviews with families of missing persons and family association leaders in three contexts. The data are subsequently used to show how the issue of missing persons can advance a range of narratives around conflict that can both advance and set back peace, and how missing persons, as both individual and collective trauma, can be instrumentalized for a variety of political goals. Next, testimony of affected families is shared to show that families of the missing can become a bridge between erstwhile enemies, driven by the need to know, but serving as agents who serve to humanize the “other” of conflict and share such understanding within their communities. Finally, the impact of families of the missing on peacebuilding is framed in terms of both psychosocial and civic transformation, addressing not only the impacts of violence but also potentially its drivers.
Victims as peacebuilding actors
There is a significant literature exploring victims’ role in post-conflict peacebuilding,Footnote 6 although little of this engages with the families of missing persons. Victims hold a moral authority: their lived experience of suffering gives them a unique voice and legitimacy in all processes addressing past violations, especially truth-seeking, where their direct testimony can have both a documentary and an affective impact. Victim testimony can humanize the abstraction of the language of violations, break the silence that violence imposes and contribute to public recognition of past wrongs.Footnote 7 Such acknowledgment is often a prerequisite for reconciliation and trust-building after armed conflict. Notably, the literature on transitional justice shows how victim testimonies help reconstruct a shared narrative of conflict and push societies towards accounting for a violent past in multiple ways.Footnote 8 Transitional justice has increasingly seen a victim-centred approach advanced that places victims as the conscience of a process and valorizes their active participation in mechanisms to address legacies of violence.Footnote 9
Victims often mobilize in associations or networks that both offer support and solidarity and provide a platform for advocacy to address their multiple needs.Footnote 10 This typically takes the form of demanding – and seeking to participate in – institutional processes that can deliver reparations, justice and institutional reform, as well as inclusion in peace processes.Footnote 11 Through engagement with State and non-State actors, victims’ organizations can influence policy agendas, push for inclusive participation and ensure that peacebuilding addresses their needs.Footnote 12 Victim engagement strengthens the legitimacy of peacebuilding efforts and ensures that processes are responsive to lived realities rather than solely elite-driven.
Victims and their associations can play a key role in memorialization, public education, dialogue and commemoration activities which contribute to transforming societal narratives of conflict and victimhood into ones of shared suffering, empathy and intergroup understanding;Footnote 13 indeed, much of the data shared by this study’s interviewees shows precisely this dynamic. Memory work, in all its forms, while potentially perpetuating collective grievances, can also help prevent the re-emergence of divisive narratives and contribute to non-repetition. By virtue of their experience of harm, victims can potentially act as bridges between formerly opposed groups. Their participation in dialogue, joint memory actions, cross-community associations and peer-to-peer engagements can help to humanize the “other”, reduce mistrust and start processes of social integration. This community-level bridge-building is a key dimension of peacebuilding, especially in societies fractured by identity-based conflict.
Victims’ involvement in transitional justice and peacebuilding processes, whether at the community or political level, can symbolically shift societal understandings of justice, accountability and reconciliation. Their presence and participation challenge impunity, give voice to subaltern perspectives and help shift social norms toward inclusion, the rule of law, and recognition of harm. It is notable that the ability of victims to be involved in such processes is usually dependent upon their mobilization in some form, most obviously with their peers in family associations.
There is little written about how the issue of missing persons is linked to peacebuilding. This paper builds on work which suggests that when families learn the fate of missing relatives, this reduces ambiguous loss and the long-term trauma that can fuel grievance and mistrust,Footnote 14 and that such emotional and social repair is a foundation for reconciliation at the community and national levels. Accounting for the missing through search, identification, truth-telling and reparations can reduce a desire for revenge and distrust in institutions by restoring dignity and demonstrating that parties to conflict are responding. Indeed, empirical work links transitional justice measures, including resolving missing cases, to lower recurrence risks when combined with broader reforms.Footnote 15 Transparent and credible processes to address missing persons help restore faith in institutions – a key peacebuilding objective, particularly after the end of active hostilities.Footnote 16 Where properly designed, such processes strengthen rule of law, and conversely, if they are seen as biased or obstructed, they can enhance polarization. Investigations that identify those responsible contribute to accountability and long-term deterrence; at the same time, programmes that combine truth-seeking, reparations and, where appropriate, conditional amnesties or restorative measures can help stabilize fragile settlements, with the literature stressing the need for careful sequencing and design to avoid undermining peace.Footnote 17 Identifying remains where possible and clarifying fates allows communities to resume social, economic and legal routines which are essential for normalization after hostilities. Forensic and administrative answers therefore have direct practical peacebuilding effects.Footnote 18
Ambiguous loss is linked to peacebuilding in a previous study by one of the present authors, who notes that it is readily framed as a collective trauma with impacts for the entire community from which the missing come.Footnote 19 The study makes an analogy with “chosen traumas” and highlights the importance in ambiguous loss of meaning-making and of the challenge of forgetting, both of which resonate with what makes collective traumas effective tools of politics, allowing missing persons to be instrumentalized to advance particular political agendas.
One study that seeks to link activism around the missing to peacebuilding concludes that, since healing and reconciliation are interlinked, addressing the psychosocial needs of families is “not only at the core of individual coping, but [also at the core of] societal reconstruction and peacebuilding”.Footnote 20 Activities of family associations and broader civil society that engage with the needs and demands of the families of the missing and that seek to integrate peacebuilding, mental health and psychosocial support mechanisms have been demonstrated to foster the prospect of sustainable peace.
Methodology and contexts
The methodology for this studyFootnote 21 relies on a comparative, qualitative approach, synthesizing primary data gathered from and with associations of families of the missing in three contexts. Specifically, the study examines the emergence of agency among families of the missing through their mobilization in family associations, charting their transition from passive victims to proactive advocates for justice and reconciliation, initiated by the shared emotional impasse created by ambiguous loss.
The three contexts that are covered by the study – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Nepal – represent conflicts with differing geopolitical drivers, yet all share the legacy of large numbers of disappearances:
• Bosnia and Herzegovina: Despite a formal peace agreement following bitter inter-ethnic conflict, and resolution of a high number of missing persons cases through large-scale forensic operations,Footnote 22 the context remains marked by deeply entrenched ethnic divisions.Footnote 23
• Cyprus: A context defined by ongoing political deadlock as the conflict remains frozen, despite no active hostilities. The long-term, bicommunal work of the Committee on Missing PersonsFootnote 24 has had some success in resolving missing persons cases. Cooperation between families of the missing from both sides serves as a rare, consistent bridge between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities.
• Nepal: A context of internal political transition, following ten years of conflict, where the search for the missing has been entangled with the complex and slow establishment of transitional justice mechanisms.Footnote 25 Organizations of families of the missing cut across the political spectrum, including victims of both warring parties, challenging other constituencies who may wish to advance narratives of division.
The comparative framework, while not exhaustive, serves to isolate the commonalities in the experience of families of the missing, offering the prospect of developing a generalizable model for understanding their role in peacebuilding.
Research data were collected from family members of the missing associated with family associations in Cyprus, Nepal and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Cyprus, the authors made contact with leaders of the group Together We Can. Members of this association made referrals to others from both Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities for interviews. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Sarajevo supported access to a number of leaders of family associations from all three major communities; all these associations work across communal lines. In Nepal, data were collected by a researcher who has led the mobilization of families of the missing. Interviews were carried out with family members, civil society organizations working on the missing issue, politicians and local authorities, with a focus on the district of Bardiya, where the greatest number of persons are missing from the conflict, and on the principal family association in Bardiya, the Conflict Victims’ Committee (CVC). While Bardiya has the largest number of families of the missing, there may be different views and perspectives from families in other districts. In Cyprus and Bosnia and Herzegovina, interviews were carried out by the two principal researchers, who are the authors of this article. Interviews were semi-structured and were recorded with the consent of respondents; they were then transcribed and subsequently analyzed by iteratively ordering all elements under a series of headings which were themselves extracted from the data. Eight interviews were carried out in each of Cyprus and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and twenty in Nepal, each typically of a duration greater than one hour.Footnote 26
The missing as a driver of conflict or peace
The status of missing persons is inherently bipolar in its potential effect on the environment following the cessation of active hostilities. Depending on how the issue is framed and managed by political actors, it can serve either as a potent driver of renewed antagonism and grievance or as a powerful, unifying catalyst for peacebuilding. This binary potential underscores the highly political nature of what often appears, on the surface, to be a purely humanitarian tragedy.
The political exploitation of the missing issue hinges on the concept of exclusive victimhood. In politically segregated societies that have experienced conflict, ruling elites often adopt a selective approach to memory, acknowledging only the suffering of their own ethnic or political group while simultaneously denying or minimizing the losses of the “other”.Footnote 27 Zembylas defines this as “the nationalization of mourning by the nation-state [which] constructs forgiveness as an almost impossible or even dangerous idea”.Footnote 28 This monopolization of memory is a powerful tool for maintaining social distance and justifying continued political antagonism. In all contexts covered by the present study, the missing and their families were seen as tools that could be politically leveraged, as reported by families who took part in the study:
Living without … [an] answer about our missing relatives and ongoing injustice has increased our anger, frustration and mistrust in the State; such anger, frustration and mistrust may lead to revenge or instability in society. (Wife of missing man, Nepal)
My younger brother, he always said that the government was using the issue of missing people to highlight in international forums that our side is the victim of [the] war, that we have thousands of missing people, … [that the government was] hindering progress, if you like, in finding missing people because [it] wanted to prolong the problem, and that he was frustrated in that sense. (Family of missing, Cyprus)
This instrumentalization typically involves a zero-sum calculus of victimhood, where the recognition of the “other’s” suffering is presented as a betrayal or diminution of one’s own group’s loss. This cognitive framing is actively encouraged by hard-line political actors who benefit from ethnic polarization, showing how the individual trauma of the families is collectivized. By maintaining the atmosphere of unresolved trauma, the political system ensures that the constituency for revenge or continued hostility remains mobilized. The psychological toll of ambiguous loss – the constant vigilance, the inability to mourn, the perpetual hope/despair cycleFootnote 29 – is thus externalized and politicized, transforming personal grief into a collective political weapon. The absence of the missing person is structurally incorporated into the political system, acting as a permanent veto on genuine reconciliation and a continuous feedback loop for conflict narratives.
The missing thus become sacred symbols of the group’s suffering, their unresolved status serving as perpetual justification for political intransigence. This was seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with families perceiving politicians to be taking an attitude towards the missing that did not echo their own position or seek to address their needs. In Cyprus, some families said they had been asked to tell their stories in forums that served certain political actors; however, when family members concluded that such appearances did not contribute to finding their missing relative but rather represented an instrumentalization of their pain, they stopped and found ways to do so only when speaking alongside families from the other side.
The politics of trauma
The link between the families’ trauma and their instrumentalization was made forcefully in the research conducted, in the sense that their trauma makes them useful to those seeking to use the issue of the missing for a particular agenda, because the pain of not knowing makes people want to talk about their experience and their need to know in the public arena. Often without psychological support, families perceived that this vulnerability led to their exploitation:
How do you heal the trauma? I mean, you give psychological support, so that person is no longer in a weak position emotionally. But if you don’t treat [them], you can use that person [however] you want to use them for propaganda. (Cypriot journalist, speaking on behalf of families)
One Cypriot family member described how the trauma he and his family lived with led him to become political in ways that empowered him to challenge the widespread, nationalistic understanding of both the conflict and the enemy across the border:
Yes, this [the fact that he had three persons missing in his family] is what … started making me think politically. … Not because my family was speaking about politics at home, but because I could see all these traumas in them and … maybe it [gave me the] motivation … to find the roots. This is what also made me start having political opinions without being [a member of] a political family, for example; or even the fact that I wanted to study politics was a very personal choice. And also my involvement with all the bicommunal activities was something that … I had to do. I believe that this is how it started and evolved. (Family of missing, Cyprus)
Conversely, the same issue can be transformed into a crucial resource for peace, contingent upon the agency and organization of the families of the missing. The shared humanitarian imperative – the universal need and right to know the fate and whereabouts of one’s relative – can supersede the political and ethnic divisions that characterized the conflict. When family associations organize and insist on an approach that is victim-centric and truth-based, they directly challenge the political instrumentalization of their pain by insisting on a moral framework that transcends ethnic and political boundaries.
In the beginning, political actors used victims for their own benefit during elections. Sometimes they viewed victims as the opposition who often challenged/questioned them. In the long run, political parties themselves split and became weak, whereas the CVC [the family association] became stronger and a decisive force to mobilize its members in the local constituency. … [P]olitical actors now accept the CVC as an unavoidable social force in Bardiya. (Local politician and family of missing, Nepal)
This transformation requires a deliberate effort to depoliticize the search for the missing. The commonality of families’ circumstances and suffering lays the groundwork for the subsequent, deeper engagement necessary for genuine conflict transformation. This reframing is essential because it shifts the focus from political blame to moral responsibility, providing a pathway for cooperation that is less threatening to the political establishment and more grounded in universal human rights. By demanding the truth not as an ethnic group but as human beings with rights, families successfully reclaim the narrative from the political sphere and situate it firmly within the sphere of human dignity and transitional justice or, equivalently, repoliticize the issue around a politics of rights rather than a sectarian politics. This collective mobilization based on universal rights provides a powerful moral counter-narrative to the political logic of division.
Families of the missing and the imperative for engagement across the divide
The unique psychological and social pressure experienced by families of the missing – the desperate search to resolve ambiguous loss – acts as the primary driver of inter-community engagement. This imperative often positions families as the vanguard of post-conflict reconciliation, initiating dialogue and cooperation well before official State or societal structures may be prepared to do so. This necessity-driven engagement is a key mechanism of bottom-up peacebuilding.
The immediate and urgent need for information compels families of the missing to seek contact with individuals or communities believed to possess knowledge about the disappearance. This search inherently requires crossing the conflict divide, as the critical information is likely held by those from the “other” side, whether perpetrators, witnesses or authorities. This need-driven interaction constitutes the first and arguably the most difficult step towards a humanizing of the “other” of conflict. The act of reaching out is a profound challenge to the culture of fear, denial and hatred that remains prevalent in societies following the cessation of active hostilities, making the families of the missing a self-selecting group of peace advocates whose actions carry inherent risks, yet also immense moral authority.
Whilst families reaching out are unlikely to have access to authorities, witnesses or perpetrators on the other side, they are able to engage with other families who share both their experience and their needs. Families interviewed for this research described themselves as motivated to build relations across the divide of conflict over time for a number of reasons. First, they began to feel a natural empathy for families of the missing from the other side. Second, as victims who felt they had been instrumentalized politically as a justification for conflict, they saw that their collective words had greater impact to support peacebuilding. Families also wanted to avoid others suffering as they had suffered – a sentiment that was heard repeatedly from multiple families across all contexts studied, putting them at the forefront of efforts for reconciliation. As one family association leader from Bosnia and Herzegovina stated, “We were demonstrating sympathy and understanding, and we were all agreeing that this shouldn’t happen to anyone, anywhere in the world.”
In particular, family associations, which were at first suspicious of each other and whose members initially refused to even sit together, were a crucial part of building awareness and relationships between family members of missing persons on opposite sides of the conflict. In all three research contexts, the process of coming together across the divide of conflict was challenging, with those who led such processes being very conscious that sensitive issues – including questions of responsibility for how people went missing – could not be discussed straight away. Rather, direct human relationships were prioritized that allowed trust to be built, which created the space for a realization of both the shared challenges that these groups faced and the importance of families seeking to work together. An example of this process was seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina:
First meetings were very, very difficult… There were so many misunderstandings, fights, conflicts, people accusing each other: “You killed this person”, … “No, you killed this person”. … You let everyone say whatever they needed to say. They say whatever is on their chest. And once they have got everything off their chest, then the things that need to be resolved are the only things that are left. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Over time, as trust was built, families from both sides became peers who shared the same painful experience and ultimately allies, struggling to achieve the same goals.
In all three contexts, families active in family associations reached out to families of the missing from the other side (or sides, in Bosnia and Herzegovina) long before such contact was normalized more widely. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, this was facilitated by the ICRC from the very early days after the end of active hostilities.Footnote 30 This enabled families to overcome their suspicion of other ethnicities whom they had previously seen as adversaries. It also allowed for deep and close relationships of trust to develop over the longer term based on the families’ common goal of discovering the fate and whereabouts of their missing relatives.
In Cyprus, what began as the exchange of stories and experiences between family members of the missing became the collection of data that could be shared with those officially tasked with finding the missing:
[W]e sat down and we – firstly – overcame the shock of talking to Turkish Cypriots; you know, we couldn’t see each other until the year 2000 or so. So, it was a shock … for both sides. And then we started telling our stories. And this I think really helped the officials who started searching [for], locating, exhuming [and] identifying … missing persons primarily from 1974. (Family association leader, Cyprus)
Such processes, of meetings between ethnic groups linked in popular discourse to perpetrators who were responsible for individuals going missing, were always sensitive and could not be rushed. This was clear, for example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the process necessarily took time but ultimately led to information about the missing emerging:
We would drink a coffee, but communication was very, very restricted for a year. We would not obtain any information from one another. … After a year, some things … started to [change] … [and] one could get certain information to find out where someone had been buried. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
The research demonstrates in all three contexts that initial, tentative contacts, though fraught with suspicion and mistrust, were sustained by the singular objective of finding a loved one. The act of sharing testimony and articulating shared suffering incrementally dissolves the monolithic, adversarial image of the “other” that is constructed during the conflict. The focus shifts from collective guilt to individual responsibility for the missing event, and from there, to a shared understanding of collective suffering. This pursuit of factual truth becomes a pragmatic, ethical act, driving a de-escalation of intergroup tension by prioritizing a humanitarian outcome over political posturing. The establishment of this fragile, information-based trust is a foundational element for any subsequent relational peacebuilding. It is a form of peacebuilding of necessity, bypassing the structural inertia of political elites and establishing a de facto space for dialogue beyond formal, contentious political negotiations. This process breaks the social taboos against contact, providing a crucial model for wider societal interaction.
Forging shared identity through shared loss
The ultimate phase of this engagement involves the formation of cross-community family associations (as in Nepal and Cyprus) or building alliances between associations from different parties (as in Bosnia and Herzegovina). The formation of these bodies signifies a deliberate act of agency whereby the families consciously reject the political designation of “enemy” in favour of the shared identity of a “person suffering from the same ambiguous loss”. This process moves beyond mere procedural cooperation to the creation of a shared moral constituency.
This shared identity provides the collective resilience necessary to resist political pressures aimed at maintaining ethnic or political separation. It fosters a shared narrative of trauma, one that acknowledges the pain on both sides without necessarily sacrificing the pursuit of justice. This profound act of forging a common agenda based on a common vulnerability is critical to peacebuilding, as it introduces an alternative social script – one of empathy and cooperation – that runs counter to prevailing narratives of hatred and retribution. This collective action thus serves as a powerful, bottom-up mechanism for conflict prevention by directly mitigating the structural factors of grievance and distrust at the community level. The shared identity provides a protective shield against attempts by political hard-liners to co-opt or marginalize the families, securing their legitimacy as non-partisan actors in what is peacebuilding, even if it is not named as such. Their unity on the basis of shared humanity is a tangible counter to political divisiveness, creating a durable foundation for cross-communal advocacy that persists even when engagement at the political level is fraught and fragile.
The data collected in the research study show that families of the missing have achieved a sense of reconciliation between families from all sides, in terms of acknowledging a common sense of victimhood and common impact on their lives; families from the other side have moved from being seen as part of an enemy community to being perceived as fellow victims with whom one feels solidarity. This can then serve as both an example to wider communities and a foundation for broader reconciliation:
It’s not like reconciliation is going to come about on its own. I think that we have reconciled – all of us who have sat down at the same table. We have found our peace, but it seems like the governments that represent us, they have yet to find this peace. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Families saw a connection between their own experiences and the desire to avoid repetition, believing that what they had been through offered a lesson in the risks of future conflict:
People in the larger community hear of this, and it really echoes there … because ultimately … they will say, “I don’t want to go through the same things that my neighbour did”, because when you find a single bone or … piece of clothing and learn about the whereabouts of these persons, I believe that this really raises awareness among many people, because then they acknowledge that these are horrible things and that they should never be allowed to happen again, anywhere. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Building relations with the other side
The transition of the issue of missing persons from a conflict driver to a peacebuilding catalyst is fundamentally mediated by the active construction of intergroup relationships among the families of the missing. This process is complex, iterative, and marked by cycles of contact, conflict, empathy and consolidation, ultimately leading to the dismantling of the psychological barriers established during the armed conflict.
The challenge for family associations seeking to reach out across the divide of conflict was to overcome the stigmatization of being perceived as part of the “enemy” group. This demanded that family members challenge their own preconceptions about the “other” in ways that required an evolution of their attitudes which took time and effort. Families in Bosnia and Herzegovina articulated how hard it was at the start of this process of engagement, with family members initially being seen as representatives of their ethnic group – linked to antagonisms of the conflict – rather than as people experiencing the same suffering:
I mean, these first meetings were quite painful, and they were quite risky too. There had been a display of very passionate emotions, sometimes direct, even physical conflict. … I mean, this was very fresh. The pain was overwhelming, and everyone saw the enemy in the other person that belonged to some other ethnic or religious group. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Families understood that “we can’t really do anything until we sit together” (family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina), and this drove them to persevere in making contact, despite the difficulty in doing so. When families were able to speak with each other, they quickly understood that they shared an agenda. In all contexts, the fact of such contact challenged the fictions of war in ways that transformed families’ understandings. In Nepal, most families were initially unaware that there were missing persons from the other side:
I had no idea about this [missing persons from the other side] in the beginning. … When I became a member of the CVC, I met a few members. There is no difference when we meet and share our suffering, and we find ourselves together. … We all participate and remember our past. (Daughter of missing man, Nepal)
Similarly, for Greek Cypriots the very fact that there were missing from the Turkish Cypriot side was not known and was described by one family member as a “huge shock” for Greek Cypriots when the truth emerged. As families discovered the truth, they understood that they had not been given access to all the facts and believed that the issue had been politicized.
The fact that both sides suffered as a result of having a missing relative, which only emerged as a result of families coming together, was a powerful driver of an acknowledgment of shared humanity. As time passed and family associations forged close working relationships, the logic of working together became clear. As one family member in Bosnia and Herzegovina pointed out, when human remains are found, one cannot know whose they are and from which ethnic group they come: the initial anonymity of the dead demands cooperation across the divide of conflict.
This process of engagement between families across the conflict divide creates a “third space”Footnote 31 between the polarized representations on either side of the conflict, an operational reality where ethnic or political allegiance must be temporarily suspended in favour of the humanitarian objective. Crucially, as families move from simple acknowledgment to mutual support in advocacy and lobbying, the engagement shifts from a purely reactive search for data to a proactive political partnership. The establishment of bicommunal or multi-ethnic links between families represents the most advanced stage of this operational engagement. These structures, whether formal or informal, codify the shared commitment to truth and justice, providing a collective platform that legitimizes the cross-divide cooperation between the families in the face of societal pressure. By pooling resources, coordinating advocacy efforts and presenting a unified public face, these associations gain substantial political capital, transforming the families from petitioners into a recognized political constituency whose needs must be addressed for the sake of stability.
Humanization: Relational reciprocity and cognitive reframing
The most transformative impact of cross-divide engagement is the process of humanization, which occurs as families gain direct exposure to the suffering of their erstwhile adversaries. This process is a direct and necessary antithesis to the dehumanization campaigns characteristic of conflict, which typically portray the enemy group as monolithic, inherently malicious, and incapable of experiencing loss or pain.
Humanization proceeds through two interconnected pathways: empathic recognition and discursive confrontation. Firstly, empathic recognition emerges naturally from shared testimony. When a member of one group hears the story of ambiguous loss from a member of the “other side”, cultural or political differences begin to dissolve under the weight of a shared emotional connection. The commonalities of grief, the inability to perform burial rites, the legal, administrative and economic limbo of having an alternative to a death certificate: these universally shared consequences of ambiguous loss establish a common ground that transcends the political boundaries of the conflict.
If you have a missing [relative], it’s the exact same pain, it’s exactly the same waiting, it’s exactly the same void inside you that you cannot feel. It is the exact same paralysis. So, I needed to show this to them. And how we did this, we… we let everybody tell their own story. And when they sat and listened to these stories, they realized. It’s very similar, with their stories …. [I]t’s no different – the feelings, and the waiting, and how their mothers and fathers suffered when they were waiting for a missing son or a missing daughter, … so it empowered [them]. (Cypriot journalist)
The political category of “enemy” is thus replaced by the personal and universal category of “fellow sufferer”. The experience forces a critical cognitive shift: the realization that “the other side suffered like us”. This links to relational reciprocity, where trauma-informed therapy understands the value of being able to both give emotional support and receive it.Footnote 32 This is especially important for trauma survivors, because part of healing involves rebuilding trust and safe relational patterns. Such a mechanism underpins the move toward reconciliation, establishing an affective bridge that political rhetoric struggles to break down.
Secondly, the engagement facilitates a discursive confrontation with the dominant narratives of exclusive victimhood. Political discourse often demands that victimhood be a zero-sum game, where the recognition of the “other’s” pain diminishes one’s own. Families of the missing who engage across the divide actively reject this binary, instead advocating for a reciprocal recognition of trauma. In Cyprus, a family member said: “I started meeting the other side, OK. And then I understood that they had the same, missing persons, killings, and it was bidirectional. It wasn’t just our side.” This shows how families were exposed to a single narrative until they met with families from the other side. This challenge is profoundly peacebuilding, as it introduces the concept of shared victimhood into the public sphere. The political significance of this humanization lies in its ability to destabilize the “perpetrator” narrative. When families from opposing sides meet and collaborate, they implicitly acknowledge that within the “other” group are individuals who are also victims, suffering from the very same consequences of the violence. This acknowledgment dismantles the essentialist view of the “other” as purely evil or culpable, introducing complexity and differentiating between the political elite/perpetrators and the broader community, thereby creating space for intergroup trust to emerge among non-combatants.
Shared narratives and memory
The collaboration between families culminates in the development of shared narratives and memory, which fundamentally revise the historical record as understood and articulated at the grassroots level. Families understand that they – as victims – have an important role to play in contributing to what they have called “at least a draft common narrative” (family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina) of what happened in their respective territories. There remain limits to the extent to which even families of the missing who work together share such a common narrative, but they understand that this is one of their goals:
Of course, whenever we start talking about causes, or the beginning of the war, this is where we have conflicting views, but we are not really discussing that. … The causes of the war will always be differently perceived by the different ethnic groups. Addressing the issue of missing persons, you know, builds more confidence among us, and it will lead to peace. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
This process is intensely political, as it competes directly with historical narratives designed to maintain political legitimacy and ethnic segregation. An important element of the understanding that cross-community engagement makes possible is an acknowledgement that one’s own side committed acts that resulted in people going missing:
I understood that there were people living [on] my side… that they actually did these things and [that] some of them were … real politicians or really … in the community. (Family of missing, Cyprus)
A key distinction must be drawn between the political truth (typically monolithic and serving State interests) and what might be called the humanitarian truth (fragmentary, framed by trauma and focused on individual fate and dignity). Family associations prioritize the latter; their implicit shared goal is not an attempt to harmonize the historical facts of the war – which often remain contested – but rather to unify their experience as a family member of a missing person. The collective memory they create is a counter-narrative of resilience and cooperation in the face of both official inertia and political manipulation. One family member described the extent of shared narratives and collective memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina as follows:
I think to some extent, each ethnic group still feels … that we don’t have collective memory or … a collective view of the victors, but I would say that there is more understanding. They do have more understanding for the other ethnic groups. Now they have more understanding for the other parties losing their loved ones because, as I said, during this process, we did a lot, [but] it will take more time for us to really get to the point that we can really think about doing some joint things in this respect; kind of… building collective memory. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
This shared narrative is built around two key tenets. The first is depoliticization of the missing: they are remembered primarily as individuals – family and community members, parents, children – rather than as military or political symbols. This focus reinforces the humanitarian mandate of the search for the missing and challenges the instrumentalization of the missing and the dead for political gain. Second, there is an emphasis on the moral imperative: shared goals emphasize the right to know the truth and the joint moral obligation to prevent future disappearances. This moral foundation provides a sustainable, ethical basis for the families’ continued cooperation, even when political winds shift. The practical expression of this shared narrative is evident in bicommunal activities. In Cyprus, these included sports and social activities unconnected with the conflict and the missing issue, in addition to the sharing of families’ experiences with students in school settings, showing how the third space that the families had created could impact the real world, including the next generation. In Nepal, bicommunal activities included commemoration ceremonies that did not discriminate between victims of the two sides and unified advocacy for all the missing, regardless of their particular identity. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, families have organized joint ceremonies on the International Day of the Disappeared and emphasize that they, as survivors, are “living memorials” whose presence, solidarity and testimony represent a shared narrative that challenges political instrumentalization of the issue.
All these acts and events are powerful public performances that directly challenge divisive political discourse. For instance, holding a bicommunal ceremony at a mass grave site transforms a place of historical division into a shared locus of mourning. This symbolic action is crucial for societal transformation because it provides a public blueprint for reconciliation, demonstrating that it is possible to honour one’s own dead and missing without delegitimizing the grief of the “other” side. The long-term impact of this shared memory is its contribution to social resilience against future conflict – by establishing a memory framework that prioritizes human rights, dignity and shared moral principles over exclusive ethnic or political loyalty, families interviewed for this research create a lasting cultural counterweight to the forces of extremism. This shared narrative may serve as a historical firewall, preventing the next generation from being indoctrinated solely by the divisive, often State-sanctioned versions of history.
The data from Nepal, for example, show that today, families are united in what is perceived as a joint struggle for recognition and support, and against impunity. In building bridges between victims from different communities, there is evidence that long-held prejudices against people of a different caste, ethnicity or political background can be challenged. For instance, one woman, from a Hindu hill caste family that had traditionally been privileged in Nepal, joined a family association dominated by long-marginalized indigenous people from the plains, who had been targeted by the State during the conflict:
When I started going to family meetings and Red Cross activities, my attitude changed. I saw similar feelings among other families. … I felt completely alone and isolated from the family association at the beginning, as a woman victim from a hill caste family in an [indigenous] Tharu majority district. When I actively joined the CVC, that changed my feelings about other members and that helped me to walk together with the larger victim group. (Wife of missing man, Nepal)
What is seen in all contexts is that shared narratives and suffering build novel shared identities. Rather than identifying solely as members of a particular ethnic or political group, family members are both families of the missing as well as Bosnian or Croat, Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot. Through their activities, family associations have successfully constructed new identities which complement and sit alongside those that defined the lines of the conflict. In analogy with how identity formation in social movements is understood, families’ identity as families of the missing emerges through their action and shared experience and grievances.
While I was with my family, I was a different person. Now that I’ve got this new identity as a member of the family of a missing person, … I feel that I’m also quite a different person because … I always feel some uncertainty hovering over me, as now … I feel that I belong more to the families of missing persons than to other groups or other communities. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
This then becomes a platform for challenging the ethnically and politically based narratives that sustain antagonism, and it can in turn become a basis for community-level peacebuilding.
Families of the missing as peacebuilders: Agency and structural change
The collective action and cross-divide cooperation inherent in the search for missing persons elevates families of the missing from a vulnerable group of victims to active agents of peacebuilding. Their influence is multilayered, affecting social relationships and community dynamics, and potentially impacting political processes. Their role as peacebuilders is distinct because their legitimacy is derived from their suffering and their humanitarian goals, which provide a moral authority often lacking in political actors. As peacebuilders, families exercise agency by challenging the constraints imposed by the conflict – namely, the constraints of enmity, fear and political instrumentalization. Their decision to collaborate, often against the prevailing political and social tides, is a decisive act of moral and political autonomy.
Families of the missing hold a special position in their communities: because they have long perceived themselves as being instrumentalized by politicians as examples of the cruelty of the enemy and as a reason to maintain antagonism, when these families then embrace peace and reconciliation, it sends a powerful message that resonates with those communities. Due to their identity and experience as victims and as searchers for (and tellers of) truth, families of the missing play an unacknowledged but powerful role in societies emerging from conflict. The families who have mobilized understand this and are working together not just to find the missing but to challenge conflictual narratives, change their societies and build empathy and understanding:
Our greatest value is precisely the fact that we do have empathy towards one another. In this world, I think empathy is something that’s slowly being lost. … The more we meet, [the more] this empathy grows. … I think this is important. … I’m hoping that it’s going to extend to our authorities, as well. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
In both Cyprus and Bosnia and Herzegovina, families of the missing were among the first to seek to bridge the divide of conflict and build relationships with the “other”. Whilst this was initially driven by the search for information about the missing, it became about solidarity between those who had suffered similarly and the support, both emotional and practical, that they could offer each other. As such, families became a bridge between communities who remained suspicious, representing an example of what could be built in terms of positive relationships by people with a commitment to doing so.
I still see a lot of people who live in the past; people who simply cannot let go. … [I]f we [families of the missing] are really demonstrating good cooperation across ethnic lines, this should be a very valuable lesson for society, something that should help us to move forward. (Family association leader, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Families of the missing have operated as a vanguard of reconciliation, initiating dialogues and making gestures of cooperation that are considered too politically risky for governments or even much of mainstream civil society. This forward-leaning role is directly attributable to their moral authority and the perceived non-political nature of their primary objective – a critical factor in penetrating the silence and denial surrounding the issue, sustained by perpetrators and, to some extent, also by their communities. Families, by insisting on truth and demanding accountability, implicitly force a confrontation with this denial, but their cross-community approach ensures that this confrontation is mediated through the lens of shared victimhood, making the process of truth-seeking less accusatory and more focused on the humanitarian necessity of disclosure.
This vanguard function is driven by families’ understanding of the necessity of reconciliation. For the families, reconciliation is not a utopian political ideal but a pragmatic, immediate need for the resolution of their ambiguous loss since without cooperation, without some measure of dialogue and trust, the search for the missing stalls. This necessity drives them to make political compromises and outreach efforts that formal political actors, driven by the logic of electoral competition or ethnic loyalty, cannot afford to make. Furthermore, the families set an ethical standard for political conduct. By consistently emphasizing the humanitarian, non-discriminatory nature of their mission (i.e., the search for all missing persons), they model a form of ethical governance that is often missing in States following the end of active hostilities. This moral example provides a benchmark against which the actions and rhetoric of political leaders can be judged, modelling ideal behaviour and potentially compelling them toward more inclusive and rights-respecting action. In essence, the families stand against polarization, serving as a check on extremist political mobilization.
Families’ peacebuilding impact: Psychosocial healing and civic transformation
The peacebuilding impact of families of the missing resonates deeply within their own communities. There is evidence in the data shared here that the families’ stories are transformative, in the sense that they can dramatically change individual and collective understandings, in positive ways.
When they hear us [families] speak together, something changes in people. Not in everyone, but we have seen this change concretely in many people. When they hear [us] speak together, something changes in their hearts; it touches them because they … think, if [someone], say, lost thirty members of his family, and [someone else] lost eight members of his family, and they can reconcile, what is it that we cannot share? I mean, to put it bluntly, this changes their attitude. (Cypriot journalist)
The success of the families’ cross-community efforts has the potential to translate into a reduction of internal polarization and extremism. In communities defined by collective trauma, the political discourse is often dominated by hard-line voices that thrive on both the continued ambiguity of families’ loss and the maintenance of ethnic or political separation. Families of the missing seek to set an example to others by visibly engaging with other communities, attending weddings and funerals in those communities, and challenging their neighbours’ prejudices. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, many see the families’ value as complementing the explicit peacebuilding work of formal agencies which focus on larger towns, whereas the families of the missing are in the villages where the conflict started – which in many cases were ethnically cleansed – and where attitudes remain highly traditional.
When family associations achieve tangible results in terms of bicommunal activities and the rebuilding of relationships, they effectively discredit the extremist narrative. They demonstrate that cooperation, rather than antagonism, is the most effective strategy for addressing their needs, even if for most families an answer remains out of reach. This pragmatic success shifts community expectations and reduces the influence of political actors who rely on grievance and division.
While the families’ voices are powerful, they can also provoke strong resistance. Families indicated that in both Cyprus and Bosnia and Herzegovina (where conflict was ethnically rooted), while many people were complimentary about the families’ bicommunal efforts, others pushed back or criticized them. The truth-telling that family associations were engaged in and the building of narratives and relationships that bridge conflict-era divides were controversial for some precisely because they challenged long-held narratives that served to sustain the position of people in power, which in some cases included alleged perpetrators of disappearances.
Family associations can also play a vital role in social and psychological recovery. By providing a structured, supportive environment, they address the profound isolation often experienced by those suffering from ambiguous loss.Footnote 33 The collective action and shared purpose within the association transform personal anguish into a public political claim and a collective healing mechanism – a form of “active coping”. Such collective resilience insulates families and their wider communities from further political exploitation and contributes to the overall psychosocial stability required for peace.Footnote 34 This shift from passive victimhood to active agency instils a sense of collective efficacy – the belief that their actions can effect change – which is a powerful therapeutic tool for moving the individual, family and community past trauma that freezes them in the past.
Family associations also stimulate enhanced civic participation and political literacy. In demanding accountability from authorities, family members have navigated the intricacies of legal frameworks, governmental processes and international law. This engagement transforms the leadership of family associations into articulate and politically astute citizens capable of holding power to account. This increased civic capacity is a crucial component of durable peacebuilding, as it strengthens the foundations of a democratic, participatory society. Families of the missing, therefore, not only advocate for their immediate needs but also contribute to the long-term strengthening of civil society and democratic culture within their respective communities.
Addressing root causes of conflict
The work of family associations extends beyond immediate humanitarian concerns around the missing to addressing the root causes of the conflict itself. The structural inequalities and failures of governance that enabled disappearances are often the same underlying issues that obstruct sustainable peace. By advocating for truth and justice, families of the missing implicitly demand deeper, systemic reforms.
Two critical root causes are consistently targeted by the families’ agenda: lack of inclusivity and systemic failure of the rule of law. At the core of families’ demands in all contexts is the need for accountability for perpetrators, which seeks to establish the truth of what occurred during the conflict and aims to challenge the continued influence of both those linked to violations that led to persons going missing and those close to power who have a vested interest in maintaining opacity and leveraging conflict impacts. This commitment to the rule of law is a crucial component of conflict prevention, as it rebuilds public trust in institutions and reduces the likelihood of future cycles of violence predicated on impunity. The families’ advocacy in this regard is not limited to criminal justice but extends to demanding institutional memory and legislative reform.
Evidence from Nepal suggests that family associations can also have an impact in advocating for and advancing attention to the long-standing social issues that can drive conflict. The CVC family association has mobilized families to be active not only in advancing their own demands – for truth and memory, for example – but also in representing their wider communities as valued social and political actors. This engagement has allowed the CVC to take explicit peacebuilding action by seeking to defuse conflict when it arises at the community level:
We … live with social and political conflict. It’s an ongoing process. What I have learned from many years of activism is that we are now used to confronting the situation … and can contribute to prevention measures [and] prevent this kind of conflict in society, at both the social and political level. We are directly or indirectly preventing this kind of conflict in communities. … [T]he most interesting part is how the CVC is perceived, as this actor that’s special and can … reach across typical political and other divides. (Family association leader, Nepal)
This emphasizes what is seen in the other contexts: that those who work with and represent families of the missing, engaging with victims of both sides in the conflict, have a special capacity to advance peacebuilding and be accepted by all.
More than this, the CVC engages with the wider issues that drove conflict, such as social exclusion and poverty, particularly as they affect the indigenous people of the Bardiya region, who were most targeted by disappearances:
It’s also clear that you can’t separate the CVC and its Tharu leadership from Tharu issues, [which] are clearly important in Bardiya and [to] peace. Whatever [else] peace means, it means representation and participation and inclusivity. … One of the few [Tharu] faces you see at national level …, [the family association leader] is known [and] can confront the secretary of a ministry and … also negotiate and sit with the prime minister, and then also can sit and question UN representatives, or some diplomatic mission in Kathmandu. (Family association leader, Nepal)
Conclusions
The issue of missing persons is not a peripheral humanitarian concern but a central pillar of reconstruction and sustainable peacebuilding following the cessation of active hostilities. The empirical evidence drawn from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Nepal demonstrates a powerful causal link between the activism of families of the missing and their organizations, and the generation of significant, bottom-up peacebuilding outcomes.
The inherent trauma of ambiguous loss, while readily instrumentalized politically to drive antagonism, can also serve as a catalyst for families of the missing to seek cross-community engagement, driven by their search for information. This engagement initiates a transformative process that begins with initial, tentative and pragmatic outreach to the other side and ultimately leads to the profound humanization of the perceived enemy and the creation of shared narratives of memory and resilience. This appears to confirm that the trauma of ambiguous loss, and the resulting drive to resolve uncertainty, motivates families to take the dramatic steps that instantiate both individual healing and collective political action toward peace.
Peacebuilding involves not only responding to violence but addressing its underlying causes before they escalate. Because most contemporary conflicts involve repeated cycles of violence, unresolved cases of missing persons are particularly significant. For families, personal peace is deeply tied to learning the fate of their loved ones, while political actors can exploit the unresolved past to fuel antagonism and distrust. When the missing issue remains unaddressed, it can be socialized within communities as a narrative of grievance, feeding desires for revenge. Conversely, resolving cases of missing persons can reduce the ability of political actors to misuse the issue and can weaken divisive narratives.
The families of the missing, when mobilized in family associations, transition from passive victims to active agents of transformation. This process entails activism that is itself healing for family members, in building collective solidarity, creating meanings from the incomprehensibility of disappearance, and coping with ambiguity in the most positive way. They serve as a vanguard of reconciliation, taking risks that political actors cannot, and their successful cooperation translates directly into a reduction of polarization at the community level. Families’ moral authority and legitimacy, derived from their victim status, gives them a unique license to challenge impunity, demand institutional reform and articulate a vision of peace based on reciprocal recognition of suffering and the universal application of justice.
Peacebuilding requires transforming the root causes, attitudes and relationships underpinning conflict. Driven by the need for information, families of the missing reach out to those on the opposing side, creating opportunities for dialogue and understanding. Across all studied contexts, families from different sides have overcome suspicion, hostility and sometimes threats from their own communities, to build solidarity around their shared experiences. Families of the missing begin to challenge exclusive, one-sided interpretations of the conflict by acknowledging victimhood on all sides, and their empathy toward former enemies leads them to advocate for reconciliation and non-recurrence, becoming catalysts for broader societal change. These encounters produce profound personal transformation and lay the foundation for altering community-level narratives and driving broader transformation in community attitudes.
The data collected in these three contexts underscore that families of the missing are uniquely positioned to contribute to sustainable peace. Through their search for truth, their cross-community relationships, and their advocacy for transformation and inclusion from a position of legitimacy and with a solely humanitarian focus, they help to prevent renewed conflict, heal social divisions and build the foundation for a more peaceful future.
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