Transformations and transitions: The social and political life of the dead.

Death is often considered the end of the story, and indeed the end of politics. The papers in this special issue demonstrate however that this is far from the case. They probe the transformations and transitions of the dead across varying cultural and social contexts, and time periods, and reckon with how human remains are repurposed, mobilized, represented, and integrated into larger narratives, including evidentiary, memorial, political, and emotional.

Missing pieces and body parts: On bodily integrity and political violence.

While much attention is paid to what happens to dead bodies after political violence, disaster, or atrocity, less attention has been paid to body parts, despite the wide-ranging efforts, both material (often forensic) and discursive, to reconstitute or resuscitate the whole dead body. Materializing the whole body is often considered key to truth-telling mechanisms and for closure for family members of the missing and dead, thus the body part is often posited as a problem in need of a solution. We are seeing, largely due to advances in forensic technologies, an increasing belief that all body parts be identified and distinguished from other materials, and , therefore, be recovered and repatriated to the whole body in its death.