ARC Future Fellowship outcomes: making sense of the missing

Around the world, large-scale conflict and state violence cause extraordinary numbers of people to go missing every day. While DNA-based forensic technologies are increasingly promoted as the ‘best practice’ response, most missing persons are never found or identified, leaving families and communities to create their own forms of meaning of this unsettling experience.

Associate Professor Lia Kent’s Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship provided a unique opportunity to investigate these challenges and how people make sense of them in Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka.

The project, Local responses to missing persons and post-conflict peacebuilding, aimed to generate new knowledge, influence policy and practice, build networks and enhance public awareness of the enduring impacts of conflict-related missing persons. It also sought to contribute to broader efforts to decolonise humanitarian and human rights responses to the missing by centring local knowledge, priorities and practice.

In Timor-Leste, Associate Professor Kent interviewed family members whose relatives had gone missing during the 24-year Indonesian occupation (1975–1999). Some had been forcibly disappeared by Indonesia state forces or their proxies or had gone missing during large-scale displacements. Others had children who had been taken to Indonesia in coercive circumstances to be raised by military families or placed in orphanages. In Sri Lanka, she documented the stories of Sinhalese families impacted by the enforced disappearances during the late 1980s southern insurrection and Tamil families impacted by the decades-long civil war (1983–2009).

A key finding from this research was that customary and spiritual rituals, often neglected by dominant discourses of humanitarianism and human rights, provide important spaces where families re-establish relationships with their missing loved ones and care for them.

Families and communities use creative ways to make meaning of ‘missingness’ in contexts of limited support from the state and international community. They devise practices that seek to make bodies physically present, for example, searching for and reburying human remains, and practices that assign meaning to — or push for a state response to — an ambiguous absence, such as memorialisation, occupying public space and spiritual practices.

As part of the project, Associate Professor Kent forged collaborations with Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR), the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC). With AJAR, she researched the experiences of separated East Timorese children and their families, providing unique insights into AJAR’s reunification program, identifying long-term challenges and making recommendations to the Timor-Leste and Indonesian states.

Her collaboration with ICRC led to a new research project in Bougainville with Dr Simon Robins (ICRC), and Drs David Oakshott and Mercy Masta (ANU), examining the ICRC’s engagement with local responses to missing persons informed by kastom (custom).

This research is particularly timely, as the ICRC is supporting the establishment of a new Office of Missing Persons of Bougainville — likely the first instance of an international humanitarian organisation supporting local, customary approaches to identify the dead and the missing. This collaboration offers valuable lessons for future humanitarian engagement.

A highlight of the fellowship has been the formation of the Afterlives research network, catalysed by an online workshop in 2022 and a face-to-face workshop in Bangkok in 2023 (co-organised with Dr Robins). These gatherings brought together scholars, practitioners and activists exploring the social and political impacts of the missing and dead in contexts of conflict, state violence and migration. Since then, members have presented at the International Studies Association (2024) and a third Afterlives workshop in Colombo, Sri Lanka (3–5 September 2025), co-organised with Dr Robins and Dr Damian Grenfell, which fostered engagement with Sri Lankan scholars, filmmakers, artists and activists. The network has also published two special issues in Death Studies and the Journal of Human Rights Practice.

Now a global community, Afterlives aims to understand the long-term impacts of the missing and dead in ways that support affected communities; promote both north-south and south-south intellectual exchange and collaboration; mentor early career scholars; and reimagine ethical, just responses that acknowledge local expertise and diverse epistemologies. Network members continue to pursue innovative methods for research, advocacy and social change, working alongside families and practitioners to ensure research leads to real-world impact.