Abstract

Every year, 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. This paper examines the political production and use of ‘missing people’ as a political, but ostensibly apolitical, category. I trace the rise in disappeared people through the bureaucracies of the state, the struggles and trauma of families, in the disinterment and materiality of public and clandestine cemeteries, and via the ongoing violence of racialised policing and agentic organised crime. If politics and sovereignty are constituted by life and death as political theory widely holds, making people ‘go missing’ from politics is a widespread (but dramatically understudied) political technique, globally, which takes capitalism and inequitably valued life as its ethical flagstaff.