Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2020 DOI:10.1111/blar.13138 The Deviated Mourning of the Disappeared: Reimagining Disappearance and Transcending its Tropes GABRIEL GATTI University of the Basque Country, Spain JAUME PERIS BLANES Universitat de València, Spain Forced disappearance has hindered the development of conventional forms of mourning, but protocols have gradually emerged, establishing canonical ways of facing that diffculty, while the concepts of ‘disappear- ance’ and ‘disappeared’ have been consolidated as effective transnational categories capable of explaining new forms of social violence. This article examines how in the new forms of disappearance the manifestations of mourning systematically deviate from the canon and acquire a complex- ity that exceeds the established tropes about it. It requires reimagining the dynamics of mourning in the new contexts of disappearance and, especially, in those of ‘social disappearance’. Keywords: forced disappearance, living disappeared, mourning, social disappearance. Disappearance, the Disappeared and their Tropes Today it is hard to fnd anyone who does not know what ‘forced disappearance’ of persons is or what the fgure of ‘the disappeared’ represents. The naturalisation of these concepts is a recent phenomenon, however, dating back to 2006, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. This milestone marks the beginning of a new phase in the history of the concepts of ‘disappearance’ and ‘disappeared’, the stage of agreed-on and established names. Both concepts, until then ambiguous, uncertain, open, have since become solid and frm. First, they gained legal effectiveness, as they denote very diverse situations of human rights violations, enabling not only their visibility and problematisation, but also the possibility of seeking justice. They then achieved institutional frmness, as the apparatus associated with them (evaluation committees, working groups, and a range of forced disappearance specialists such as legal experts, psychologists, forensic experts, anthropologists, sociologists, and culture scholars) © 2020 Society for Latin American Studies 1