1 Paper submitted to ISA 2012 San Diego Panel: In Search of Truth and Reconciliation, April 1 st 2012 Constructing meaning from disappearance: Local memorialisation of the Missing in Nepal Simon Robins 1 Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit, University of York, UK Abstract Disappearance in conflict creates challenges of identity and meaning for the families of those (largely men) whose fate remains unknown, with women not knowing if they are wives or widows and desperately seeking to construct positive meanings from their experience. An empirical study has been made of the families of those disappeared during Nepal‟s Maoist insurgency, focusing on processes of local memorialisation in rural areas. The study focuses on how and why victims seek certain forms of recognition and memorialisation, including their psychosocial motivations, and how this constitutes part of a contested politics of memory after conflict. Memory is about recognition, largely social, of what has happened and who it has happened to: the recognition of who has suffered and how, and ultimately who is a victim. Preferred means of memorialisation included local monuments and collective prayer ceremonies that served both to confirm in a highly social way that the disappeared are missing not dead, and sought to serve the community and thus integrate stigmatised families into communities from which they had been alienated by violations. Memorialisation can be a crucial support to the resilience of families of the Missing, serving as a social process to address both the emotional and social impacts of disappearance. Remembering the disappeared in ways that can aid the well-being of the families left behind demands local approaches that are contextualised in the cultural and social worlds of impacted communities: this challenges memorialisation, and transitional justice processes more broadly, that emerges exclusively from institutional processes steered by elites. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 1 simon.robins@simonrobins.com