Individuating War Dead: Scientific Intervention into Post-conflict Societies

Advances in forensic science have profoundly changed post-conflict societies’ (particularly states’) capacity to identify the remains of missing persons. Through DNA testing, comparative radiography, even isotopic analyses, smaller and smaller fragments of human remains can be named and returned to surviving kin. How has this increased ability to identify the otherwise unrecognizable remains of war dead—from civilian victims to combatants killed in action—affected modes of commemoration? The question  spotlights the interplay between science and society and invites interdisciplinary reflection from anthropology and its subfields, as from science and technology studies and history.    On an institutional level, forensic science has intervened as a purveyor of “truth,” producing hardened medico-legal facts for war crimes trials and human rights investigations, which themselves are often levied to refute prevailing discourses of denial or commensurability. Tabulated loss lends support to demands for accountability. Bodies of war dead, however, also hold powerful sway over how communities memorialize past loss within the context of present and future aims. Individuated through the exacting labors of forensic analysis, identified remains, however fragmentary or partial, evoke personalized narratives of suffering and sacrifice; physically returned to surviving kin, they convene communities of mourners in acts of ritual care and memorialization. In this paper, I draw on the Euro-American examples of former Yugoslavia and the US military’s efforts to account for its war dead from past conflicts, to explore how the science of recovery, exhumation, and identification responds to and reinforces a Western liberal imperative of individuated memory in post-conflict societies.