The Contemporary Aspect of the Crime of Enforced Disappearances

The crime of enforced disappearances is complex and evolving, raising critical questions about how perpetrators, victims, and the political context of these crimes have changed over time (e.g. disappearances by repressive states to disappearances by drug cartels). This is the first effort to create a novel typology of disappearances by systematically mapping these three dimensions using a newly compiled dataset spanning reports from 1999 to 2023. This dataset aggregates global sources to document an extensive record of these violations, enabling us to explore their evolution with cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) techniques tailored for large-scale text analysis. Our methodology employs sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and supervised classification to examine the dynamics of enforced disappearances across different contexts and time periods. We focus on uncovering whether new forms of enforced disappearances have emerged, potentially shaped by the increasing prominence of international accountability mechanisms. By tracing patterns in the data, we aim to assess how these mechanisms may influence the strategies of perpetrators or the selection of victims, and whether such changes reflect a broader shift in the nature of these crimes. This study addresses a critical gap in the literature by providing a data-driven, methodological approach to understanding enforced disappearances in a globalised context. Our findings demonstrate that enforced disappearances are no longer confined to the typical authoritarian, oppressive model. New types have emerged, with the crime becoming more widespread and traversing across countries and regions, revealing its growing transnational dimension.