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DisappearanceThe Normalisation of the Extreme

By Brad Evans and Chantal Meza

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

What was once a hidden secret defining totalitarian regimes has become the defining problem of our times. Every day we encounter stories concerning the disappearance of humans, communities, cultures, and life sustaining ecosystems. Disappearance has also become a dominant theme in popular entertainment, as we have normalised the extreme. But how are we to make sense of this? This is not just about increased awareness. It now openly touches our most primal of fears – to vanish without a trace – which has been amplified in our visual landscapes that depend upon and yet weaponize the value we place on appearances.

Recognizing this state of affairs and the ways in which societies are precariously hovering over disappearance fault-lines, this book will map out in original ways the history of the phenomena to offer an urgent and timely intervention. Moving beyond old ideas concerning bodies, the authors demand new ways of seeing disappearance to inspire alternative ways of thinking and responses. Disappearance, they argue, is a form of neuroviolence that is inseparable from the invisible operations of power. Hence countering it, not only requires that we make visible those forces which continue to annihilate life, it is to look precisely at the way disappearance now structures our societies and is inseparable from any concern with power in the world.

Reviews

How to visualise those who vanish without a trace? How to understand the void left by enforced disappearance? In a fascinating, original and insightful blend of philosophy, art, politics and ethics, Brad Evans and Chantal Meza take us from the Holocaust to Pinochet’s Chile and from contemporary Mexico to Gaza. Along the way they ask important questions and resist the temptation of easy answers.
An ambitious, unsettling and innovative book that places disappearance at the heart of a far-reaching contemporary shift. Evans and Meza turn disappearance into a global lens through which to interpret contemporary forms of violence, power and erasure. It is no longer merely a crime, but an underlying structure of the present. Although rooted in contexts as intense as that of Mexico, the book transcends any national framework to chart a truly global map of disappearance, linking enforced disappearances, ecologies of violence, surveillance regimes and contemporary forms of war and control. Through dense and evocative writing, and a radical intersection of art and theory, the book proposes new ways of seeing that which ‘tends to disappear’. The result is an original and demanding work that compels us to think—and to see—in a different way that which, increasingly, defines our world.
Table of contents

List of Artworks by Chantal Meza
Acknowledgements
Foreword
by Everardo Gonzalez

Preface: Ways of Seeing Disappearance

1. Disappearance Fault-Lines
2. A Global Topography of Terror
3. The Rape of History
4. When Worlds Disappear
Interlude: In the Dust of New Mexico
5. Devourance
6. Surveillance & Punish
7. NeuroViolence
8. The Disappearance Horizon
Epilogue: Dreams of Disappearance

About the contributors

Brad Evans

Brad Evans is a Professor of Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath. He is the author of twenty books and edited volumes, along with over a hundred and fifty academic and international media articles. Brad has written extensively on the state of international affairs, while having made a number of telling theoretical contributions to the understanding of violence. For the past decade he has largely been working on the violence of disappearance and the importance of trans-disciplinary responses. He previously held academic positions at the Universities of Bristol and Leeds, while also teaching at Columbia University, New York.

Brad regularly makes television appearances to global broadcast audiences including televised interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and TRT World. Throughout 2015-17, Brad led a dedicated series of conversations on violence with leading critical thinkers for The New York Times opinion section (The Stone). He later continued the conversation as lead editor in a column dealing with violence and the arts/critical theory with the Los Angeles Review of Books, which ran from 2017-2022. He is now Assistant editor with American Book Review, leading a dedicated section called “Violent Times”.

Chantal Meza

Chantal Meza is an acclaimed Mexican painter based in the United Kingdom whose work practice focuses on the human as seen through various forms of disappearance. Her work is held in public and private collections around the world and over the past 15 years her paintings have featured in exhibitions and biennials in prominent Museums and Galleries in Mexico, United Kingdom, Paraguay and Germany. Having delivered international lectures and workshops at reputable universities such as Harvard University, École Normale Superiéure, and Goethe Univeristät, in 2025 she was appointed Artist Impact and Engagement Fellow at the University of Bath. Her State of Disappearance collection is now on permanent display at the university’s Chancellors Building having being gifted following solo shows of the works in Bristol and London.

Chantal’s solo Eden Bleeds show at St Marys Redcliffe, Bristol during March/April 2025 was the first contemporary art exhibition in the iconic venues 800-year history, featuring on BBC 1 Easter Sunday morning broadcast. Her Disappearance of Worlds solo exhibition at the JCR gallery, Pembroke College, University of Oxford in June 2025 received critical acclaim, notably from art critic Will Gompertz. Most recently, her exhibition Absence, was showcased at the Embassy of Switzerland in London at an event partnered by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the British Red Cross. She is the author of many articles and co-editor of the book, State of Disappearance (McGill Queens Press: 2023). Chantal is currently Artistic Director for the Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies.

Everardo González

Everardo González, a Mexican director who is considered one of the strongest voices in the documentary genre in Latin America.

Everardo's filmography includes Pulque Song (2003), The Old Thieves (2007), The Open Sky (2011), Drought (2011) and El Paso (2015), all screened and awarded at various festivals like Berlin, IDFA, Toulouse, Locarno, Montreal, BAFICI, Sarajevo, Guadalajara and Morelia.

His film Devil’s Freedom (2017) was awarded the Amnesty International Film Prize at the Berlinale in 2017. In 2018, he directed A 3 Minute Hug, a Netflix Original in Latin America. He collaborated with the New York Times OpDocs with the film Children from the Narcozone, which was nominated for a News and Doc Emmy Award. His most recent film, A Wolf Pack called Ernesto (2024), has young gang members tell their chilling, occasionally poetic stories, revealing the ease with which violent organisations target young people in Mexico.

Everardo is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas. He is also the founder of the Mexican Documentary Net, which looks for social, political, and cultural impact for bringing documentary filmmakers better conditions for the future.