Introduction. The forced disappearance of persons

The text introduces works presented at the workshop (with a similar title as the one of this article) held in July 2017 at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. The aim of that workshop was to understand the logic of transnational circulation and some local uses of the category of enforced disappearance after it was sanctioned in 2007 by the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance by the United Nations. That juridical and historical crystallization is the point of departure to understand the transformations, the effects and the reproduction of the juridical type when transformed as ideal type. It is upon those typified forms of disappearance that today we can think about different situations that affect very diverse social figures. This presentation proposes a definition of a concept that is repeatedly use in the texts of this special issue, that of social disappearance.