The global dead and the ethics of mourning and remembrance

While international relations has addressed justice after atrocity and the ethics of various legal mechanisms, less attention has been paid to the ethics of mourning and remembrance. Meanwhile, the ethics governing what is done with the global dead has remained the purview of the medical profession, even as forensic investigations are intimately linked with global and transnational processes such as prosecution for crimes against humanity, or post-conflict state-building. This chapter investigates the international implications of mourning the global dead, and the formal structures of remembrance that are often emplaced to tell the story of the dead. If dead bodies are generated en masse by many of the security topics international relations scholars already study, then we also need to reckon with the ethical and political implications of the dead for these very topics.