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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how mourning is reshaped when death is governed through the logics of counter-terrorism. Drawing on ethnographic research with Belgian families whose children left to fight in Syria after 2011, it explores what it means to grieve under conditions of suspicion and stigma.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how mourning is reshaped when death is governed through the logics of counter-terrorism. Drawing on ethnographic research with Belgian families whose children left to fight in Syria after 2011 and died there, it explores what it means to grieve under conditions of suspicion, stigma, and political ambiguity. Rather than approaching mourning as a bounded ritual or a linear process, the paper conceptualises it as an unstable and contested practice, shaped by state power and the absence of certainty. I introduce the notion of suspended mourning to capture the specific temporal, affective, and political conditions under which these families experience loss. Suspension does not indicate an absence of grief, but its continuous deferral and social containment. This suspension operates on three interconnected levels. First, governmental: death is difficult to administer when bodies are absent, information is partial, and legal recognition remains uncertain. Second, affective: the lack of official confirmation sustains hope, doubt, and anticipation. Third, representational: public expressions of mourning are constrained by dominant discourses that frame those who died in Syria through categories of terrorism, disloyalty, and moral deviance. By tracing how families navigate these overlapping forms of suspension, the paper shows how mourning becomes a site where the afterlives of counter-terrorism policies are lived and negotiated. I argue that suspended mourning reveals not only the limits imposed on grief, but also the ways families actively rework memory, kinship, and moral belonging in the shadow of securitised regimes of death.