Abstract

This article argues that, in contemporary conflicts, organized collective violence persists beyond armed combat through postmortem practices that differentially manage corpses. Through a historical-conceptual analysis of the Western rationalization of war, it is argued that corpses cease to operate as a symbolic closure of conflict and acquire a structuring function in the organization of space, fear, and community belonging. This mutation destabilizes the classic distinction between war and peace by keeping the temporality of conflict open when corpses remain outside both the legal and social order. In this framework, postmortem exclusion establishes hierarchies of recognition that are incompatible with democratic equality, so that the restitution of corpses is proposed as an ethical and political condition for the restructuring of the common order in contexts of prolonged violence.