This article examines the experiences of survivors of the 13 November 2015 Paris attacks and the 14 July 2016 Nice attack in France, focusing on how they relate to the deceased victims and experience their agency. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the paper explores the agential relationships that emerge between survivors and the dead, even prior acquaintance. The findings challenge conventional accounts of agency as intentional action, showing that the dead can exert a form of agency grounded in affective, ethical, and meaning-making processes. Drawing on the concepts of communitas and continuing bonds, the paper demonstrates that the shared experience of existential rupture can create enduring connections between the living and the dead in the aftermath of political violence. The article contributes to grief and agency theory by reconceptualising survival after terrorism as a relational condition, constituted through the ongoing agency of deceased victims.

This article examines the social afterlife of šehidi (martyrs) in north-western Bosnia-Herzegovina, analysing how their presence endures through cemeteries, commemorations, and everyday rituals. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how sites such as šehidska mezarja (martyrs' cemeteries) and practices like dženaza (funeral) and recitations of El-Fatiha articulate absence-presence and sustain continuing bonds between the living and the dead. Engaging on deathscapes and continuing bonds, the article shows that šehidi are not imagined as ghosts but act as agents whose memory reshapes landscapes, politics, and identities. It considers the institutionalisation of martyrdom, the “cult of šehid,” and the economic and symbolic privileges afforded to survivors’ families. By juxtaposing local practices with artistic and transnational memorial projects, the article highlights how the dead continue to act upon the living, rendering memory and mourning both intimate and deeply political.

Although the focus is very much on the dead during murder trials, the dead themselves are downplayed in various respects. Relegated to the category of the deceased, and reduced to objects for scrutiny by forensic pathologists, police photographers, detectives and the court, the dead are dehumanised. Moreover, the verdict and the sentencing that takes place in the course of the trial, stemming as they do from impersonal legal deliberations, may seem detached from the dead. Next, the horror of the murders may seem to overwhelm all else, including the dead individuals concerned. Under such circumstances, do the dead have any agency during and after a murder trial? Are the dead active “absent presences” (Maddrell, 2013) in the world of the living, influencing some of their ideas, emotions, actions and responses? As these issues are explored in this paper, the writer draws on her own experience of attending a murder trial.

Religious holidays and ceremonies are stable points of remembrance of the dead in time and space across the globe. Since the twentieth century in Slovakia, commemorations of the dead have most often been associated with holidays such as Easter, Christmas, and All Saints Days, called Dušičky (Little Souls) in Slovakia. Dušičky is a triduum of festive days, including All Saints’ Eve on the 31st of October, All Saints’ Day on the 1st of November, and All Souls’ Day on the 2nd of November. During these holidays, remembrances and associated practices are concentrated in public places such as churches and graveyards, but also in private areas, such as the homes of the mourners. The paper focuses on the analysis of commemoration practices and rituals concerned with the dead during the triduum of religious holidays, Dušičky in rural Slovakia. The text will also analyze the diverse practices associated with the cemetery, graves, and the church carried out during this holiday season.

Since the 1990s, hundreds of mass graves from the Second World War have been documented in Slovenia; over 200 investigated, and more than 100 fully or partially exhumed. The process of uncovering and acknowledging these sites, concealed until the 1990s, has had a gradual but profound impact on the lives of those associated with the graves or the deceased, on the local communities where they have been uncovered, and it has redefined the broader field of memory politics. The article examines personal and embodied encounters with mass graves as sites of violence, memory, and death. It argues that the materiality of mass graves, human remains, and related objects not only evokes affective responses, but also mobilizes political and social action, thereby influencing commemorative practices and the broader politics of memory. Excavations thus not only recover human remains, but also facilitate the resurfacing of previously silenced memories and reshape the relationship with the dead.