[Nigeria / Northeast] - The Disappearing Self Erases the Body to Feed a Phantom of Conflict

Event Baseline: Families across northeastern Nigeria continue to search for loved ones who went missing during years of insurgency and communal violence. No centralized registry or state mechanism has resolved the disappearances.

The missing are not gone. They are erased. The state self, like the insurgent self, uses the physical body as a pawn in a war of phantom identities. Families wait in the space between two delusions: the state's claim of order and the militants' claim of divine purpose. Neither sees the human whole. Each is trapped in the illusion of a separate self fighting for survival. This unresolved grief is a loaded gun. The families who search are the living reminder that the system has failed. The state pretends to care while doing nothing. The body becomes an abstraction, a number, a forgotten file. Thought has split loyalty into tribe and nation, and the disappeared are left in the crack. Until the self stops identifying with flags and gods, the killing will continue and the missing will multiply.