American or Afghan forces. The most common response families provided was socioeconomic: their loved ones had been travelling a great distance for work, trade or an errand, and failed to return. Indeed, detainees were searching for work in Afghanistan because they could not find sufficient opportunities where they lived. It was normal to travel to the border for trade: porous borders meant visa-free travel;22 or they had gone to recover debts with former business partners who previously lived in Pakistan (following the first Afghan war). Detainees’ and their families’ experiences of normalized hardship to build gainful livelihoods, then, informed how they narrated their stories of being brought into contact with violence. For detainees’ families, recollecting the everyday was integral to their process of guessing to make sense of the (un)expected, and to explain the disruption in their lives as a means to access justice.23 Denied access to detainees, families then became JPP’s main point of contact for investigating the circumstances of abduction. But the testimonies obtained revealed much more about what it means to live with violence in FATA. In documenting detainees and their families’ experiences, this report continues to draw from Das and Kleinman to show how “everyday life is transformed in the engagement with violence … interrogat[ing] the notion of the everyday as the site of the ordinary … [as] ongoing violence has blurred the boundaries between violence, conflict, and peaceful resolution”. Usman serves as a poignant example: once he returned from Bagram, he immediately became an internally displaced person (IDP), and had to relocate to Swabi due to the ongoing violence that had taken over his home in Razmak, North Waziristan while he was away. Or, there is Shakil Nazar, whose father asked him to travel from Karachi to their home in South Waziristan to save some of their valuables from the military operations that had begun in the region. Everyone assumed he was staying in different family homes on this trip, until one day it was discovered that he had not returned. Then there is the story of Hanif Ali, who suffered from mental illness and would often disappear from home for days at a time. His family believed he must have wandered across the border during an episode. These efforts to explain the inexplicable through narratives of normality can also be understood through Agamben’s (2005) theorization of the ways in which violence introduces anomie into everyday life, discussed on page 12.  Haseeb Asif describes the Chaman border between Balochistan province and Kandahar, Afghanistan, as a bustling market area of foot traffic, the sale of odd goods, hash, and other smuggled items like small and large appliances as well as automobiles and car parts. Asif, Haseeb. “Open For Business: Chaman Thrives As a Smugglers’ Paradise.” The Herald. Aug. 31, 2016. 23  Both the material reality of these experiences, and their conceptualization as responses to explain the circumstances leading to abduction point to Das and Kleinman’s theorization of the relationship between violence, the everyday, and subjectivity in global contexts. Such phenomena intersect in “a field of relational power,” that is the larger socioeconomic processes that comprise our local social worlds. Das, Veena & Kleinman, Arthur. “Introduction,” Violence and Subjectivity. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2000. 22 9