ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, biometric border control has attained key importance throughout Europe. Employing digital images of, for example, fingerprints, DNA, bones, faces or irises, biometric technologies use bodies to identify, categorize and regulate individuals’ cross-border movements.

Based on innovative collaborative fieldwork, this book examines how biometrics are developed, put to use and negotiated in key European border sites. It analyses the disparate ways in which the technologies are applied, perceived and experienced by border control agents and others managing the cross-border flow of people, by scientists and developers engaged in making the technologies, and by migrants and non-government organizations attempting to manoeuvre in the complicated and often-unpredictable systems of technological control.

Biometric technologies are promoted by national and supranational authorities and industry as scientifically exact and neutral methods of identification and verification, and as an infallible solution to security threats. The ethnographic case studies in this volume demonstrate, however, that the technologies are, in fact, characterized by considerable ambiguity and uncertainty and subject to substantial subjective interpretation, translation and brokering with different implications for migrants, border guards, researchers and other actors engaged in the border world.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

The biometric border world

part I|48 pages

In the laboratory

chapter |9 pages

Introducing the site

chapter 1|19 pages

Body cartographers

Mapping bodies and borders in the laboratory

chapter 2|16 pages

The ‘biometric community’

Friends, foes and the political economy of biometric technologies

chapter |2 pages

Epilogue

part II|48 pages

On the border

chapter |10 pages

Introducing the site

chapter 3|17 pages

Vision, faces, identities

Technologies of recognition

chapter |4 pages

Epilogue

part III|44 pages

En route

chapter |9 pages

Introducing the site

chapter 5|17 pages

Fleeting (biometric) encounters

Care and control at Italian border sites

chapter 6|14 pages

‘In-formation’ and ‘Out-formation’

Routines and gaps en route

chapter |2 pages

Epilogue

part IV|44 pages

In the family

chapter |8 pages

Introducing the site

chapter 7|17 pages

Biometric verification versus social validation of relations of kinship

Somali refugees in Denmark

chapter 8|14 pages

Mouth swabs and other techniques of verification

Determining refugees’ rights to a family life

chapter |3 pages

Epilogue

chapter |10 pages

Conclusion