ABSTRACT
This chapter focus on familial searching, a technology that detects genetic relatedness and is used to identify criminal suspects and/or identify missing persons through their connection with relatives whose profiles are included in forensic DNA databases. More specifically, we move away from traditional approaches that reflect solely upon the uses of familial searching in criminal investigations, highlighting its ethical, social, and operational challenges, as a means to explore how this technology is situated, within the European context, at the intersection of two distinct but related rationales: control and care. That is, by emphasizing how familial searching might be either mobilized to expand suspicion by assisting criminal investigations, and/or to provide historical reparation for collective trauma by supporting the identification of the missing. The latter situation is more evident in countries with a recent history of repression under totalitarian regimes and substantially affected by the disappearance of its people, where DNA identification in the field of missing persons tends to represent a facilitating mechanism of reconstitution. Different uses of DNA-identification, namely control and care, are thus being amalgamated into a single political project, aimed at expanding genetic surveillance.
