Race, Racism and Identification in the Era of Technosecurity

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the era of technosecurity the State’s concerns with migration, terrorism, and crime are increasingly entangled. This is reflected in the development of identification systems that depend on the collection and analysis of both data and bodily traces. Race is a persistent if sometimes elusive element in this. Examination of three domains of innovation in technosecurity – the management of dispersed borders, the expanding use of DNA in criminal justice, and the sourcing, sharing and analysis of digitized facial images – reveals the complexities of the resulting politics. Across these different domains, there is a varied and ambiguous relationship between explicit race talk and patterns of disadvantage. This can obscure a common underlying pattern: emerging socio-technical arrangements, directly or indirectly, highlight and discriminate against minorities. The inter-dependences of security and technology reconfigure the race object as an unstable assemblage of corporeal, digital, and discursive elements. The implementation and management of new identification systems often accommodate to contemporary sensitivities around cultural difference and expression of identity but in ways that do little to address the structured inequalities they reinforce.