Refugees’ loss of self-determination in UNHCR operations through the gaining of identity in blockchain technology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through the experimental use of blockchain technology with biometric enrollment, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is seeking ways to give refugees control over their own individual identities and greater forms of self-determination within contexts of assistance and protection. The point is to empower refugees with identity-sovereignty that may greatly enhance their autonomy and dignity as persons. In this regard, UNHCR addresses core problems in refugee identification that have always undermined its institutional objectives. However, regardless of its successes in this regard, UNHCR's use of blockchain with these aims demonstrates a great misunderstanding of identity, as if identity were a mere property and disregards the social and political relational contexts in which identity is effectively mobilized with autonomy. Moreover, UNHCR ignores how refugees’ identities are already richly formed for them. UNHCR's development of blockchain systems of identification have the effect of displacing the relational and social qualities of identity with a system of fixed coding over which refugees have no actual control. The uses of blockchain in this context serve the function of rendering the identities of persons seeking assistance and protection as refugees merely as “refugees” within a manageable system over which UNHCR maintains sovereignty.