Seminar 3 in a series on ‘Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility’, convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp

Seminar abstract: Centralized biometric systems have become ubiquitous in the humanitarian and refugee aid sectors in recent years, but are also facing increasing scrutiny. This talk will discuss a particularly poignant example of exclusion caused by the introduction of biometric refugee registration in Kenya. Considered neither citizens nor refugees, tens of thousands of citizens cannot obtain national IDs because their fingerprints are in refugee databases. The ongoing dilemma of those caught between the national and refugee systems is more than just a case of techno-solutionism gone wrong. The problem of double registration in Kenya also exposes key institutional tensions at the heart of the refugee sector and raises fundamental challenges for those who see in digital identity technologies the prospect for a ‘post-social’ politics of inclusion and redistribution.