The Civil History of Biometric Computers : Linking the 1960s African Independences to the Rise of Western Security Infrastructure

Since the 1990s, biometric companies have become intermediaries in the identification of citizens across the world. While working in support to the national sovereignty of individual states, the companies develop IT systems both to protect the borders of Western countries and to produce civil registries, national identity documents, and manage elections in postcolonial states. How has the biometrics industry come to specialize in both security and citizenship practices? What role do colonial relations play in the emergence of this shared infrastructure? Whereas existing scholarship reads the industry growth as a consequence of the 1990s/2000s “migration crisis” and “war on terror”, two early biometric computer projects launched in 1970s/1980s for civil purposes – one in Senegal to produce an electoral roll and one in Cameroon to create a national ID database – rebuild the link between the industry and colonial moment. The arrival, in the second half of the twentieth century, of independence from imperial rule and the subsequent extension of citizenship rights to postcolonial populations generated uses, and users) that enabled for criminal identification - to a new market (new production biometrics computers emerge as – at a technology for the contexts, clients, time conceived only ordinary citizens (civil biometrics). Biometric computers emerged from practices of digital value production rooted in postcolonial stateandcitizenship the other demandsofcolonial formations, and modernity (border only after that connected to control), gradually becoming the generic infrastructure for governing our shared postcolonial citizenship.