Making the ‘beneficiary’: Humanitarian biometrics and the politics of place

Abstract

Over 6.5 million people in South Sudan—half of the country's estimated population—have been biometrically registered as a prerequisite for humanitarian assistance. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research with humanitarian data collection actors in the country, this article demonstrates how humanitarian vulnerability—the state of being ‘in need’ of humanitarian assistance—is performed and made material through the collection of fingerprints and other biometric information. I argue that the integration of biometrics into humanitarian programs in South Sudan, while intended to identify and verify that aid is going to the “most vulnerable” populations, in practice increases individual vulnerability to future harm. I suggest that this works in two ways, emphasizing the spatial arrangements of power that both structure and are reproduced through the biometric system. First, the biometric rendering of bodies-as-data, deployed in South Sudan as evidence of humanitarian vulnerability, is a form of abstraction that produces difference through both a conceptual distancing and devaluation of the humanitarian subject. Second, the biometric system's location-based design fixes individuals in place in practice, inadvertently increasing exposure to violence.