Current book project: MAKING BIOMETRIC CITIZENS

Trilingual fingerprint form used by the Police in British Mandate Palestine, circa 1940s. Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony's College, Oxford.

When governments started using biometrics over 150 years ago, they mainly deployed them to govern non-citizens and groups at society’s margins, as biometric methods crystallized as tools of exclusion in eugenics, criminology, and colonial rule. Today, biometrics have become routine parts of ID cards and other apparatuses that states around the world use to identify their citizens writ large.

To address this transformation, my current book project takes two early examples of the 21st century biometric turn in state governance – British and Israeli national biometric systems proposed in the early 2000s – and traces their shared history. Dating back to 1904, this interconnected past covers nine biometric systems in the UK, Palestine, and Israel that successively influenced each other through circulations of technologies, experts, and methods.

Making Biometric Citizens shows that even as the technical designs and political purposes of biometric systems changed across time and place, governments have always used them to designate who does and does not belong in the nation. By bringing together sources from British, Israeli, and Palestinian archives, and oral history interviews with government officials, engineers, activists, and people who experience biometric identification, the book offers a cross-regional account of how shifts in state power, citizenship, and national belonging have been tied to biometric innovations - from the height of the British Empire through the rise of the Digital Age.