Kinship surveillance: technology and the weaponization of the family at the border

This article introduces the notion of kinship surveillance to capture the unilateral production of knowledge about familial relationships of migrants that gets weaponized by the state to control borders. I ask why, how, and when knowledge about migrants’ kinship relations has been made into a scale of border regimes, and how kinship surveillance has been historically enacted through different media technologies. I expose the historical discursive work that legitimizes the technopolitical weaponization of kinship by the state, rendering an enunciation of ‘family’ as biologically and genetically legible into a means of border control. The article unpacks how fears of fraud and deception, and fears of being ‘too slow’ and ‘overwhelmed’, are mobilized by the state to justify new technologies of kinship surveillance. As a result, I show how technologies such as DNA or blood group testing could emerge under the promise to reduce kinship to information points that can be extracted, stored, and used in complicity with border regimes, seemingly addressing the state’s fears by promising to ‘outwit’ and ‘outpace’ the migrant. At a moment of rampant digitalization and automation of ethnonationalist border regimes, I argue that historicizing the technopolitics of kinship surveillance decentres innovationist hypes around ‘smart’ border technologies. Rather, the longer history of kinship surveillance shows how the epistemic authority claimed by the state and its technologies over migrants’ kinship is a construction that has been weaponized. The idea that kinship is something measurable that can serve border control has a longer history, driven by the fear of the Other, manifesting in borders’ obsessions with surveilling kinship.