From ‘ID’ to proactive profiling: Identity, selective governance and the speculative making of bodies as borders

Abstract In today’s age of revanchist nationalism and xenophobia, ‘identity’ is commonly understood as a question of collective belonging. But another valence of identity is highly empirical, associated with the individual and constantly enforced by and beyond the state: ‘ID’, or ‘identity verification’. A focus on ID is novel because a new kind of speculative identity verification is apace: digital identity. We argue that, distinct from biometrics and other forms of identity verification such as fingerprints that seek to tie an individual to their body, digital ID enables and heightens a search for intent that is social and speculative. This is a novel subject and space for borders and policing. States and the firms they hire to police their borders are increasingly concerned with digital identity as the means to know individuals, and especially individuals who are beyond their borders but whose intent they surmise is to cross and harm. We examine two disparate cases of digital identity and efforts to police them in order to conceptualize what digitalizing identity means for bordering specific individuals. This effort to identify via privately held data carries a focus on particularly vulnerable populations such as refugees and missing people, reinforcing collective identity and borders against these ‘strangers’, while tracing a trajectory further into the material world of digital capitalism.