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Forensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologies, however, has been accomplished through the capture of various Indigenous Peoples' genetic material and a subsequent ongoing genetic servitude.
In Forensic Colonialism Mark Munsterhjelm explores how controversial studies of Indigenous Peoples have been used to develop racializing forensic technologies. Making moral and political claims about defending the public from criminals and terrorists, international networks of scientists, police, and security agencies have developed forensic genetic technologies firmly embedded in hierarchies that target and exploit many Indigenous Peoples without their consent. Collections began under the guise of the highly controversial Human Genome Diversity Project and related efforts, including the 1987 sampling of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples as they recovered from near genocide. After 9/11, War on Terror rhetoric began to be used to justify research on ancestry estimation and physical appearance (phenotyping) markers, and since 2019, international research cooperation networks' use of genetic data from thousands of Uyghurs and other Indigenous Peoples from Xinjiang and Tibet has contributed to a series of controversies. Munsterhjelm concludes that technologies produced by forensic genetics advance the biopolitical security only of privileged populations, and that this depends on imposing race-based divisions between who lives and who dies.
Meticulously researched, Forensic Colonialism adds to growing debates over racial categories, their roots in colonialism, and the political hierarchies inherent to forensic genetics.
Tables and Figures | vii
Abbreviations and Glossary | ix
Introduction: Assemblages of Capture | 3
1 “Kidd Lab Genehunter Center” | 31
2 Judicial Review, Not Peer Review: The Karitiana and Surui in the DNA Wars | 62
3 Hunting Diverse Humans after 9/11 | 102
4 Testing Ancestry SNPs on Uyghurs and Other Turkic Peoples in Xinjiang | 136
5 Chinese Patents and Applications | 169
6 The VisiGen Consortium | 185
7 Phenotyping Uyghurs in Shanghai | 197
8 Securing Europe and China | 211
9 Convergence: The Partner Institute, the Beijing Institute of Genomics, and the Institute of Forensic Science | 242
10 The Tumxuk Uyghurs | 258
11 Destabilizing Research Assemblages | 276
Conclusion: Indigenous Peoples in Racializing Security Assemblages | 319
Notes | 329
References | 349
Index | 399
Mark Munsterhjelm teaches in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Windsor.
"There is so little scholarly analysis of biotechnology, colonization, and policing theory – particularly regarding the Uyghurs, one of the most urgent sites of contemporary settler colonization – and it is vital that this research be shared with scientists and the public. Mark Munsterhjelm expertly takes on this difficult task with his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of DNA collection in this unique, engaging, and important book."
– Darren Byler, Simon Fraser University and author of In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony
