Biometrics as imperialism: age assessments of young asylum seekers in Denmark

Introduction

This article explores the medical age assessments of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Denmark, which take place in the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Copenhagen, as an imperialist technology of control. Every year, forensic doctors carry out somewhat uncertain estimates of the age of a couple of hundred young people seeking asylum as unaccompanied minors for the Danish Immigration Service. If the person seeking asylum is estimated as over 18 years of age, which happens in most cases, they no longer fall under the protection of the status of an unaccompanied minor, thus making it easier for the Danish state to reject their claim for asylum and finally deport them.

Decolonial migration scholars and activists Arce and Suarez-Krabbe argue that ‘colonization and imperialism have served as a “laboratory” for all kinds of interventions related to the management of displaced populations, laying down the groundwork for the contemporary militarization of borders, proliferation of surveillance technologies, and the legal formations that undergird dispossession, expropriation, and displacement’. ¹ I look here at the age assessment of young asylum seekers as a technique for managing displaced populations, and trace its connection with a wider range of border militarisation, surveillance technologies and legal formations which have been deployed and developed in colonial rule and war.

Across the globe, Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples are exploited and dispossessed for capitalist accumulation. ² Dispossession is enabled by imperialist US-led wars paving the way for neoliberalisation and its ‘productive destruction’ of places and communities. ³ As abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued, a central feature of the racial capitalist war economy is abandonment; the ‘rigorously coordinated and organized setting aside of people and resources’. Organised abandonment and dispossession cause premature death, and are then processes of racism. Gilmore defines racism as the ‘state sanctioned and extra legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death’. ⁴

Organised abandonment and wars generate mass migrations. Imperial states respond to the geographic and insurgent movement of people by constructing and expanding carceral regimes, including prison building, border militarisation and surveillance infrastructure. And so, those made disposable by this organised abandonment of neoliberal racial capitalism are imprisoned and deported. The global carceral regime provides opportunities for the continued accumulation of capital with massive state investments bolstering weapons manufacturers and surveillance companies. ⁵ In 2018, the EU decided to triple its funding for migration and border control to 34.9 billion euros in the next long-term budget. ⁶ The Danish state, which participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, actively participates in the EU’s punishment and exclusion of migrants.

In autumn 2017, I interviewed six Afghan boys and men who had migrated to Denmark alone, where they had applied for asylum as unaccompanied minors. Four of them were put through a medical age assessment as part of their asylum case in Denmark in 2016, one had been through the medical age assessment in Norway earlier, and one had been through the age-estimation process in 2009. All of them were given the age of 19 years in the assessment, and all except for the one from 2009 had their asylum applications rejected. At least one of them has been deported to Kabul. Of the others, some live undocumented in other European countries. This article is based on interviews, documentation of the asylum cases of the four who were age-assessed in Denmark in 2016 and an analysis of laws and official documents regarding age estimations.

In what follows, I sketch out the particular imperial relationship between Denmark and Afghanistan; since the biggest group of people who are age-estimated are Afghans, this serves as an important context. I then look into the medical statements to connect them with biometric measurement in colonial contexts and the current border regime expansion of biometric surveillance. In the third part, I look at the Danish Immigration Service’s age decision-making process and argue that it articulates a form of administrative rule that works to depoliticise questions of dispossession and death, and which has its history in colonial rule. Finally, I argue that the logic undergirding age estimations can be understood as humanitarian violence.

Afghanistan, war and the Danish deportation regime

All of the six boys and men I have talked to about their age estimates are Afghan. From 2014 to 2016, 687 Afghans underwent the age assessment process as part of their asylum cases, making Afghan people consistently the largest age-assessed group, as well as the largest group of unaccompanied minors overall. In the same years, 1,432 Afghans applied for asylum as unaccompanied minors in Denmark, amounting to a third of all unaccompanied minor applications. ⁷ The Danish state has a particular imperial history with Afghanistan through participation in the Afghan war from 2002 and recent deportation agreements. ⁸

On 7 October 2001, the USA commenced its ‘war on terror’ by bombing Afghanistan. Shortly after, US and British troops were deployed to what would turn into the US’s longest war. ⁹ Since 2002, 19,000 Danish troops have been deployed to Afghanistan as part of NATO forces. ¹⁰ As of November 2018, 140,000 Afghans have been killed in the war, and millions displaced. ¹¹ The war in Afghanistan seems to be the epitome of what can be described as a period of ‘the invention of perpetual wars, general wars without end, made on false promises of security and waged against ever shifting spectral enemies, driven by ideologies of order and counter-insurgency and by policies to contain and quarantine the effects of global poverty’. ¹²

The ‘war on terror’ has worked to fortify a racial neoliberal world order in which US military interventions pave the way for US corporate expansions around the globe, and the 9/11 attacks have been used as the ideological grounds for this. ¹³ The resolution to legalise warfare on ‘nations, organisation and persons’ responsible for or aiding the 9/11 attacks was adopted by the US congress on 18 September 2001, just before the beginning of the bombing of Afghanistan. In the following years, the resolution would be used to justify over thirty US military attacks around the globe. ¹⁴ And so, according to postcolonial geographer Derek Gregory, the war depended on a violent cartography in which transnational terrorism became territorially fixed and synonymous with the space of Afghanistan, which, contrary to transnational terrorism, was accessible through military power. ¹⁵

A warfare began of torture, white phosphorous and unmarked mass graves. In contrast to the hyper-visible and spectacularised attacks on the ground, this war was cloaked in a ‘carefully constructed invisibility’ – the US department of defence bought exclusive rights to satellite photos of Afghanistan and journalists were denied access to the field to a greater degree than in any other earlier war involving US military forces. ¹⁶ Only after the invasion was a new set of humanitarian reasons for the war formulated: rebuilding a failed state, liberating women and securing human rights. ¹⁷ Throughout the war, the presence of vast numbers of western troops, along with foreign aid, created a war economy with pervasive corruption and economic interests in the continuation of conflict. ¹⁸

While many Afghans had already been displaced before the war, it contributed to many more being forced to migrate. Afghans constitute one of the largest groups of displaced people in the world, with three million living in Pakistan and Iran, and a million internally displaced. ¹⁹ In Europe, since 2015 Afghans have been one of the biggest groups to apply for asylum. ²⁰ However, Afghans are increasingly met with the rejection of asylum claims, detention, abandonment and deportation. ²¹ The chances of getting asylum for Afghans in Europe have been lowered remarkably over recent years – from 68 per cent getting accepted in September 2015 to 33 per cent in December 2016. ²² In Denmark, the acceptance rate of Afghan asylum seekers has for several years been lower than in the rest of Europe, and especially low in recent years, with just 16 per cent in 2017. ²³

The high number of rejections of Afghan people’s asylum claims relies partly on bureaucratic practices of reclassifying the levels of safety in Afghanistan. ²⁴ One of these is a drastic increase in use of the argument by the Danish Refugee Appeals Board that those seeking asylum have an ‘internal flight alternative’, whereby asylum is rejected on the grounds that the person could allegedly be safe in parts of the country other than where they originate from. In 2017, the Appeals Board made this claim four times more often than the year before, or in eight out of ten cases of Afghan asylum seekers. ²⁵ This claim was also made in the rejection of four out of the five applications for asylum examined in this article. Other EU countries have made similar bureaucratic manoeuvres to reject more Afghans. ²⁶

Aggressive EU deals with Afghanistan, and bilateral agreements with EU states including Denmark, have paved the way for a recent tripling in deportations from the EU to Afghanistan. In 2016, the EU signed the ‘Joint Way Forward’ deal with Afghanistan, stating that Afghanistan should accept and help facilitate the deportation of unlimited numbers of Afghans from the EU. ²⁷ The deal was signed just before a large EU-hosted conference on foreign aid to Afghanistan, and a leaked EU memo about the negotiations suggested that Afghanistan’s dependency on EU aid should be used to pressure Afghanistan to take 80,000 deportees. ²⁸ In the first year of the EU-Afghan deal, twenty-three deportation charter flights to Afghanistan were co-ordinated and sponsored by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Six EU states organised these flights – one of them was Denmark. ²⁹

Already in 2003, Denmark had pressured Afghanistan with threats of stopping foreign aid unless Afghanistan would accept deportations from Denmark. ³⁰ In 2011, Denmark was one of six EU countries – all at that time with troops in Afghanistan – that participated in the pilot project called the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors (ERPUM) which attempted to enable the deportation of unaccompanied minors to Afghanistan by creating so-called reception facilities for deported children in Kabul. ³¹ While the project failed and only lasted until 2014, ideas from the project have been incorporated into the Joint Way Forward deal, which states that ‘unaccompanied minors are not to be returned without successful tracing of family members or without adequate reception and care-taking arrangements having been put in place in Afghanistan’ (my emphasis). ³² Denmark and Norway are currently again negotiating with Afghanistan to create facilities for deported children in Kabul. ³³

Even as this aggressive push for deportations to Afghanistan continues, the country remains unstable and violence is rife. In the first half of 2018, numbers of civilians killed reached a record height, and 70 per cent of those deported to Afghanistan were forced to migrate again due to violence. ³⁴ Several deportations from Denmark have been notably violent, and people deported from Denmark and other EU states have been killed, gone missing or attempted suicide. ³⁵ It is in this context that the Danish state – a central actor in an EU politics of deportation – age-assesses young Afghan asylum seekers and uses foreign aid as means of pressure to violently deport as many Afghans as possible, including children, to a place that Denmark and other EU states have destabilised through decades of warfare and neo-colonial ‘aid’.

Mapping the muted body

During the first interview in the processing of an asylum claim, the Immigration Service can decide to require an age estimation of the person seeking asylum. In Danish migration law, age estimations fall into the category ‘elucidation of identity’. The estimation consists of a dental examination at the University of Copenhagen School of Dentistry, an X-ray of the wrist at Rigshospitalet and a naked body examination at the Department of Forensic Medicine in the University of Copenhagen. Forensic doctors write a statement based on a dental examination and X-ray, which includes descriptions of the body of the asylum seeker. The Immigration Service then reaches a decision on the age based on the statement. ³⁶ The X-ray and the naked body examination make reference to standardised medical schema on growth. ³⁷

In one interview, a young Afghan person who had been through age estimation described the process:

First they checked my body, and then they test my teeth, and then they checked my hands . . . Just three types of assessment, body, teeth and hands . . . The doctor didn’t tell me anything. There was just the translator, and the translator was just telling me how I should react, how I should show my teeth, how I should take my hands, and that I should take off my clothes . . . but they didn’t tell how, why this process is going on. And they checked my height and weight as well. ³⁸

The non-verbality of this encounter brings to mind decolonial revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s words on patient–doctor relations in the colonial context: ‘The doctor rather quickly gave up the hope of obtaining information from the colonised patient and fell back on the clinical examination, thinking that the body would be more eloquent.’ ³⁹

Postcolonial migration scholar Prem Kumar Rajaram argues that civilisational thinking – the racist logic that undergirds the ‘war on terror’ – depends on its capacity to imbue particular spaces, and that this happens through very material practices of, for example, mapping and surveying. ⁴⁰ In a similar vein, Derek Gregory, whose geographical work concerns the Afghanistan war in particular, argues that the violent cartography that enabled the bombing of Afghanistan was performed through a technical register, in which systems of surveillance and intelligence were mobilised to produce Afghanistan as an abstract, de-corporealised space, whereby Kabul became co-ordinates on a map and the Afghan people became targets. In this part of the analysis, I am concerned with how age assessments could be considered as a colonial mapping of the body.

While the examination of the body of the migrant is a less technologically advanced endeavour (except maybe for the X-ray of the hand), I argue that a similar material practice to what Rajaram and Gregory describe occurs through the process of age estimation. The age-estimation procedure, as described above, is a process of abstraction and de-corporealisation, in which the body, teeth and hands of the Afghan boy are made into objects for state measurement. Subaltern studies scholar David Arnold has shown how colonialism used the body as a site for the construction of its own authority, legitimacy and control, with medical science playing a central role in this. As a result, colonial rules produced enormous amounts of text on the physical condition of the colonised. ⁴¹ The production of such documentation is also central in the age-estimation process. An example of a statement from early 2016 reads as follows:

The examination showed: A young man with straight dark hair. Height 166 cm, weight 67.5 kilos. Average build, medium nutrition. There was shaved beard on the upper lip, chin and cheeks. There was shaved hair growth in the armpits and moderate hair growth on the chest. The pubic hair was shaven but gathered over the penis root with spreading to the inner parts of the thigh and up towards the navel. The outer genitalia were normal with two normal testicles in the scrotum. Penis was circumcised. The genitalia and degree of hair growth corresponded to a so-called tanner stadium IV. There was no sign of violence. There was no sign of illness. There were no special characteristics.

While in this medical statement no ‘special characteristics’ are noted, in other statements, forensic doctors note, for example, scars and tattoos. A few appendices about the statistics of standard deviation as well as the referenced medical schemas accompany the statement.

In early 2016, the Department of Forensic Medicine implemented a new format for the statement, in which the doctor types yes, no, or an answer in a few words, to themes such as ‘face, hair growth’ or ‘periods of malnutrition’ organised into three categories: ‘Illness, medication, nutrition, gynaecology’, ‘Physical examination’ and ‘Signs of violence, disease etc’. While the form is less textual, the data and level of detail are roughly the same. The new statement form lists a most probable age, an age minus the standard deviation, a lower age threshold, and an outer lower age threshold. Technologies that measure the living body are referred to as biometrics. When these practices serve for identification, as Black studies scholar Simone Browne argues, building on Fanon, subjectivity is denied, since ‘biometric information is required to speak the truth of and for muted bodies’. ⁴² This is a useful notion for age assessment, where the doctors’ examinations are invoked to speak the truth of and against people seeking asylum.

Biometric technologies of surveillance

It is no surprise then, that biometric technologies for identification have racist histories that are intertwined with colonialism and eugenics. An early biometric technology, as Simone Browne in her work on surveillance and Blackness has noted, was the branding of enslaved people in the transatlantic slave trade, which contributed to marking the Black subject as commodity. ⁴³ Fingerprints, which are the most widespread biometric technology used today, were first used for state purposes under British colonial rule in India, and it was Francis Galton, a British anthropologist who invented the racist, genocidal science of eugenics, ⁴⁴ who suggested that fingerprints should be used systematically to identify colonised populations. ⁴⁵

Since 2007, US military and NATO troops have gathered biometric data on millions of Afghans with the hope of implementing a biometric database that will eventually encompass data on all Afghan people over the age of 16. ⁴⁶ A US military Commander’s Handbook to Biometrics in Afghanistan states that biometrics in Afghanistan can be used ‘not only to defeat insurgents and identify criminals, but also to verify its lawful citizens’. It encourages troops to gather biometric data on every military operation, and reveals that international troops have employed 1,000 Afghans to collect biometric data in ‘every province, district, border port of entry, and major airport in Afghanistan’. ⁴⁷ This is the most wide-ranging national project of biometric data collection, and would not be legal in most of the occupying states behind it. ⁴⁸

Deportations contribute to this: when Danish and other EU police services deport rejected asylum seekers, they pass on their fingerprints and facial photographs to local authorities. In the leaked EU memo about the Joint Way Forward agreement, it is mentioned as a ‘positive incentive’ for Afghanistan, that the ‘EU is already contributing to the development of biometric identity cards and electronic population registers, also allowing for a quicker identification of the persons in the framework of a readmission procedure’. ⁴⁹ In Afghanistan, the Taliban has shown interest in biometric data, and claimed that they have access to the biometrical databases of the Afghan government. ⁵⁰ It seems then that Afghanistan serves as a laboratory for the development of biometric surveilling infrastructure, which is mobilised to control the same populations once they migrate to Europe.

Biometric techniques play a central role in the European border regime, with the EU stating that one of the four pillars in its border politics is the development of ‘biometric borders’. ⁵¹ This is centralised through transnational databases such as the Eurodac database, the Schengen Information System (SIS) and the Visa Information System (VIS). These databases are under the management of the EU agency EU-Lisa, which has the task of ensuring the ‘interoperability’ of EU information systems, and which in 2018 was given an increased mandate to centralise the operation and develop new databases such as the Exit-Entry System (EES). With this new mandate came an increase in the agency’s subsidy of 78.3 million Euros for 2018–2020 on top of 288 million for EES, 30 million for Eurodac and 16 million for SIS. ⁵²

Eurodac, the first biometrical system commissioned by the EU, is particularly relevant here. The database was established in 2000 with the stated purpose of enabling the administration of the Dublin II regulation, by making it possible for national police or migration authorities to see whether a person applying for asylum had previously applied in a different EU state. ⁵³ National police and migration authorities store facial photos and fingerprints of all people who seek asylum in Europe on Eurodac. In 2015, Europol and the national police were given access to Eurodac, and in 2016, it was developed further with facial recognition technology, the storage of data for longer and the expansion of data categories. ⁵⁴

In Denmark, the collection of biometric data for the surveillance and control of migrants is increasing, too. In 2017, the Danish parliament passed a change to the immigration law about the increased use of the biometric data of migrants. This established a central register for the biometric data of all people applying for entry and residence in Denmark (in addition to already existing registers), giving further access to such data for a range of government agencies including the police, and extending the period for the storage of the facial photography and fingerprints to twenty years. Commenting on the changes to the law, the minister stated that, while the current purpose of the register was to increase the control in order to identify migrants, on a longer term it might be used for police work and to control ‘social fraud’. ⁵⁵

Jackie Wang, a prison abolitionist and Black studies scholar, argues that once ‘digital carceral infrastructures’, have been built, they are almost impossible to undo, and that they allow the automated carceral state to spread its terrain. ⁵⁶ The aforementioned biometric databases and surveillance systems, I would argue, make up a digital carceral infrastructure that is used to control the movement of people. While the Danish and EU databases of biometric data do not currently register the data from age assessments, the tendency seems to be an increased fusion of databases and an expansion of data collection and government access. Therefore, data such as the ‘special characteristics’ that forensic doctors note during the age estimation could potentially be included in these infrastructures if they turn out to be of interest for surveillance.

The EU-driven expansion of biometric surveillance in migration control reaches far beyond the EU’s territory. Biometric systems are central to the externalising of EU borders through collaboration with third countries in Africa and West Asia on facilitating deportation, training of military and police, and donation of military equipment and surveillance systems. The EU has pushed third countries to register biometric data of their populations using systems donated or developed by European companies, thus intensifying imperial state surveillance. ⁵⁷ This has been massively profitable for European biometric security corporations and weapon manufacturers such as Veridos, Gemalto, Idemia and Thales, which, in turn, lobby for increased militarisation and externalisation of borders. ⁵⁸

These companies, together with state agencies and research organisations, make up what Simone Brown calls an ‘identity industrial complex’, which she argues is deeply integrated with the military industrial complex at large. ⁵⁹ This term is useful for conceptualising the interest of corporations in the EU expansion of biometrics, and the entanglement of state actors with biometric lobbies. Members of Danish and European biometric lobby organisations include, besides the companies mentioned above, the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology, which is part of the Department of Forensic Medicine in the University of Copenhagen where age assessments take place, the Danish Ministry of Defence Acquisition, the Logistics Organisation and the Danish National ID-centre, which is a Danish state agency that examines identity documents of migrants for migration authorities and the police. ⁶⁰

I argue that the collection of private data on the bodies of young Afghan migrants in the age-estimation procedure is to be understood in line with racist histories of the mapping of the bodies of colonised populations for purposes of control and commodification. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have served as a testing ground for the development of a biometrical surveillance infrastructure for counter-insurgency and general surveillance. These technologies are then used to control the movement of subaltern populations when they migrate to Europe, to the benefit of an enormous biometrics industry.

Warfare bureaucracy

Prem Kumar Rajaram characterises administrative rule as principally embodying the turning of political questions into technical ones, rendering them a bureaucratic matter, and thereby depoliticising the issues involved. He argues that administrative rule first entrenched itself as a form of rule in European colonies. ⁶¹ In administrative rule, the most marginalised groups are subjected to a bureaucratic type of governance (and, I will add, as Jackie Wang argues, to increasing automation of the processing of their casework) which depends on its ability to exclude them from political questions, dismissing them as unworthy of politics. Underlying administrative rule is a rejection of the epistemologies of the people it regulates. ⁶² Examples of contemporary administrative rule given by Rajaram include the creation of an Iraqi state by occupying forces after the 2003 invasion and the governing of migrants in the EU. ⁶³

In memoranda on the processing of asylum cases of unaccompanied minors by the Ministry of Immigration, the method of estimating a person’s age, and the process of using this estimate as the basis of a decision on the age, is outlined. Before 2018, the operative memorandum on determining the age of the claimant described the process in less than half a page. It was replaced in 2018 with a new memorandum that outlines the age-estimation process in five pages, and details that:

If there is more than a year between the age the applicant has stated, and the most probable age/the youngest age within the most probable age span, which appears in the declaration from the Department of Forensic Medicine, the Immigration Service in principle decides to determine the age of the applicant to the most probable age/the youngest age within the most probable age span. ⁶⁴

In one interview, a person who had been through the age-estimation process stated that: ‘the basic problem here is that they age assess all people just 19, 19, 19. They don’t age assess it accurately, and it has a really bad impact on our life here. Because of that decision, we lost so many chances.’ I think this captures the issue of depoliticisation: age estimation is one of the ways in which the state rendered these people deportable, but the decision was made through the technicalised act of giving all of them the age of 19. One of the young Afghans recalled the video call during which he was informed that his age was decided:

I started crying. I said I have a father, I have a mother, they know about my age, I know about my age. But they said ‘they decide about your case on a higher level, so we cannot change it’. So I cried. But they said, ‘we cannot do anything, it’s the higher positions that decide about it’. ⁶⁵

This demonstrates how the establishment of the new age as objective is, of course, contingent on the dismissal of the knowledge of the age-estimated person and their parents. Another interviewee said:

When I was born, my mother wrote my date of birth, because at that time there was war, she wrote it on the cover of the Quran. Because in every home it’s a kind of safe thing, you know, so people write important things on the cover. So I asked my mother how old I am, and my mother looked at that cover of the Quran. But when I told them that this is my age here in Denmark, they said no, we cannot accept that or believe in it. So I had to go to age assessment. And finally they age assessed me 19. As they do for everybody.

When he complained to the Danish Ministry of Immigration about the decision, they upheld it stating that there was no other proof in his case than the ‘objective findings’ of his age estimation.

In this manner, migration authorities establish their power through referencing ‘proof’, which the state has produced itself. When the Immigration Service dismiss documents from a range of global south states as ‘evidence’, they often reference the National ID-Centre, the state agency that determines which documents are reliable. ⁶⁶ In its decisions, the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (the state agency that makes the final decision on asylum applications after the Immigration Service) refers to a collection of documents called its ‘background material’ about the countries of people applying for asylum, which is produced by NGOs as well as the Foreign Ministry, the European Asylum Support Office, and the immigration authorities of other EU states. This ‘background material’ entails at the moment 904 documents about Afghanistan alone. ⁶⁷

I argue that the asylum bureaucracy seems to work in an almost automated way when the background material is mobilised in the processing of asylum cases – the same way that the medical schema is invoked to estimate the majority of people as 19 years old. A parallel: through referring to a report on the alleged alternative to asylum as ‘internal flight’ in Afghanistan, the Appeals Board now rejects the majority of Afghans’ asylum cases. Biometrics, which were dealt with in the previous section, have everything to do with automation: the ambition of biometrics technology/weapon companies and state agencies is to use biometric technology to implement automatic border control, automatic crime detection, automatic counter-insurgency.

One person who went through the age-estimation procedure said: ‘my father and my mother know better about my age than the machine’, which I read as a rejection of the administrative hierarchy of knowledge. Wang argues that we will see the government increasingly processing cases of the masses by machine. ⁶⁸ In the context of age estimations, the age decision is not automated in the sense that only machines process it, but, nonetheless, through the X-ray of the hand, the interpretation of data through medical schema, the shift to the new statement form with its standardised questions and the technicalisation of the age decision made by the Immigration Service, the process assumes a routine, almost automated character. ⁶⁹

Paradoxically, in this type of automated bureaucratic warfare, precision is not important – a US American journalist entered his own biometric data into the system and was identified as an Afghan on the terrorist watch list. ⁷⁰ When the US military use data from the National Security Agency to target the location of mobile phones belonging to alleged terrorists in drone attacks, it is of no concern to them that phones can be passed along, and therefore drone strikes based on mobile phone locations are bound to often kill the wrong people. ⁷¹ In the age estimation of young asylum seekers, it becomes besides the point that there is no medical technique that could determine the exact age of a living person, and that obviously faulty decisions are regularly made, as when two Afghan twin brothers in 2017 were given different ages. ⁷²

What administrative rule in war looks like is this: during the Afghanistan war, Danish soldiers, like other NATO and US troops, paid millions of euros to local Afghans in ex gratia payments for killing and wounding civilians, and for destroying and damaging lands, animals and property. From the Danish military book-keeping of these payments, it appears that Danish troops paid €80 when they destroyed a wheat field, €130 when they drove into a donkey, and €35,000 when they killed five people including two children with a mortar shell. This was the first war in which compensation payments were this systematised – once every other month, price lists were regulated to ensure that troops from different western states would pay the same per killing or damage, and, in some Danish troop sections, soldiers always carried around cash to pay for damages immediately. ⁷³

While the military explained the need for systematised ex gratia payments as a way of maintaining tolerable relations with local populations, it seems that what they established in practice was an administrative response to the very political issue of killing civilians as an occupying power. Calculations and standardised price lists served to make technical and quantifiable questions of life and death. Other attempts to quantify civilian losses during war include, for example, the Israeli military employment of physicists to develop complicated formulae, which calculate the appropriate ratio of ‘collateral civilian death’. ⁷⁴ While I am not suggesting that age estimations necessarily share the complete brutality of these ‘mathematical weapons’, they have roots in the same calculative logics of administrative rule.

Administrative rule has, since early European colonialism, served as a series of techniques to manage marginalised populations and depoliticise questions of dispossession and death. In the gravest examples of warfare, administrative logics turn questions of civilian killings into price lists and ratio-formulae. In the case of age assessment, detailed instructions for bureaucratic procedures and references to medical schemas provide a facade of rationality and expertise to a process in which young asylum seekers are all given the age of 19; a number that renders them deportable. I turn next to how this bodily mapping and administrative rule are shaped and enabled by humanitarian discourse and logic.

Humanitarian invasion

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been characterised by reconfigurations of international legal doctrines and a proliferation of convenient new military-legal categories. In the case of the Afghan war, the introduction of the concept of ‘unlawful combatants’ has been particularly significant. The Geneva conventions operate with a dichotomy of civilians and lawful combatants, but in the Afghan war, a third category of ‘unlawful combatants’ that are subject to US military authority was put into practice by the US Department of Justice. In 2002, it put forward a claim that Afghanistan’s status as a ‘failed state’ meant that the Taliban militia are not entitled to prisoner of war status, with the purpose of subjecting them to executions, incarceration in secret prisons, and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – another legal fabrication from the ‘war on terror’. ⁷⁵

In 2002, the US National Security Strategy introduced the concept of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’, which is the ‘option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. . . even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack’, which breaks with previous international law concepts of self-defence that are premised on the previous occurrence of an armed attack. The strategy states that the most effective self-defence against ‘rogue states’ is to transform them into democratic ones (by intervention). This new concept of self-defence is similar to sixteenth-century Spanish legal justifications of the warfare in the Americas, based simultaneously on self-defence and humanitarian intervention, as noted by legal scholar Anthony Anghie. ⁷⁶

As Eyal Weizman shows, international law is shaped by its transgressions, or as he writes, ‘in modern war, violence legislates’. ⁷⁷ When new legal technologies are created which enable, rather than restrain, violence, they set precedents and become part of international law. For example, this has been put to use by Israeli military lawyers, who invent new legal arguments and push them forward – for instance, around the year 2000, targeted assassinations (previously judged illegal in international law) were rendered legal. One of the scholars behind the legal defence for targeted assassinations said: ‘The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming valuable part of international law. What we do becomes the law.’ ⁷⁸

It seems then that Gaza serves as a laboratory for legalistic violence – the Israeli state expands the possibilities for violence in international law for other powers such as the US and the European occupying forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is a parallel here to the politics of the Danish border regime – Inger Støjberg, the former Danish Minister of Immigration has, since 2015, made it her project to ‘go to the edge of conventions’ when it comes to the treatment of people applying for asylum, and has several times spoken of purposely ‘challenging international conventions’ and ‘looking critically at the practical interpretation of conventions’ (to explore new legal territories for deportations and incarceration). ⁷⁹ When it comes to young people seeking asylum, Denmark and Norway have taken turns in setting examples as to how to increase deportations while working to the limit of conventions in ways that, in practice, reshape them – as seen with the ERPUM project, where the purpose has been to work around children’s rights by reframing deportations of children as placing them in ‘return facilities’.

The option for the Immigration Service to require an estimate of the age of an asylum applicant was written into Danish immigration law in December 2010. It was part of a legislative package that rewrote the entire section of the immigration law concerning unaccompanied minors. It made it possible to deport unaccompanied minors to so-called reception facilities, thus preparing for Danish participation in the ERPUM project, which started the year after the law. Before this, age estimations had been carried out for at least ten years, but in 2009, there was an administrative decision to change practice so as to age assess all unaccompanied minors except for those obviously much younger than 18, rather than only in cases of doubt. ⁸⁰ It seems then, that age assessments have been deeply entangled legally with Danish government moves to deport more children, while still framed in humanitarian language.

Age estimations are often explained with reference to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or with reference to the special protection given to migrants who have the status of unaccompanied minors in the asylum system (although this ‘special protection’ has of course also been drastically delimited in recent years ⁸¹ ). At a joint council about age estimation in 2017, Inger Støjberg said:

We of course have to take care of the minors who arrive here alone without family and network, and therefore it is completely unacceptable that some foreigners attempt to obtain access to this especially favourable arrangement on false premises by falsely claiming themselves to be younger than they are. ⁸²

The reference to the ‘favourable arrangement’ that upholds the rights of children serves as a legitimisation for the invasive age-estimation procedure. ⁸³ A similar humanitarian intention is used to justify the decision by forensic doctors to include an examination of the naked body, making Denmark one of eight EU states in which this is done. ⁸⁴ When asked about why this is part of the process in Denmark, Niels Lynnerup, the head of the Department of Forensic Medicine, who participated in designing the procedure, said:

Sometimes, we are the first doctors they see in a long time. And of course it is an age estimation, and we are not their practitioners, meaning we are not doctors providing treatment for them, but we do have the option to say, that in this person, we see something which means that they ought to seek a proper doctor. And we write that into the declaration, and inform the assessor [from the Red Cross]. ⁸⁵

After the invasion of Afghanistan, a new set of apparently humanitarian arguments emerged that would justify the continuation of the occupation, long after the alleged harbouring of Bin Laden could serve as the official explanation for the war and the fight against the Taliban turned out to be a difficult win. ⁸⁶ As Talal Asad, a postcolonial anthropologist, writes about the Afghanistan war: ‘Political motives for violence and humanitarianism are often deeply entangled, making it difficult to separate them.’ ⁸⁷ In the expansion of the border regime, humanitarian discourse paves the way for violence; the militarisation and externalisation of EU borders is very often couched in the language of humanitarianism, with increased border policing framed as ‘search and rescue missions’ and ‘countering human smuggling’. ⁸⁸

When ‘humanitarian’ logics govern war, a range of quasi-state actors ostensibly attempting to secure compliance with international conventions and human rights get involved in shaping policies. As an example, Eyal Weizman shows that the US military guide ‘Field Manual FM 3-24’ from 2005, which has been used in Afghanistan and Iraq, was acclaimed as an ‘unprecedented collaboration [between] a human rights centre partnered with the armed forces’ by the Harvard University’s Carr Centre for Human Rights, which co-sponsored and co-organised the drafting of the document. The document argues for a focus on limiting civilian deaths for the reason that they are not tactical, thus allowing, in Weizman’s words, ‘human rights principles to become tools in the hands of an occupying military’. ⁸⁹

The entanglement of NGOs and humanitarian organisations with imperialist agendas happens under an idiom and within a context which Weizman calls ‘the lesser of all evils’ – a logic of harm reduction and politics of necessity that has seeped into international law particularly during the ‘war on terror’, and which maintains, rather than challenges, occupying regimes. ⁹⁰ This logic seemed to be at play when the chair of the ethics committee of the Danish Medical Association explained why Danish doctors conduct medical age estimations:

If it is not doctors who take care of it [age estimations], then it has to be someone else who takes care of it. And it is the case, that if it is someone else who takes care of it, for example someone in a ministry or government agency, some official . . . then this person will not have any prerequisites to estimate whether it is between 17 or 19 [years], or it is between 15 and 23 [years].

The logic suggests that it is better that doctors, rather than other professionals, conduct imprecise tests for immigration authorities (there seems to be no possibility of refusing to take part).

Two relevant actors here are the Danish Red Cross and the Danish Refugee Council, which both work closely with the Danish migration authorities and carry out state tasks regarding migration control. The Red Cross operates asylum camps and the Danish Refugee Council carries out ‘return counselling’, in co-operation with the state, for people awaiting deportation. ⁹¹ When the age-estimation procedure was codified in immigration law in 2010, the Danish Red Cross and the Danish Refugee Council both responded to a hearing of the Danish parliament that age decisions should take other factors than the medical assessment into consideration. ⁹² The Danish Red Cross also provides assessors who are present when the assessments take place. ⁹³ These NGOs, by suggesting small changes in the age assessment process, rather than contesting it more widely, and by working with the state to facilitate it by providing assessors, enable and even legitimise its practice.

Behind the legalistic, administrative operations and humanitarian logic undergirding imperialist violence are deeply orientalist assumptions about the characteristics of those targeted by it. Lynnerup from the Department of Forensic Medicine said about the examination of applicants’ naked bodies: ‘We are of course aware that a part of the people we examine come from cultural groups where there are other ways of thinking about body awareness, where you do not just undress, we know that.’ ⁹⁴ And in regard to the differential pricing of human life in the ex gratia payments in Afghanistan, a Danish soldier said, ‘There was a different size of the compensation, depending on whether the victim was a man or woman. Such was the culture, and we had to conform to that.’ ⁹⁵ Under these orientalist sleights of logic, the responsibility is transposed from the imperialist power to the ‘culture’ of the dominated.

During warfare, international law, conventions and rights are shaped and reshaped by those who have the capacity to actively challenge them and explore new legal territories for violence and control. This mechanism is intentionally activated by the Danish Minister of Immigration who seeks to carve out new possibilities along the edges of conventions for the incarceration and deportation of unaccompanied minors. Humanitarian logics of ‘lesser evils’ govern western warfare, border militarisation and the entanglement of NGOs within them. Through medical age assessments, the rights of children and a discourse of ‘medical care’ is mobilised to render the submission of young people to naked body examinations as legitimate and necessary.

Conclusion

When the Danish state conducts medical age estimations of young asylum seekers, and uses dubious results to reject and deport them, it draws on a range of state techniques to manage displaced populations in global racial capitalism, which take the form of mapping the body, administrative rule and humanitarian violence. These three aspects work together with techniques of surveillance, detention and deportation, which serve to dispossess and dispose of migrants and people seeking asylum. The foregoing analysis is in no way an exhaustive account of the techniques of the border regime: it is, rather, one that locates the age assessment process in the context of histories of colonial management and contemporary war. It is just one of many techniques of surveillance and control developed through such warfare that, in its bureaucracy, obfuscation and elaboration, serves to divert attention from the processes that forced people to flee Afghanistan in the first place, while allowing imperialist violence to appear rational, scientific and necessary.