Introduction

Modern Western thinking still operates along abyssal lines that divide the human world from the sub-human, in such a way that principles of humanity are not undermined by inhumane practices. Accordingly, different reflections and analyses detail the relevance of modern colonial historicity as well as the temporal, social, political and cultural durability of the logics of racialisation and racial surveillance in today’s societies. Reflecting on the incorporation of genetic technologies in criminal identification, this section provides an analysis of the bio-objectification of human beings, criminalisation and racial surveillance, which are still hostages of processes of coloniality and racialisation, even if under another guise and different semantics. The debate on the silent interference of race, racism and racialisation is deconstructed under various angles of analysis based on specific case studies in which sophisticated genetic technologies are adopted to infer population groups in order to identify suspects of crimes.