Immediacy and Authority

As DNA technology becomes more refined and more widely accessible, expectations increase for its ready application in postmortem recovery efforts, whether in response to mass disaster or mass atrocity. But whose expectations are being raised, and to what effect? This chapter examines the discourse of forensic intervention that privileges genetics as the necessary and immediate tool to restore identity and achieve social repair. It draws on the examples of two of the largest DNA-led human identification efforts, which ran nearly concurrently—the identification of the World Trade Center victims and the victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically the Srebrenica genocide—to consider the interplay between evolving practice and anticipated outcomes, among both the scientific community and surviving kin.