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Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writing

I: Biometric state versus documentary state: Identification technologies and citizenship African citizenships – A biometric turn?The biometric turn in African ‘emergence’Documentary state versus biometric state: legal identity without the social person?Biometrics embedded in the social and political Notes References Documentary government and mathematical identification: On the theoretical significance of African biometric government The political virtues of documentary government Mathematical character of biometric identification Hegemony on a digital shoe-string Notes References Legible bodies and lives: How a biometric registration campaign reinvented the Chadian population Chadian politicians and French companies The reinvention of a population The bureaucratic and biometric standardization of bodies and lives Conclusion Notes References Testimonies and social markers in the age of biometrics: The work of the identity control and verification commission in Chad Digitized paper barriers: Identity verifications and exclusion of immigrant learners in Johannesburg’s low-income high schools A mixed regime of identity verification amid the Home Affairs-ization of school The production of paper barriers in the documentary verification regime Interpersonal certification of identities: an ambivalent local adjustment to the regime of documentary verification Strengthening of paper barriers through digital authentication Notes References A proof of innocence: Biometric registration of Malian refugees living in Burkina Faso The republic and its double: Forgery, inequalities, and state morality in Cameroon Of lives and territories unequally captured by the state Moralities of the fake, the self, and the state Notes References General amnesty for all ‘René Cailliés’! Falsifying birth certificates and reforming legal identification in Côte d’Ivoire II: Identity, citizenship, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion The French West African identity card in Senegal: The challenges and meanings of legal identification in the era of imperial citizenship (1946–1960)A kipande for Ugandans? The aborted 1947 ‘identity card for Africans’Papers to ward off the threat: Identity cards, documentary uncertainty, and genocide in Rwanda Civil war, ‘ethnic obsession,’ and fear of falsification (1990-1994)Documentary uncertainty and identity verification during the genocide (April-July 1994)Conclusion Notes References Rwanda: Identity papers under Belgian colonial occupation Kenya’s ethnic Somalis and access to identity papers: Citizenship and nation-building in north-east Kenya Improved access to identity documents Post-2008 crisis peacebuilding, constitutional engineering, and access to identity documents How Nubians and the Makonde have recently benefited from certain aspects of the democratization process The continuing marginalization of Kenya’s ethnic Somalis The Shifta War and the neocolonial construction of the Kenyan state in its peripheries The globalized state and the figure o f the Sotnali refugee The Kenyan nation state and the figure of the Somali terrorist Conclusion Notes References Bureaucracy and the politics of identification in Nigeria: Issuing certificates of indigene and investigating citizens’ ancestral origins Social demand and routinization of the production of certificates The bureaucratization ofprocedures Issuing certificates in situation of crisis Notes References ‘Hands off my citizenship!’ Biometrics and its politics in Mauritania Biometrics as ‘techno-politics’Biometric enrolment in practice Contesting the new registration procedures ‘Hands off my citizenship!’ and the fight against the ‘biometric genocide’Negotiating biometrics Conclusion Notes References What state is there for those ‘without paper or pencil’? A case study of women and identification in North Cameroon The identity of the disposable or fixed-term citizen Identification, an ordeal of proletarianization The state and the paper barrier Notes References III: Bureaucratic writing of the self: Political subjectivities and the social production of papers Disputing parenthood at the civil registry in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1960s A civil registry for the new social state When and why undertake identity registration?Altered identities: registering as a social process Conclusion Notes References Bureaucratic interpersonal knowledge: Village identity papers and the production of moral homelands in Uganda The historical invention of the village as the cradle of someone’s ‘truth’The bureaucratic reproduction of interpersonal knowledge Conclusion: the unbearable lightness of morally unanchored individuals Notes References Negotiating indigenousness: Citizenship and the struggle for papers of the Maragoli community in Uganda Bureaucratizing self-defence and reframing identities: The case of Koglweogo in Burkina Faso Bureaucratizing self-defence How to know ‘who’s who’: a logic of identification and self-registration ‘Even dogs have papers’10: the struggle for recognition?Notes References ‘Here is my evidence’: The documented path of a woman ex-combatant from Côte d’Ivoire ‘Here is my evidence’: papers as symbolic vehicles of the imaginary and of self-representation in Côte d’Ivoire ‘When we say ex-coinbatant, we mean ex-combatant! Women or boys—we’re all the same’: a gendered history of the Ivorian conflict ‘She created this so we’d be united and so that even after the war, we’d stay united’: the role of demobilized combatant’s associations Conclusion Notes References Faith papers: Transnational mobility, Christian networks, and citizenship in Morocco and Senegal Papers at the heart of evangelical churches’ establishment in Dakar and Rabat Baptism cards and certificates: Christian identity papers The letter of recommendation: renewal of faith, monitoring, and building networks in writing Conclusion Notes References A driver and his licence in Senegal: Professional ethos and documentary imaginary Inanimate politics: Identifying ‘lifeless and undocumented migrants’ in Guinea and Morocco The body and its signs as a subject of debate between police officers and diplomats Identifying kinship to recognize nationality: the role of families and ‘tracers’Notes The identificatory city in sub-Saharan Africa The bureaucratization of society The bureaucratization of the imaginary The bureaucratization of social organization Bureaucratization and privatization of the state Identification ‘from below’ in Africa Notes References

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Biometric state versus documentary state: Identification technologies and citizenship
African citizenships – A biometric turn? Séverine Awenengo Dalberto, Richard Banégas, and Armando Cutolo Translated by Rachel Robertson Biometrics is experiencing a dramatic uptake in the emerging countries of the Global South, as shown by the Indian experience with the Aadhaar identification...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)
Documentary state versus biometric state: legal identity without the social person?
The new identification technologies seem to be bringing about a radical recasting of the relationship between the individual and the state. At the heart of this rupture, explains Breckenridge in this volume, is the shift from the classificatory logic of documentary bureaucracy—linked to language and...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)
Identification ‘from below’ in Africa
In short, the bureaucratization of African societies is first and foremost a social phenomenon, before being a mode of state building. It is dependent on cultural practices as much as on economic or administrative practices. It was carried out in and by the imaginary, in particular the imaginary of etiquette,...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)
Industrial Policies and Outcomes in Africa: From a Dominant State to the Investment Climate
Despite major differences in history, language, and political structure, the SSAn countries in this volume share a striking uniformity in their approach to industrialization. Broadly, their policies to encourage industrial development fall into three phases: state-led; import substitution; the Washington...
(Manufacturing transformation : comparative studies of industrial development in Africa and emerging Asia)
Documentary government and mathematical identification: On the theoretical significance of African biometric government
Keith Breckenridge Africans today find themselves on the cutting edge of a global turn away from the forms of documentary government that have dominated most societies for the last millennium.1 Viewed in the aggregate, and especially at the level of entire countries, what is striking about the contemporary...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)
Education and notions of critical citizenship in South Africa
In the context of contemporary South Africa varying views of critical citizenship are present in debates on education (Enslin 2003; Ramphele 2001). Enslin reflects on the tension between the notion of citizenship articulated in the constitution, which was strongly informed by a participatory notion of...
(The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education)
A moral economy of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa?
S.J. Cooper-Knock Introduction During the transition from apartheid, many jurists, activists and politicians sought to create a new legal order that would forge and protect a democratic South Africa. In a country historically defined by oppressive legal regimes, this was a monumental step forward....
(Political Values and Narratives of Resistance: Social Justice and the Fractured Promises of Post-colonial States)
African citizenships – A biometric turn?
Séverine Awenengo Dalberto, Richard Banégas, and Armando Cutolo Translated by Rachel Robertson Biometrics is experiencing a dramatic uptake in the emerging countries of the Global South, as shown by the Indian experience with the Aadhaar identification system which, despite setbacks, has already led...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)
Mathematical character of biometric identification
Biometric systems, especially the fingerprinting techniques that were developed by Francis Galton and Edward Henry, have their roots in the same middle-class disdain for popular literacy that Jonathan Rose (2001) sees at the root of twentieth-century modernism: the creation of ‘a body Documentary...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)
The French West African identity card in Senegal: The challenges and meanings of legal identification in the era of imperial citizenship (1946–1960)
Séverine Awenengo Dalberto Translated by Rachel Robertson Introduction On 17 October 1949, the Governor General of French West Africa (Afrique-Occidentale française, AOF) instituted an identity card in the federation.1 Initially introduced to allow the identity of itinerant individuals...
(Identification and Citizenship in Africa: Biometrics, the Documentary State and Bureaucratic Writings of the Self)