Inclusion and Control: Identity Documentation in the Global South

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel examines the politics of issuing and receiving identity documents in a wide range of countries in the Global South. Whether people possess official papers can be used to include or exclude them from participating in politics (including voting) as well as social programs. Yet being known to the state through official registration can also open up channels of state surveillance and control, especially when the establishment of a legal identity includes biometric dimensions. The papers on the panel analyze this double-edged nature of identity provisioning (from the supply side on the part of the state) and attainment (from the demand side on the part of society). Two of the papers (Bowles, and Scacco et al.) assess how ordinary people view the trade-off between inclusion and state surveillance in the establishment of a legal identity with biometric markers. The two other papers (Harbers, and Hunter) investigate which population groups have been incorporated or excluded by legal identity documentation regimes in the past and present, with Harbers focusing on ethnic minorites and Hunter on women. Given that navigating modern bureaucracies to access political, social, and economic rights and services depends ever more on having up-to-date identity documents, all the papers on the panel address a vital and timely issue.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Social Policy and the Documentation of Older Women as Citizens - Wendy Hunter, University of Texas, Austin

• Biometric State: Citizen Response to State Intervention in Uganda - Jeremy Bowles, Stanford University

• Political Exclusion, Ethnicity, and Uneven Access to Civil Registration - Imke Harbers, University of Amsterdam

• Digitalization, Legibility and Intergroup Inequality in Kenya - Lisa Garbe; Nina McMurry, WZB Berlin Social Science Center; Alexandra Scacco, WZB Berlin Social Science Center; Kelly Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chair

• Wendy Hunter University of Texas, Austin

Discussants

• John Gerring University of Texas, Austin

• James W. McGuire Wesleyan University