How are the bureaucracies of civil registration and identification changing in the global south under the UN SDG 16.9 and World Bank Identification for Development (ID4D) agenda? How are increasingly digitised bureaucracies of certification reshaping state-citizen relations? Team members Atharv Dhiman, Vy Tran and Gulshan Banas recently presented their research in a PhD workshop on the comparative politics of legal identity hosted by the CERTIZENS project at the Centre of African Studies (CAS), University of Copenhagen. The workshop was aimed at profiling and sharing the work of five CERTIZENS PhDs focused on African contexts, and three PhDs linked to the CitizenGap research project in Amsterdam. It combined theoretical and empirical focus on questions related to various forms of national identification, classification, registration, certification, citizenship, and state-making in two regions of the global south. Empirical discussions focused on legal identity and exclusion across the national cases of Ghana (participants: Agnes Doe Agbanyo and Isaac Owusu Nsiah), Uganda (participants: Martin Buhamizo and Milcah Abasabyona), and India (participants: Atharv Dhiman and Gulshan Banas). Workshop participants Amanda Wendel Malm and Vy Tran examined the global ID policy and theoretical and empirical challenges in measuring the global gap in legal identity from a comparative perspective, respectively. Finally, a guest presentation by Ferenc David Markó focused on South Sudan.
All PhD papers included (in alphabetical order by first name):
- Agnes Doe Agbanyo – National Registration and Surveillance: The Ghana Card and SIM Registration Projects in Ghana | Discussant: Luuk van der Baaren
- Amanda Wendel Malm – The Global ID Policy Community: Interactions and policy mobility in legal identity, identification management and civil registration | Discussant: Alena Thiel
- Atharv Dhiman – Legible, Legitimate and Legal Identity – Politics of conflict in identity production | Discussant: Toke Møldrup Wolff
- Gulshan Banas – Seeking the State: Citizens’ pursuit of identity documents in contexts of partial inclusion | Discussant: Amanda Hammar
- Isaac Owusu Nsiah – The Fulani, Ghana Card and Exclusions: (Post)Colonial citizenship and state (society)-Fulani relation in Ghana | Discussant: Toke Møldrup Wolff
- Martin Buhamizo – Biometric Identity Card and Identification Crisis in Uganda | Discussant: Alena Thiel
- Milcah Abasabyona – Legal Identification Documents: Threats and opportunities for the ghetto youths in Kampala slums | Discussant: Amanda Hammar
- Vy Tran – Access to Legal Identity: Theoretical and empirical challenges, and a way forward | Discussant: Luuk van der Baaren
