Richard Banégas – författare

Identity documents provide rights to citizenship and social inclusion. They can also generate violence and conflicts. This book explores Côte d'Ivoire's 'ID war' as a paradigmatic case of a citizenship crisis, centered on the access to national identity cards and certificates. Using ethnographic and historical data, it shows how the documentary struggle for citizenship has continued in the post-crisis reconstruction, affecting the new policies of identification and registration based upon biometrics and new technologies. It describes how the latter have been overturned and reframed by the Ivorian society. Focusing on the production and negotiation of legal identities, the book delves into the social life of IDs and biometrics and describes the clandestine world of the 'margouillats', the corrupt brokers of the civil registry, the forms of documentary falsification aimed at taming legal and bureaucratic principles with the requirements of ordinary social life, the hidden practices of state apparatuses of identification and the local machinery of biometric registration, and the self-made censuses and systems of identification used by minorities seeking recognition in the public space. Through these ethnographic descriptions with a specific approach 'from below', the book shows that actual reforms supposed to depoliticize - and in the case of biometric technologies, to de-socialize - identification do not erase its constitutively political dimension. From a comparative perspective, the case of Côte d'Ivoire reveals the unprecedented revenge of the documentary state on the biometric state and encourages us to rethink their dyadic opposition in a more complex triangulation of identification, debt and recognition.Oxford Studies in African Politics and International Relations is a series for scholars and students working on African politics and International Relations and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on contemporary developments in African political science, political economy, and International Relations, such as electoral politics, democratization, decentralization, the political impact of natural resources, the dynamics and consequences of conflict, and the nature of the continent's engagement with the East and West. Comparative and mixed methods work is particularly encouraged. Case studies are welcomed but should demonstrate the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the study and its wider relevance to contemporary debates. The series focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, although proposals that explain how the region engages with North Africa and other parts of the world are of interest. General Editors Nic Cheeseman, Peace Medie, and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira.

In the context of a global biometric turn, this book investigates processes of legal identification in Africa ‘from below,’ asking what this means for the relationship between citizens and the state.Almost half of the population of the African continent is thought to lack a legal identity, and many states see biometric technology as a reliable and efficient solution to the problem. However, this book shows that biometrics, far from securing identities and avoiding fraud or political distrust, can even participate in reinforcing exclusion and polarizing debates on citizenship and national belonging. It highlights the social and political embedding of legal identities and the resilience of the documentary state. Drawing on empirical research conducted across 14 countries, the book documents the processes, practices, and meanings of legal identification in Africa from the 1950s right up to the biometric boom. Beyond the classic opposition between surveillance and recognition, it demonstrates how analysing the social uses of IDs and tools of identification can give a fresh account of the state at work, the practices of citizenship, and the role of bureaucracy in the writing of the self in African societies.This book will be of an important reference for students and scholars of African studies, politics, human security, and anthropology and the sociology of the state.