ID wars in Côte d'Ivoire: a political ethnography of identification and citizenship

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. It 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; 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.