« Un container de papiers » : citoyenneté et fabrique des apatrides dans les villages de colonisation du centre de la Côte d’Ivoire

The article explores the historical and political dynamics connecting identification, registration and citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire. It focuses on rural communities displaced from Haute Volta in the 1930s and settled by the Ivorian colonial government in ‘colonial villages’. Their population has been kept until the Nineties in an ambiguous status of stranger immigrants, and still today experiences difficulties in obtaining identity documents from local administration. As a matter of fact, despite their legal recognition as national citizens, these people are in a liminal status of juridical exception and political dependence from the ruling party. After the end of the Ivorian crisis (2002-2011), the old issue of citizenship and documents has come to be recast in terms of the ‘risk of statelessness’ by the government and international organizations. The article reconstructs the history of their discrimination and their struggle for ‘papers’. It shows that neither the civil registration nor biometric reforms have radically altered their documentary insecurity and the old stereotypes that continue to structure national belonging. Still today, the population of the “voltaic villages” is connected by the “autochthones” to the historical memory of colonial governmentality. The article concludes observing how new biometric technologies, although aimed at depoliticizing the issue of identification, are far from reducing the risks of statelessness, and may even pave the way for its digital consolidation.