Civil Registration Centre for Development, The Hague and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Johannesburg

Bhalisa 1 | People | Workshop Participants

Carla AbouZahr | Independent Consultant in Health Strategy and Policy |

Carla AbouZahr’s involvement in civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) started while she was employed at the World Health Organization from 1989 to 2011. The challenges of monitoring progress in reducing maternal mortality led her to focus on the need for investment in national systems to register births and deaths and generate vital statistics on fertility, mortality and causes of death. She was responsible for WHO’s work in health information system strengthening of which CRVS is a key component. She led and managed the development of a series of papers on civil registration and vital statistics published in the Lancet in 2007 (http://www.thelancet.com/series/who-counts). Since her retirement in 2011, she has provided consultancy support to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) for the Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, November 2014. http://www.getinthepicture.org; to the Asian Development Bank for the International Identity Management Conference in Seoul, Korea, September 2014.

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Erik Bähre | Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University | http://www.erikbaehre.nl/

Erik Bähre is assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. He worked previously at the University of Amsterdam, University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu Natal), University College Utrecht (2002-2005), and was researcher at the department of anthropology at the London School of Economics taking part in a ESRC funded research project on economic change in South Africa. He has been awarded a KNAW NIAS (2011-2012) research fellowship. He specializes in economic anthropology and most of his research is carried out in South Africa. His research interests include how poor people come to depend on commercial insurance companies; how insurance companies try to offer sustainable insurance to the poor by limiting administrative costs; and how statistical classification and bureaucratic procedures lead to a realignment of morality and identity.

Juliana Vengoechea Barrios | Open Society Justice Initiative |

Juliana Vengoechea Barrios is an Aryeh Neier Fellow with the Open Society Justice Initiative .Prior to OSJI Vengoechea was an assistant professor and the director of the Center for Studies in International Law "Francisco Suárez, S.J" at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Vengoechea has also worked as a human rights and international humanitarian law advisor for the Vice-presidency of Colombia, as fellow of the Program in Asylum and Refugee Law at University of Michigan, working at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington D.C, as well as legal fellow of the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research are citizenship and nationality, forced migration, socio economic rights and International Human Rights Law. Vengoechea holds LLB degrees from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and University of the Basque Country , a LLM degree from the University of Michigan and is a member of the New York State Bar.

Jackie Bhabha | Harvard School of Public Health | http://jacquelinebhabha.com

Jacqueline Bhabha is FXB Director of Research, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London. From 1997 to 2001 Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago.  Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the editor of Children Without A State (MIT Press, 2011), author of Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age (Princeton University Press, 2014), and the editor of Human Rights and Adolescence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Bhabha serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation and the Journal of Refugee Studies. 

Keith Breckenridge | Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research | http://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/keith-breckenridge

Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and the Deputy Director at Wiser. His book -- Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014) – shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South. He has also published widely on the history and contemporary politics of biometrics,  with important papers in Africa, History Workshop, the Journal of Southern African Studies, Public Culture and comparative anthologies on systems of identification (the full list is here).  This interest in biometrics has also drawn him in to the global institutional history of state documentation, especially the forms of birth, death and marriage registration that are ubiquitous (but very poorly understood) in Europe, Asia and the Americas (see

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Helge Brunborg is a researcher in demography. He has mostly been employed by Statistics Norway but he has also worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the University of Botswana and the Central Statistics Office of Botswana, as well as having been involved in a number of consultancies in many countries. He has taken a special interest in registration issues, both from a statistical and human rights perspective. In particular, he believes strongly in organizing individual population data from civil registration and population censuses in a central population register, which can be of immense value for statistics, research and administration, including for the registered individuals. These ideas are discussed in the report “Status Analysis on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS)”, http://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_attachment/20.... On the issue of registration, specifically, he has published VO Nielsen, H Brunborg, V Aalandslid, D Roll-Hansen & C Hendriks: Status Analysis on Civil Registrat

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Armando Cutolo | Dipartimento di Studi Sociali, Politici e Cognitivi (DISPOC),University of Siena | http://www.dispoc.unisi.it/it/dipartimento/persone/docenti-di-ruolo/armando-cutolo

My interest, as an anthropologist, in registration and legal ID in Cote d’Ivoire has started during my research on the Ivorian nationalism and on the movement of jeunes patriotes. But in fact, I had started taking field-notes on “the social life of ID cards” quite a few years before, since the second halve of the nineties. The research I was carrying at that time focused on kinship, ethnicity and local notions of personhood in the Anno region. Here akan and mande social identities were connected within a common regional political frame that was affected by the “ivoirité” ethno-nationalist ideology - where the mande-dioula Ivorian nationals were implicitly equated with “strangers” coming from northern bordering countries. Travelling in the region I was able (obliged) to spend some time at police checkpoints, witnessing the transactions, the negotiations and the tactics centred around the “cartes d’identité nationales” and the “carte de séjour d’étranger. These ethnographic observations brought me to focus the specific, mobile configurations connecting legal identity, person and personhood within identification practices. After the conflict started, in

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Mariana Dahan | World Bank |

After starting her career in the telecommunications industry in 1998, Mariana Dahan became interested in the patterns of diffusion of innovations – a topic she has studied extensively in her PhD research work, while being at the European Business School in France and at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the United States. Having worked for mobile operators in both developed and developing countries, Dr. Dahan gained valuable insights on mobile technologies’ impact on economic growth. Since 2009, Mariana Dahan works with Governments from low- and middle-income countries, as part of the Global Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Practice of The World Bank, based in Washington, DC, in the United States. Currently, Dr. Dahan is the Coordinator of the Identification for Development (ID4D) Working Group: a bold initiative that aims at formulating a coherent cross-sectoral approach to identification systems and coordinating closely with other development agencies. As part of her previous work at The World Bank, Dr. Dahan has also managed the Identity Management (IDM) Experts Group, building strategic partnerships with Governments, private sector, research labs and civi

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Sanjay Dharwadker | WCC Smart Search & Match |

Sanjay Dharwadker heads the global ID consultancy practice for WCC, Utrecht (www.wcc-group.com). The organization offers a versatile tool-box for identity search and match, that is currently being tuned to address diverse social issues related to migration, crime and not the least, national identity. WCC works closely inter alia, with the Netherlands government (IND), the European Union (EU-VIS), UNHCR and on projects such as the border-crossing of migrant workers across Mexico – Guatemala. Earlier he worked in Africa for nearly a decade on projects such as identity management and personalized engagement for effective ARV dispensation among key populations. Before that, in India, he was part of the team/s that evaluated and considered the possibilities of using large-scale identity management tools (registration, smart cards and biometrics) for welfare, and participated in the standardization process that helped accelerate low-cost implementations in the last decade, leading finally to the nation-wide Aadhaar program. But it was the earlier decade that provided him the real insights into developmental challenges, when he worked for the Tech

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Kevin Donovan | History and STS, University of Michigan | https://umich.academia.edu/KevinDonovan/

Kevin Donovan is in the PhD program in Anthropology & History at the University of Michigan. His dissertation studies the history and contemporary politics of regionalism in East Africa, including the emerging regional identification regimes. Prior work focused on the emergence of mobile money and the use of biometric registration in South Africa and Kenya. Resulting publications can be found at: https://umich.academia.edu/KevinDonovan/

Amanda Flaim | Center for Population Health and Aging |

Amanda Flaim, a Development Sociologist and specialist in Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University, is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University in the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Duke Population Research Institute and the Social Science Research Institute. She has served as a lead research consultant on statelessness for UNESCO in Thailand for UNHCR. Her chapter, "Problems of Evidence, Evidence of Problems: Expanding Citizenship and Reproducing Statelessness among Highlanders in Northern Thailand," is available in the forthcoming volume Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Encounters with Blood, Birthright, and Bureaucracy (Lawrance and Stevens, eds). She has a forthcoming article in Comparative Education Review, where she reveals the perpetual inadequacies of human rights frameworks to resolve problems of exclusion from schooling among stateless populations. Her dissertation, "No Land’s Man: Sovereignty, Legal Status, and the Production of Statelessness among Highlanders in Northern Thailand" (2015), is available through Cornell University Libraries.

Laurent Fourchard is currently a senior researcher with the French Foundation of Political Science (FNSP) at the research institute ‘Les Afriques dans le Monde’ at Sciences Po Bordeaux, France. His research is located at the intersection of African history and African politics and his interests focus on urban comparative research, violence and exclusion, citizenship and process of identification in Nigeria and South Africa.

His last publications include:

« Of xenophobia and citizenship: the politics of exclusion and inclusion in Africa”, Africa, 85, 1, 2015, pp. 2-12 (with Aurélia Segatti). “Bureaucrats and indigenes: producing and bypassing certificates of origins in Nigeria”, Africa, 85, 1, 2015, pp. 36-57.

“Between world history and state formation: new perspectives on Africa's cities”, Journal of African History , 52, 2011, pp. 223-248. « The politics of mobilization for security in South African townships” African Affairs , 110, 441, 2011, pp. 607-627.

Alan Gelb | Center for Global Development | http://www.cgdev.org/expert/alan-gelb

Alan Gelb is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Global Development. He was previously with the World Bank, where his most recent positions included Director of Development Policy and Chief Economist for the Africa Region. Prior to that, he managed the program of research on countries in transition from socialist systems and also led work in the area of financial systems. In addition to the topic of identification for development his current areas of research and operational interest include: growth and diversification of African economies; the management of resource-rich countries; and instruments to provide aid on the basis of results. He has written several books and many articles on these and other topics. His interest in the topic of individual identification originated from the recognition that accurate identification and authentication of individuals could contribute to the more effective implementation of economic and development policies. A first focus was on the use of biometric identification systems for cash transfer programs: see http://www.cgd

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Radha Govil | UNHCR |

Radha Govil has worked as a Legal Officer in UNHCR’s Division of International Protection for the past five years, focusing on issues relating to nationality and statelessness. She has been involved in a number of statelessness mapping studies, including in Afghanistan, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya and Pakistan, which have examined the reasons for and implications of the lack birth registration or national identification documentation amongst specific populations in these countries. Radha has also led the statelessness unit's work on gender discrimination in nationality laws and was co-author of UNHCR's 10 point Global Action Plan, which sets out the strategic framework for the achievement of the goals of UNHCR's Campaign to End Statelessness, launched in November 2014. Radha holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne, and a Masters in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Mia Harbitz | Inter-American Development Bank | http://iadb.libguides.com/registros

Mia Harbitz is the lead specialist in identity management and registries in the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) with over 25 years of experience in development projects. Since 2004 Mia Harbitz has been coordinating IDBs activities in the area of identity management, including a series of studies assessing the practical implications of under-registration of citizens in Latin America. She has designed and managed several projects with the objective to modernize and strengthen the capacities of civil and identification registries in Latin America, projects that are also linked to improving the quality of national vital statistics systems and promoting universal birth registration and civil identification. She has authored as well as contributed to a number of publications on topics pertaining to legal identity, identity management and implications of under registration, as well as books on social inclusion as a means to poverty reduction. Her work in the IADB requires extensive and worldwide coordination with other multilateral agencies, development banks and governments. She has a background in engineering, and prior to coming to Latin America in 1991, she worked in develop

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Marianne Henriksen | Norwegian Directorate of Taxes |

Marianne Henriksen has a law degree from the University of Oslo with 20 years of professional experience in the public sector. From 1996 to 2010 she worked for the National Insurance Administration. Since 2010 she has worked for the Norwegian Directorate of Taxes, since 2012 as program manager for modernizaton of the Population Register. She has also been managing projects linked to serious and organized crime and fraud against the Norwegian welfare system. She has substantial experience in working across different businesses and agencies to achieve the best results. Through her work experience, she has obtained a strategic view of how Norwegian society works and how the welfare system may be sustainable through development and modernization of the National Population Register.

Most of my early work was on the history and use of census records in England, which were intimately linked to births, marriages and deaths registration since they are required for the calculation of vital rates. This has been a continuous theme in my activities, either in terms of commentaries on the source, or the creation of digital datasets. This led on in the 1990s to a consideration of the development of the London General Register Office, the body responsible for civil registration and census-taking in England from 1837 onwards. In the early years of the present century, I expanded my interests in official data gathering to the English state as a whole from 1500 onwards. In more recent years I have also written on the history of personal identification in England over the same period – from medieval seals to biometrics.

Books

Identifying the English: Personal Identification 1500 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2011)

The Information State in England: the central collection of information on citizens since 1500 (London: Palgrave, 2004).

Life, Death and Statistics: Civil Registration, Censuses and the work of the

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Eivind Hoffmann joined the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) in February 2004 as head of its Statistics and Analysis Division. From February 2011 to February 2014 he represented UDI in the Norwegian Contact Point for the European Migration Network (NO EMN NCP). Following his retirement from UDI he is currently working as an independent consultant. Assignments for UDI have involved support for UDI’s EMN involvement and R&D projects sponsored by UDI. From January 2015 he is supporting the Norwegian National ID-center’s work to present statistics on the control of foreigners’ identity and the statistics, as well as evaluating their quality. Eivind Hoffmann joined UDI after having worked in the Bureau of Statistics of the International Labour Office (ILO) 1984-2003. In ILO he worked on developing and providing guidance on a wide range of standards and methods for labour statistics, including the direct use of administrative records and statistics on the international migration of workers. Before joining the ILO he worked as research coordinator for spatial data in the Norwegian Computing Centre (NR) (1981-84). In Statistics Norway (1968-81) he headed its section for lab

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Milen Kidane | UNICEF |

Milen Kidane has been working with UNICEF Eastern and Southern Regional Office (ESARO) as a Child Protection Specialist, focusing on civil registration and justice for children programming since June 2011. Milen has over 15 years of experience in managing child protection programmes throughout Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Milen joined UNICEF- Eritrea in 2000 as a consultant and has worked with as an Emergency Child Protection Specialist in Afghanistan, Eastern DRC, Northern Uganda and Iraq as well as Trinidad and Tobago. As a child rights advocate, Milen has been involved in advocacy for child legal reform, including child justice systems and enhanced prevention and response services for children affected by violence and abuse in both development and humanitarian settings. As a member of the Regional CRVS Core Group, Milen leads the CRVS systems reform work for UNICEF in Africa. Milen holds Master’s Degree in International Human Rights and Democratization, from the University of Padua, Italy. She is a national of Eritrea and grew up in Vienna, Austria.

Jonathan Klaaren | School of Law and WISER, University of the Witwatersrand | http://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/jonathan-klaaren

Jonathan Klaaren teaches, researches, and writes at the University of the Witwatersrand in the areas of human rights, law, and sociology, having written over forty peer-reviewed publications and co-written several books, including on the South African right of access to information which has to some extent transformed South African law. http://wiser.wits.ac.za/content/promotion-access-information-act-commentary-11662 Klaaren also has written on the overlap of national security and the right to information. http://wiser.wits.ac.za/content/promotion-access-and-protection-national-security-information-south-africa-11663 His early research also encompassed the field of migration, where he researched the current status and interaction of laws of registration, identity, citizenship and migration throughout Southern Africa. http://wiser.wits.ac

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Mary Lagaay | Plan International |

Mary Lagaay currently works as a Researcher for Plan International, where she is responsible for coordinating research related to the protection and realisation of children’s rights in developing countries. This has included the coordination of Plan’s recent report ‘Birth registration and children’s rights: a complex story’ which investigated the benefits of birth registration for the individual and for the state. Most recently, she has coordinated a study into the humanitarian consequences of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Prior to her role at Plan, Mary has held roles within the Policy and Public Affairs team at the National Children’s Bureau and at Brighton Oasis Project. In 2012, she completed an MSc in Social Policy Research at the London School of Economics and was awarded an academic prize for her research on the experiences of mothers who completed intervention for problematic substance misuse.

Neo Corneliah Lepang | Government of Botswana | http://www.gov.bw/

Forthcoming

Bronwen Manby | LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights | http://www.lse.ac.uk/humanRights/whosWho/bronwen_manby.aspx

Bronwen Manby is an independent consultant and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Centre for the Study of Human Rights, and previously worked for the Open Society Foundations and Human Rights Watch. She has written widely on human rights, democracy and good governance in Africa and her current focus is on statelessness and the right to nationality, with ongoing work for the Open Society Foundations, for UNHCR and IOM and others. She is completing a book whose provisional title is “Citizenship and Statelessness in Africa: The law and politics of belonging”, which will also be submitted as a doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Law of the University of Maastricht, with the anticipated defence in 2015. She is involved in ongoing advocacy for the adoption of a protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the right to a nationality in Africa, and was the lead author of the section on nationality for the General Comment on the right to a name, birth registration and a nationality adopted in 2014 by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Publications on nationality include the following:

Nationality, migration and

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Laura Mann | African Studies Centre, Leiden | http://lauraelizabethmann.wordpress.com

Laura Mann is a postdoctoral researcher at the African Studies Centre (ASC) in the University of Leiden. She has published articles in the Journal of Modern African Studies, the Review of African Political Economy, Critical African Studies and the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries and has forthcoming articles in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and New Political Economy. She is currently pursuing research on big data, informal economies and economic governance in Kenya and South Africa. In September 2015, she will be joining the London School of Economics’ International Development department as an Assistant Professor. Some relevant blogs/papers:

https://lauraelizabethmann.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/a-political-economy-perspective-on-the-data-revolution-in-development/

https://lauraelizabethmann.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-t

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Giulia Piccolino | German Institute of Global and Area Studies | http://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/team/piccolino

Giulia Piccolino is a post-doctoral research fellow sponsored by the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. She is interested in post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining GIGA, she worked as an electoral observer for the Carter Center and as an electoral advisor for the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) and attended relevant training courses. These experiences arose her interest in voter registration and voter registration technologies. She subsequently conducted research on the Permanent Electronic Electoral List in Benin as part of the European Union Framework Programme 7 funded project “The economic, social and political consequences of democratic reforms. A quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis”. Her analysis of the joint civil/voter registration process in Côte d’Ivoire and the voter registration process in Benin and Ghana have resulted in two journal articles forthcoming on Development and Change and Democratization. Her work looks at the role of voter registration and registration technologies in the processes of state building and democratiz

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Jan Pronk | Institute of Social Studies, The Hague | http://www.janpronk.nl/index.html

Johannes Pieter "Jan" Pronk (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈjɑn ˈprɔnk]; born 16 March 1940) is a Dutch politician, diplomat, and professor. Since 2009, he is visiting professor at the United Nations University for Peace in Ciudad Colón, Costa Rica.

Pronk was a member of the Labour Party (PvdA) from 1965 to 2013. He has served three terms as Minister for Development Cooperation and one term as Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment in government cabinets between 1973 and 2002. He was the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of Mission for the United Nations Mission in Sudan from 2004 until 2006. Presently he holds a Chair in the Theory and Practice of International Development at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague.

Anna’s doctoral research explores practices of identification in Somaliland in the Horn of Africa. Her thesis considers the ways in which identity is verified by reference to personal and national genealogies, and how these topographies are incorporated and sometimes co-opted by state systems of legibility. As part of this work, she is studying practices of ‘horizontal’ identity authentication, in particular vouching, and how these fit with conceptions of citizenship in Somaliland. She is also investigating the voter registration process of 2008-10 to understand more about attitudes and ideas towards identification. Anna has spent six months in Somaliland since 2012 as part of ongoing fieldwork. In December 2012 she worked as an international observer for the local council elections, and has conducted a range of qualitative interviews and observations, predominantly in the capital Hargeisa.

Ashley Rockenbach | History, University of Michigan |

Ashley Rockenbach is an advanced doctoral candidate in African History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, provisionally titled, Home in Exile: Banyarwanda settlers and the making of the Ugandan state, 1911-present, investigates the history of Rwandan migration and settlement in 20th century Uganda. Despite decades of political exclusion, many Banyarwanda consider Uganda to be their “home.” Their stories highlight “displacement” as a historical and gendered process, one that has been integral to postcolonial state-formation. In addition to her doctoral research, Ms. Rockenbach is also part of on-going efforts to catalogue and digitize Uganda's state and district archives.

Ornit Shani | Department of Asian Studies at the University of Haifa | https://lecturers.haifa.ac.il/en/hcc/oshani/Pages/default.aspx#

My research from 1997 to 2007 explored the rise of belligerent Hindu nationalism in India from the mid-1980s that posited itself, in the main, in opposition to Islam, as it sought to redefine India as a primarily Hindu state. I argued that rather than stemming from historically entrenched or newly emergent religious antagonisms, the intensifying sectarian conflicts from the mid-1980s were largely driven by growing caste tensions among Hindus. These tensions were largely stimulated by the state’s articulation of key resource distribution policies (reservations) for the backward castes as well as the politics that surrounded them. In state policies, particularly in identifying the backward castes, religion was inadvertently made an intrinsic criterion for compensatory policies for weaker groups in the society. By addressing issues of inequality as if they were synonymous with religious rights, the state’s reservation policy appeared and was even experienced by upper caste Hindus as “preferential treatment” of religious minorities – a policy that, in effect, enabled caste conflicts to develop and communal rivalries to deepen (Shani 2007, 2011).

From 2007 my research has cent

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Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the post-colonial city and contemporary media experiences. Sundaram published Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi. (2009), emerging from years of field and archival work. Cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America are now increasingly shaped by low cost media, which has blurred the boundaries between technology, culture and everyday life for large urban populations. Sundaram argues that this is the context of new ‘pirate modernity’, a grey zone between informality and legal media regimes, visibility and disappearance. A number of essays on non-legal media circulation emerged along with Pirate Modernity, as book chapters.   Sundaram was one of the initiators of Delhi’s Sarai programme, which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series: The Public Domain (2001),

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Simon Szreter | St Johns College Cambridge and History and Policy | http://www.historyandpolicy.org/

My publications have focused on a) further supporting the argument made by Peter Solar (Economic History Review 1995) that the Poor Law of 1601 (a parish-based precocious social security system) was a more important contributor to England’s early economic development than has been realised b) arguing that the equally early parish registers played an important role in maintaining the viability of that early welfare system over two centuries, along with a system of accessible justice c) exploring the original motives for the creation of the parish registers in the reign of Henry VIII and d) exploring why this package of institutions appears not to have become established elsewhere among British settlements in North American and the Caribbean. Secondly, I have also been involved in policy-engaged advocacy publications i) pointing out that development policies premised on notions of human rights need to address practical issues of citizen registration if the abstractions of rights are to be turned into practical policies benefitting the poor ii) engaging with the long-standing professional interest of public health in vital registration systems as providing the crucial basis for

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Jaap van der Straaten is the founder and chief executive officer of CRC4D, the Civil Registration Centre for Development, The Hague (est. 2010, www.crc4d.com). CRC4D’s work is and has been commissioned especially by UNICEF, UNHCR and Plan International, providing advisory services in the field of civil registration and identity management, with an emphasis on Africa. He led the work of three associates on UNICEF’s A passport to protection. A guide to birth registration programming (2013). A selection of other reports produced for UNICEF, UNHCR and Plan International includes: A report on children lacking birth- and/or citizenship certificates in Montenegro (2011), Fulfilling the rights to identity and social protection in South Sudan, Civil registration support in Cameroon (2012),

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Laura van Waas | Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion | http://www.institutesi.org/about/

Laura van Waas is a co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness and one of its two Directors. She is also a part-time Assistant Professor in the Department of European and International Law at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. She is one of few people to date who has conducted doctoral research on statelessness and her PhD manuscript, 'Nationality Matters' (published by Intersentia in 2008), is widely used as a reference for understanding international statelessness law by researchers and practitioners all over the world. In more than a decade of working on the issue of statelessness, Laura has carried out a wide array of research and teaching projects, both within academia and for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other actors. She has worked as a consultant for UNHCR's headquarters in Geneva as well as the regional offices for the Middle East and North Africa in Beirut and for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok. She has supervised or conducted studies on statelessness for, among others, Plan International, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Open Society Foundations, the Women's Refugee Commission, t

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A good introduction to my work on identity policies and its real world impact can be found at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/researchImpact/caseStudies/whi...
As co-chair of the Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group I helped formulate the Identity Assurance Principles that underwrite the new UK Gov.verify Scheme - https://identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2014/12/04/how-were-embedding-the-...
I have written extensively about the UK identity scheme
Whitley, E. A., and Hosein, G. 2010. Global challenges for identity policies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitley, E. A., Martin, A. K., and Hosein, G. 2014. “From surveillance-by-design to privacy-by-design: Evolving identity policy in the UK,” in Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond K. Boersma, R. van Brakel, C. Fonio, and P. Wagenaar (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 205–219.