Bhalisa 1 | People | Workshop Participants

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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