Bhalisa 3 | Jesus and St Johns Colleges, Cambridge | March 19 - 21, 2019
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Bhalisa 3 | Cambridge | Participants
Edwin Abuya
http://privatelaw.uonbi.ac.ke/content/associate-professors-law
Edwin Abuya is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and an expert in human rights and transitional justice, holding a doctorate in law from the University of Sydney, Masters from the University of Cape Town and an Undergraduate inLaw from Nairobi University in Kenya. Edwin, currently an Associate Professor at Nairobi University Law School, has taught Human Rights Law and Transitional Justice in many countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States and South Africa. Edwinhas published widely and advised international agencies and government in his areas of expertise. Some of the proposals he made in the articles that he has published have since been adopted by the agencies such as the UNHCR and States such as Kenya.
Lara Allen
Lara Allen is CEO of the Centre for Global Equality, a Cambridge-based civil society organisation that evolves innovative solutions to global challenges by facilitating collaborations between academic researchers, businesses, governments and under-resourced communities in low- and middle-income countries. She is also an Affiliated Lecturer of the Centre of Development Studies at University of Cambridge, and Director of Implementation and Impact for Cambridge Global Challenges, the University’s network for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Her research interests include the theory and practice of inclusive innovation, methodologies of co-creation, and the role of fine and performing arts in community development. She is convenor of the Bahir Dar Digital Infrastructure Initiative (BDDII), which is evolving approaches to making internet access and digital services in a mid-sized Ethiopian city more equitable and transparent than is the case in most other places.
Ross Anderson
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/
Ross John Anderson is a researcher, writer, and industry consultant in security engineering. He is Professor of Security Engineering at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge where he is part of the Security Group. He is the author of the standard Security Engineering textbook. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html.
Johann Bezuidenhout
https://www.nps-institute.com/our_faculty/
Johann Bezuidenhoudt is an electrical engineering graduate from Wits University with an academic interest in computer security. Consults in retail payment systems and the regulation thereof with a specific focus on developing countries and the poor. Has been involved in mobile payments since 1996 and was the manager in charge of starting mobile payments in MTN the pan-‐African MNO. He has been consulting since 2006 in the developing world in countries including SA, Nigeria, the Philippines and Colombia. He has advised on and assessed biometric schemes in the DRC (troop demobilisation), Solomon Islands, South Africa, Colombia and Peru. Current interests are around digital identity and its appropriateness in the developing and electronic infrastructure impoverished world, minimal KYC and the issues resulting from biometric credentials not being revocable.
Subhashish Bhadra
https://www.omidyar.com/people/subhashish-bhadra
Subhashish Bhadra is an investment associate with the Digital Identity team at the Omidyar Network. He is based in Bangalore, where he is responsible for sourcing and evaluating Digital Identity investments. Subhashish joined Omidyar Network from the global management-‐consulting firm McKinsey, where he worked in the Delhi office for two years. His work there focused on public policy strategy projects including one on rural electrification in India. He also co-‐authored a report on "India's Path from Poverty to Empowerment." A Rhodes scholar, Subhashish received an M.Phil in economics from Oxford University and a B.A. in economics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi.
Amiya Bhatia
https://scholar.harvard.edu/amiyabhatia/home
Amiya is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health studying population health inequalities, and how child health and child protection outcomes are unevenly and unfairly distributed in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with a focus on South Asia.
Gautam Bhatia
https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/
Gautam Bhatia is a practicing lawyer and legal academic, based in New Delhi, India. His scholarship is focused on Indian and comparative constitutional law: he is the author of Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution(OUP 2015), articles in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law and The Oxford Handbook for the Indian Constitution, and in other peer-reviewed journals such as Global Constitutionalism and The Asian Journal of Comparative Law. For the last one year, he has been part of a large team of lawyers challenging "Aadhaar"—India's national biometric identification -before the Supreme Court of India. An offshoot of this has been the Indian Supreme Court's judgment recognising a fundamental right to privacy under the Indian Constitution, as well as an ongoing national conversation about a data protection law. He will be starting a D.Phil.in Law at the University of Oxford this October.
Laura Bingham
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/people/laura-bingham
Laura Bingham serves as legal officer for the equality/citizenship issue area of the Open Society Justice Initiative. Bingham previously worked as a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP, based in New York and as a law clerk to U.S. district court judges Hon. Lawrence F. Stengel (Eastern District of Pennsylvania) and Hon. Raymond J. Dearie (Chief Judge, Eastern District of New York).She received a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Order of the Coif. During law school, Bingham worked for the ICTR as a legal intern and spent a semester in Senegal researching the potential trial of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, for torture and crimes against humanity. Before law school, she completed a master’s degree in human rights law at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, made possible through a Rotary International Ambassadorial scholarship.
Keith Breckenridge
https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/keith-breckenridge
Keith is a Professor and Deputy Director at Wiser, and one of the editors of theJournal of African History. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, the state and the development of information systems.He studied at Wits and Johns Hopkins and completed his PhD at Northwestern in 1995. 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.In 2017 the book was awarded the inaugural Humanities Book Award by the Academy of Science of South Africa. With Simon Szreter, he edited Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History published by OUP and the British Academy in 2012, a volume of essays which examines the workings and failures of civil registration in twenty different regions and periods around the world. He is now working to finish Biometric Capitalism, which investigates the global infrastructures of biometric civil registration and credit surveillance that are developing in the former colonial world.
Natalie Brinham
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/natalie-brinham/
Natalie Brinham (also known as Alice Cowley) is an ESRC-funded PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. Her current research explores Rohingya oral histories relating to their identity cards and the slow production of their statelessness in Myanmar. Natalie worked for many years in NGOs in the UK and Southeast Asia on forced migration, trafficking and statelessness in both frontline service provision roles and research and advocacy roles. She has authored and co-authored journalistic and academic articles including in 2014 the first academic study of Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, entitled “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya” (Pac-Rim Law and Policy Journal https://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/handle/1773.1/1377) and “Genocide Cards: Rohingya refugees on why they risked their lives to refuse ID cards” (2018 Open democracyhttps://www.opendemocracy.net/natalie-brinham/genocide-cards-why-rohingy...)
Jane Caplan
https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-jane-caplan
Jane Caplan has worked mainly on the history of Nazi Germany and is currently researching the proof and policing of identity in the Third Reich. She is equally interested in the documentation of individual identity in 19th-century Europe, especially the written and visual marks of identity on and off the body and their status in political and legal discourse.
Bidisha Chaudhuri
https://www.iiitb.ac.in/faculty_page.php?name=bidishachaudhuri
Bidisha Chaudhuri is an Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB). At IIITB, she works in the research domain of IT and Society and is also affiliated with its interdisciplinarythink tank, Centre for IT & Public Policy (CITAPP). She completed her PhD at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. She received an M.A. in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and a Joint European Masters in Global Studies from University of Leipzig (Germany) and Vienna University (Austria). She is the author of the book "E-‐Governance in India: Interlocking Politics, Technology and Culture" (London & New York: Routledge, 2014) and co-‐edited the volume “Politics of the ‘Other’ in India and China: Western Concepts in Non-‐Western Contexts” (London & New York: Routledge, 2016). Her research interests include e-‐governance, political economy of digital IDs, public policy reform, ICT for development, gender and development, and South Asian politics. Prior to joining IIIT-‐B, She has worked in research institutions and developmental organisations in India and abroad.
Roland Claussen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rclaussen/
Roland’s research focus is applied data science in economics, where he developed a data typology which allows to classify variables used in consumer credit scoring not only by their specific level of predictive power, but additionally by qualitative criteria. This centers around the question of ‘Transparency and Ethics in Algorithms and Analytics’ which discusses if and to which degree which kind of data should be used for specific predictive purposes, and to which degree the data and algorithms should be transparent. Roland studied business administration at Universities of Frankfurt/Main and Bayreuth (Germany). He graduated in 2006 with an MBA equivalent degree,and later earned a PhD in Economics from University of Münster(2018) for his researchon the predictive power of different types of data in credit scoring.Roland co-founded awamo GmbH in June 2015 and acts as its Chief Product Officer. awamo strivesto digitizethe microfinance sector in East Africa by offering a mobile, biometric, and affordable core banking system to microfinance institutions. To date, awamo’s CBS serves more than 180,000 individuals and processes more than 3,000 transactions/daywithin its systems.Before, Rolandworked with SCHUFA Holding AG, Germany’s leading consumer credit bureau. From 2008 to 2012 Roland established a team for corporate strategy and holding management which focused on digitization in the consumer credit space.From 2012 to 2015 he was responsible for SCHUFA’s digital B2B/B2C product portfolio as DirectorPortfolio Management.
Gabriel Davel
https://www.afi-global.org/gabriel-davel-interim-director-financial-inclusion-policy-and-grant
Gabriel is a Chartered Accountant and has degrees in Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, a Masters’ Degree in Development Finance from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and an Advanced Diploma in Banking from the University of Johannesburg. He was a partner at Deloitte & Touche and CEO for both the Micro Finance Regulatory Council and the founding CEO the National Credit Regulator. He served on numerous committees and task teams for the South African government and centralbank, covering topics such as competition in banking, SME finance and credit market regulation. Currently he does international consulting, working on financial regulation,credit informationand credit market development in different parts of the world.He has done extensive work in different parts of Africa, the extent of credit penetration andfactors impacting on the contribution of credit to economic development in Africa.
Fernando de Medina Rosales
https://www.nrc.no/what-we-do/activities-in-the-field/icla/
Fernando de Medina-Rosales is the Global Manager of the Information, Council and Legal Assistance (ICLA) Programme of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). A lawyer by background, Fernando has dedicated his professional life to work on human rights and rule of law in conflict and development contexts, specialising on housing, land and property and legal identity. He has been driving the development of the ICLA programme during the last decade in particular the use of dispute resolution, monitoring & evaluation and most recently the digital transformation of ICLA’s services. He holds a Master in Human rights and Democratization from the European Inter-University Centre and a LL.M. on International Law from the University of Oslo.
Marielle Debos
https://u-paris10.academia.edu/MarielleDebos
Marielle Debos is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University Paris West Nanterre and a member of the Institute for Social Sciences of Politics (ISP).Before her appointment at Nanterre, she was a Marie Curie fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include armed conflicts in Africa, state formation, identification and citizenship, with a focus on Chad. Her book on armed violence in Chad will be published in 2016 by Zed Books. Her new research project focuses on biometric voter registration in Africa.
Sanjay Dharwadker
http://crvsinnovations.net/speaker/sanjay-dharwadker/
Sanjay Dharwadker heads the global ID consultancy practice for WCC, Utrecht (WWW.WCC-GROUP.COM). The organization offers software that that addressesdiverse social issues related to migration, crime and not the least, legal and national identity. WCC works closely inter alia, with various national governments, World Bank, European Union, UNHCR and on projects such as the border-crossing of migrant workers. Earlier he worked in Africa for nearly a decade on identity managementprogramsand prior to that in India: first with the path-breaking technology missionsfordrinking water and immunization, and thenon variouswelfare programsleadingfinallyto the nation-wide Aadhaar program. He is a member of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) working groups onevidence of identityand digital travel credentials. He also advises the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR)and also represents The Netherlands at ISO and CEN identity standards bodies.
Martin Doevenspeck
Martin is a Professor of Geographical Conflict Research, in the Institute of Geography at the University of Bayreuth. His research interests include: risk and disasters, society-environment relations (politics of climate change, environmental governance), political geography of Africa (violent conflict, territoriality, borders), migration and mobility.
John Effah
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-effah-phd-7352969/
Prof. John Effah holds a PhD in Information Systems. He lectures courses in E-Business, Information Management, Business Information Systems and Systems Analysis and Design at the MBA, MPhil and Executive MBA Levels. Prior to joining the University, he worked with Deloitte, a global Management Consulting and Accounting firm. Prof. Effah has extensive expertise in IT/IS practice and consulting and has a rich experience in managing both international and national ICT projects across the private as well as the public sector.
Syed Mohammed Faisal
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sussexasiacentre/people/associates/faisal
Dr Syed Mohammed Faisal is an anthropologist specialising in the study of exchange. He explored the commercial culture on the Coast of Karnataka, India and its historical roots in the Indian Ocean region. By looking at credit practices, marriage exchanges, economic significance of religious institutions the thesis argues that sources of belonging generated through kinship mutualities, religious networks, and the state are essential to ensure trust in bazaar and market exchanges. He is now engaged in developing a research project to understand the theological antecedents of the modern economic practices that looks at the role of religious ideas like prohibition of usury, institutions like the medieval era church based small-credit societies, the middle-eastern sunduq and invention of double-entry book-keeping in the making of modern ethic of welfare, charity, economy and accounting practices. He is interested in locating the role of transnational trade networks in the spread and felicitation of these practices. In parallel to this he is comparing the critique of colonialism and capitalism generated by the discipline of anthropology to Indo-Persian literature’s political-economic criticism of the Sultanate evident in the Akhlaq literature, Urdu poetry and mythology to conceptualise a probable alternative ethic of exchange.
Tom Fisher
https://privacyinternational.org/people/908/dr-tom-fisher
Tom is a Research Officer with Privacy International and is responsible for research and dissemination in the Global South. He leads our research on fintech and identity. He has a PhD in African Studies from the University of Edinburgh, exploring ethnicity and politics in East Africa. He has a MSc in African Studies fro the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in Politics and Philosophy from the University of York. He has taught in Tanzanian universities, and has a particular interest in developing robust and relevant research in the Global South.
Gus Hosein
https://privacyinternational.org/people/95/gus-hosein
Gus has worked at the intersection of technology and human rights for over twenty years. He developed national, regional, and global campaigns on communications privacy. He worked on national security and anti-terrorism policy, and led global advocacy against border registration, biometric collection, tracking of migration, travel profiling, and mass surveillance of financial data flows. He led research and co-authored a book on identity systems and policy, Global Challenges for Identity Policy. He founded regional and global networks of civil society organisations to work on technology and rights.
Alan Gelb
https://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 Economistfor the Africa Region. Priorto 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: seeHTTP://WWW.CGD. His most recent book, Identification Revolution (with Anna Diofasi Metz) was published in 2018.
Laura Goodwin
https://namati.org/network/member/lauragoodwin/
Laura Goodwin is Citizenship Program Director at Namati, a global legal empowerment organization dedicated to empowering people to understand, use, and shape the law. Namati's Citizenship Program works with communities who have citizenship in law, but in practice continue to face discrimination in attempts to access proof of nationality or related rights and services. Paralegals from these communities empower others to overcome discriminatory treatment to access legal identity documents and drive changes to the national legal framework on citizenship rights. Laura previously established and managed Namati’s Myanmar Program, which is primarily focused on land rights, and has other experience in human rights in the US and in Asia. Laura earned her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at The Fletcher School, where her studies focused on human rights law and human security.Laura is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Mia Harbitz
https://blogs.worldbank.org/team/mia-harbitz
Mia Harbitz was the lead specialist in identity management and registries in the Inter - American Development Bank (IADB) with over 25 years of experience in development projects. She coordinated IDBs activities in the area of identity management, including a series of studies assessing the practical implications of under-registration in Latin America. She has designed and managed several projects with the objective to modernize and stre ngthen 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. She has a background in engineering. Since 2015 Mia has been a consult ant to the World Bank for the Identification for Development Initiative.
Julia Harrington Reddy
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/people/julia-harrington-reddy
Julia Harrington Reddy is senior legal officer for equality and citizenship with the Open Society Justice Initiative. After graduation from law school, she was an echoing green fellow, working for two years as a legal officer at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Banjul, The Gambia.In 1997, Harrington Reddy co-founded and became executive director of the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, also based in The Gambia, which became a leader in human rights litigation in the African regional system. She and the co-founder of the Institute, Alpha Fall, won Ashoka fellowships for the Institute’s work. Harrington Reddy joined the Justice Initiative in 2003 and is based in the New York office.
Eve Hayes de Kalaf
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/staff/eve-hayes-de-kalaf/
Eve Hayes de Kalaf is a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool. She is a dual British-Dominican national with an extensive academic and professional background in Latin America and the Caribbean. Eve is particularly interested in how states are documenting and identifying populations and the impact of social policy practices on questions of race, citizenship and belonging. In 2016, Eve was awarded the David Nicholls Memorial Trust Prize for her research, and in 2018 she won the Guy Alexandre Prize for best paper at LASA in Barcelona. Eve recently wrote a chapter for the Routledge Studies in Latin American Development series entitled Welfare and Social Protection in Contemporary Latin America due to be published in April. Twitter: @EHayesdeKalaf
Marianne Henriksen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianne-henriksen-82077211/?originalSubdomain=no
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 theNorwegian 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.
Eddie Higgs
https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/higgs40206/edward-higgs
I started my career in 1978 as an archivist in the National Archives in London, where I curated British public records from the early medieval period through to the contemporary period. This also involved leading a team of civil servants ensuring that government departments were applying the laws relating to public access to records. I was latterly responsible there for looking at the issues around the management and archiving of digital records. I left the archives in 1993 to become a senior research fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Oxford, and I subsequently held academic posts at the Universities of Exeter and Essex, where I am now Professor in History. 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. More RecentlyI have written on the history of personal identification in England over the same period –frommedieval seals to biometrics.I am now also interested in how people read character from and into the faces of others, and how this might affect public and political understandings of biometric processes.
Eivind Hoffman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eivind-hoffmann-743b422a/
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 in October 2013 he has been working as an independent consultant for UDI and other Government agencies in Norway, as well as for IOM and ILO. In 2015 and 2016 he was supporting the Norwegian ID-centre’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 labour and environmental statistics from 1974.
Wendy Hunter
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/government/faculty/profile.php?id=hunterw1
Wendy Hunter studies Comparative Politics, with an emphasis on Latin American affairs. She has done in depth work on the military in Brazil and the Southern Cone, as well as research on social policy issues in Latin America, with special attention to the politics of education and health reform.She is the author of"The Transformation of the Workers' Party in Brazil, 1989–2009"(Cambridge University Press, 2010) and"Eroding Military Influence in Brazil: Politicians against Soldiers"(University of North Carolina Press, 1997), and has published articles in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, theAmerican Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and World Politics.
Deborah James
http://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/people/deborah-james
Deborah is a specialist in the anthropology of South and Southern Africa, and has recently begun research at some sites in the UK. Her work is broadly political and economic in focus. She is currently directing an ESRC-funded project entitled An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state. Her new book Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion—dubbed "banking the unbanked"—which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans. It shows the varied ways in which access to credit by people in these newly-included sectors of society is bound up with identity and status-making, and draws out the precarious nature of both the aspirations of upward mobility and the economic relations of debt which sustain the newly indebted, revealing the shadowy side of indebtedness and its potential both to produce new forms of oppression and disenfranchisement in place of older ones, while also helping realize projects of upliftment. It was one of the publications emerging from an ESRC-funded project entitled "Investing, engaging in enterprise, gambling and getting into debt: popular economies and citizen expectations in South Africa". Some of the other results were published in a special issue of Africa in 2012. A previous monograph, based on ESRC-funded research in 2002-3, shows how mutually constitutive discourses about the ownership, use, and governance of land reveal contradictory understandings of custom, community and citizenship:2007. Gaining ground? "Rights" and "property" in South African land reform. London: Routledge.
Bulelani Jili
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bulelani-jili-%E5%90%AF%E9%98%B3-a0366368/
Bulelani Jili is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University (U.S.). In 2018, he was a Derek Cooper Scholar at Cambridge University (UK). From 2016 to 2017, he was a Yenching Scholar at Peking University (CN). Under Prof. He Yafei, former Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Prof. Jiang Guo Hua, he studied Chinese geopolitical and economic strategies. Currently, he is working at WISER (Wits institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa) as a visiting researcher. Bulelani holds a MPhil from Cambridge University, M.A. in Economics from Peking University, and a B.A., honors, in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Wesleyan University (CT).
Amba Kak
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/academia/kaleidoscope/2017/Pages/Amba-Kak.aspx
Amba is a current Mozilla Tech Policy Fellow, former Google Policy Fellow, and a Rhodes Scholar. With Mozilla, Amba is studying how India’s experience protecting the open internet can inform global debates about privacy, security, digital inclusion, net-neutrality and other critical issues. Previously, she was a legal consultant at India’s National Institute of Public Finance & Policy, where she provided research inputs and legal advisory to governmental bodies on technology policy. Before that, at the Oxford Internet Institute she conducted research on user experience with zero-rated data plans in India and her thesis was awarded distinction. Amba has previously worked in advocacy for the National Campaign for People's Right to Information and served as legal researcher to two high-level committees constituted by the Indian government. Amba holds a degree in law from the National University of Juridical Science, Kolkata. She attended the University of Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship, where she completed a Bachelors in Civil Law as well as a Masters at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Jonathan Klaaren
https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/jonathan-klaaren
Jonathan Klaaren is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in the disciplines of human rights, law, and sociology and the fields of the legal profession, competition law and policy, and the regulation of identification. He has researched the current status and interaction of laws of migration, registration, identity, citizenship, privacy, and access to information throughout Southern Africa.
Andrew Kramer
https://twitter.com/andrewmkramer
Andrew is the digital identity project head in the Economic Justice Program at the Open Society Foundations. He leads the program’s work on embedding privacy, inclusion, and individual agency in the design, governance and implementation of digital identity systems. This program focuses on countering the threats these technologies pose to privacy rights and non-discrimination, and the opportunities they create for better fiscal governance and economic inclusion. Andrew has worked at the Open Society Foundations since 2016, when he joined as an advisor to Sean Hinton, CEO of the Soros Economic Development Fund and Co-director of the Economic Justice Program. He supported Sean in establishing the program, developing its first strategy, and executing the strategy in its first years. Prior to joining the Open Society Foundations, Andrew worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in London, a product manager at an educational technology startup in Berlin, and a teacher at a university in northern China. Andrew received a first-class degree in History from the University of Oxford.
Christian Lund
https://ifro.ku.dk/english/staff/?pure=en/persons/212312
Christian Lund is professor at the University of Copenhagen. He is the editor and author of Law Power and Politics in Niger(Lit Verlag, 1998), Twilight Institutions(Blackwell, 2006), Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa (Cambridge, 2008), andhe is currently working on Nine-Tenths of the Law. Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia. (clund@ifro.ku.dk)
Cláudio Machado Cavalcanti
https://contactout.com/Claudio-Machado-10841299
Cláudio has been working as a consultant in Brazil and in African Lusophones countries since 2014 on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS), Identity Management, Services Delivery and IT Interoperability. From 2004 to 2014, he worked in Brazilian federal government at the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Planning and the IT public company for Social Protection (Dataprev). Previously, he worked at local level government and IT private companies.Cláudioholds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and MBAs in Public Policy Management and IT Strategic Management. As part of the team of APAI-‐CRVS Cláudiohas been contributing to the improvement of the methodology of the programme by supporting the adoption of Business Process Management(BPM) approach.Independently Cláudiohas been researching the history of the institutionalization of Civil Registration and Civil Identity in Brazil and Latin America, focused on it impacts in the process towards the establishment of citizenship. Cláudio is also interested in Digital Governance and Open Data as a tool to transform public governance.
Bronwen Manby
http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/human-rights/people/profiles/bronwen-manby
Bronwen Manby is an independent consultant and teaching and research fellow at the London School of Economics, previously working for the Open Society Foundations and Human Rights Watch. She has written widely on human rights, democracy and good governance in Africa and has spent more than a decade focusing on statelessness and the right to nationality, with ongoing work for the Open Society Foundations, for UNHCR and IOM and others. Among her publications is a comprehensive comparative analysis of Africa’s nationality laws, Citizenship Law in Africa: A Comparative Study (the 3rd edition was published by OSF in 2016). Her book,Citizenship in Africa: The law of belonging, based on a doctorate awarded by Maastricht University in 2015, will be published in 2018. She is involved in ongoing advocacy for respect for the right to a nationality in Africa, including the strengthening of continental norms and standards.
Silvia Masiero
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/staff/silvia-masiero/
Dr Silvia Masiero is a Lecturer in International Development at the School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University. Her research focuses on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the field of socio-economic development. In particular, she studies the multiple forms of embeddedness of the IT artefact in development policy and governance, with a specific interest in its participation in the politics of anti-poverty programmes. Her current work revolves around the role of digital technologies in reshaping the politics of the Public Distribution System (PDS), the biggest food security scheme in India. Silvia holds a PhD Information Systems from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a MSc Development Management from the same institution. She is also a member of the LSE Conflict Research Group, where she pursues a parallel research stream on the use of ICTs in the management of complex humanitarian emergencies.
Alenka Prvinsek Persoglio
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alenka-prvinsek-persoglio-1181b677/?originalSubdomain=at
Alenka Prvinsek Persoglio is a lawyer, international expert in nationality law, law on civil status and migration. She is Slovenian citizen with residence in Vienna, Austria.She started her career in 1980 in the field of nationality and civil status; in 1994 she took over the Heading of the Slovenian Department for Civil status and Nationality in the Ministry of Internal Affairs; since 2001 to 2004 she acted as under/secretary of the State for Nationality and Migration.In Council of Europe she was active as expert since 1994 onward, she participated in preparation of legal opinion on harmonisation of national legislation on citizenship with European Convention on Nationality of numerous States; apart from expert work in Council of Europe, she participated in drafting of the new law on citizenship of UAE; she also took a part in preparation of the European Convention on Nationality, and later, from 2001 to 2003, chaired the working party of the Committee of experts on nationality including preparations of the Convention on the avoidance of statelessness in relation to state succession. By the end of 2004 she joined International Centre for Migration Policy Development in Vienna,has been seconded as Director of the only intergovernmental regional organization of the Western Balkans (MARRIRC -‐Migration, Asylum, Refugees Regional Centrein Skopje); in May 2007 she rejoined the International Centre for Migration Policy Development as Senior Policy Advisor where she worked until 2013. Ms. Prvinsek Persoglio is one of the four cofounders, Vice Presidents of Interact4C, International Association Connecting Technologies For Citizens, an international NGO with its seat in Brussels.
Anna Rader
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-rader-8bb8075/
From 2014-16, I was a teaching assistant at SOAS, University of London, where I led the tutorials for 'Government and Politics in Africa' (PG), 'The State and Politics in Africa' (UG) and 'Introduction to Political Analysis' (UG), and covered all related coursework including marking.I passed my doctoral viva in December 2015. My doctoral research was on practices and forms of identification in Somaliland, with a particular focus on the development of ID cards, including voter cards. My research used political ethnography, particularly interviews and participant observation, to explore 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. The thesis interrogated notions of ‘vouching’ as a way of understanding contemporary civic practices in Somaliland, and included an investigation into the voter registration process of 2008–10. I completed seven months' fieldwork, principally in Hargeisa, in 2012-14, conducting over 100 in-depth interviews with a range of government officials, community activists, journalists and local informants. I passed my doctoral viva in December 2015.Prior to the PhD, I was Editor of the RUSI Journal, the leading defence and security publication from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. I have also worked in political programming at the New Statesman and in social communications and CSR.I have acted as anelection observer in Somaliland in 2012 and 2016, and South Sudan in 2010; and also worked for UN-Habitat in Hargeisa, Somaliland as a communications consultant in 2013.
Ursula Rao
https://ethno.gko.uni-leipzig.de/index.php/research-staff/academic-staff/ursula-rao
Ursula Rao is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. She is head of the Department of Anthropology and Deputy Head of the Collaborative Research Centre “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”. Her current research focuses on e-‐governance and the social consequences of biometric technology in India. She is completing a manuscript on “Biometric Futures. Rescaling governance through new bodily disciplines”. In the past, Ursula Rao has also written in Hindi-‐and English journalism, urban space and ritual theory. Her regional focus is India. Before joining the University of Leipzig, Ursula Rao held academic positions at the University of Heidelberg (1999-‐2002), the University of Halle (2002-‐2006) and the University of New South Wales, Sydney (2007-‐2012).
Emrys Schoemaker
https://www.cariboudigital.net/advisor/emrys-schoemaker/
Emrys Schoemakerrecently completed a PhD at the LSE on Identity and Social Media in Pakistan, and is currently a researcher with Caribou Digital, a boutique consultancy company focusing on the use of digital technologies for development in emerging economies. He is at present working on understanding user experiences of Digital Identity in India, focusing on Aadhaar as well as other forms of identity credentials such as social media.
Ornit Shani
https://ornitshani.wordpress.com/
My new book, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 (Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2018), explores the making of the universal franchise and the rapid institutionalisation of democracy in India between 1947-1950. It is the first historical study of the biggestexperiment invoterregistration. It tells the story of the making of the Indian electorate, the registration of voters, through the preparation of the first draft electoral roll for the first elections under universal franchise. The work was done in anticipation of the drawing up of the Indian constitution. Putting adult suffrage into practice at independence against the partitionof the subcontinent, and ultimately enrolling over 173 million people, 49 per cent of the country’s population at the time, a vast majority of whom were poor and illiterate, was the greatest experiment of its kind in the history of democracy. Drawing on original materials, I show how in the process of making the universal franchise, people, often of modest means, were a driving force in institutionalising democratic citizenship as they struggled for their democratic voting rights and debated it with bureaucrats at various levels. I argue, thus, that in India the institutionalisation of electoral democracy preceded in significant ways the deliberative process, and that ordinary people had a significant role in establishing democracy in India at its inception. By the time the constitution came into force in January 1950, the abstract notion of the universal franchise and the principles and practices of electoral democracy were already grounded.My current research project, ‘Embedding Democracy: the Social History of India’s First Elections’is a sequel to my book on the making of the universal franchise. Itaims to explain how democracy was embedded in India through an analysis of the critical period from the enactment of the constitution in 1950 until after the first elections, which took place between October 1951 and February 1952. It seeks to analyse the role played by India’s first elections in making the notion of the rule of the peoplesufficiently credible to be embedded and sustained in the new Indian polity in the face of the adverse circumstances that prevailed in the country at the time of independence. One objective of the research is to examinethe design of electoral technologies and procedures of registration and identification as a mediating tool of access to democratic elections and popular authorisation.Ornit Shani is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Haifa. She is a scholar of the politics and modern history of India.https://ornitshani.wordpress.com
Ranjit Singh
Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University. His dissertation project examines the legal, administrative, and technological challenges in the implementation of India’s biometrics-‐based national identification project, Aadhaar. Ranjit is also involved in making a documentary film on the conceptualization, design, and implementation of an updated version of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, India. Both of these projects are geared towards elucidating the rapidly changing understandings, practices, and evaluations of the state-‐citizen relationship mediated by information infrastructures. Ranjit recently co-‐organized two panels at the 4S Conference in Boston with Michelle Spektor-‐Beyond Identification: Biometrics and Everyday Life and Beyond Identification: Biometrics and the State).
Simon Szreter
https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/prof-simon-szreter
My publications in this area 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.
Alena Thiel
https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/team/thiel
Alena is a Research Fellow at GIGA Hamburg, in addition to being affiliated to the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen, which also hosted research on transnational flows and translations of ordering ideas in urban entrepreneurs' claims-‐making vis-‐à-‐vis government officials. Having carried out over 30 months of fieldwork in Ghana over the years, I could not escape becoming interested in the very omnipresent topic of biometric identity registration in the country. My theoretical interest is above all in transnational policy mobility in this field, projections of development and modernity, but also the ways in which such fundamental technological transformationsimpact the relationship between citizens and their political communities. If you need further details, please do not hesitate to ask.
Jaap van der Straaten
https://blogs.worldbank.org/team/jaap-van-der-straaten
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),
Ian Watson
https://www.ntnu.no/ansatte/ian.watson
Ian Watson has published an in-‐depth study of national identification numbers in Iceland, which has one of the world’s most open and widely-‐used personal numbering systems. For many years he has been interestedin the broader topic of everyday-‐life numbering systems and their administration. Ian has worked in genealogy for three decades, both as an amateur and a professional, and is interested in the history of civil registration and in records accessibility. Heis an associate professor at Gjøvik University College in Norway, where he teaches information architecture to media design students. Before coming to Gjøvik he spent ten years as a teacher and administrator at Bifröst University in Iceland. His original training is in linguistics (A.B., Harvard) and the study of standardization and convention (Ph.D., Rutgers).
Keren Weitzberg
https://www.kerenweitzberg.com/
Keren Weitzberg is a researcher and educator with extensive, on-the-ground expertise in East Africa. She has a PhD from Stanford University and has worked and taught at the University of Pennsylvania and, now, University College London. Working at the intersection of migration studies, critical race studies, and science and technology studies (STS), Keren examines problematics related to mobility, border-crossing, race-making, and biometrics. She has over a decade of experience carrying out archival research, fieldwork, and interviews in East Africa and collaborating with African scholars and practitioners. Over the years, she has honed a deep expertise based, in large part, upon listening to people. Keren's first book, We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya, provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, refugee movements, and urban-rural migration and offers timely insights into the ways in which transnational populations navigate state borders. It draws from extensive archival research and over one hundred interviews that she conducted in Somali, Swahili, and English in Nairobi and the Kenya/Somali borderlands. Nominated for the African Studies Association’s 2018 Melville J. Herskovits Prize, We Do Not Have Borders asks: Why have Somalis, who have lived within the borders of the country for generations, come to be thought of as only questionably indigenous to Kenya? Keren has also published in The American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, and the Journal of Northeast African Studies.
Edgar Whitley
http://www.lse.ac.uk/management/people/academic-staff/ewhitley
Edgar is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the LSE. Edgar has a BSc (Econ) and PhD in Information Systems, both from the LSE. He is the co-editor of Information Technology and People, Senior Editor for the Journal of Information Technology and the AIS Transactions of Replication Research and an Associate Editor for the Journal of the AIS. He has served as research co-chair for the European Conference on Information Systems, track co-chair for the International Conference on Information Systems and was previously an associate editor for the European Journal of Information Systems and MIS Quarterly. Edgar was the research coordinator of the influential LSE Identity Project on the UK’s proposals to introduce biometric identity cards; proposals that were scrapped following the 2010 General Election. His book with Gus Hosein Global Challenges for Identity Policies was published by Palgrave in 2010. Edgar has also advised governments in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, India, Jamaica, Japan and Mexico about the political, technological and social challenges of effective identity policies. He has contributed to reports for the World Bank, Omidyar Network and Centre for Global Development. Edgar is co-chair of the UK Cabinet Office Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group and is a member of the ESRC Administrative Data Research Network: Information Assurance Expert Group.