Bhalisa 6 | The politics of Intermediation in the building of digital identification systems | Temple Campus Rome, July 9 - 10, 2026

Call for Paper Proposals from Bhalisa members 

Please submit proposals to this Google Form.

Deadline :  February 20, 2026

Economists have long been concerned with the effects of market intermediaries on the efficient circulation of goods and services, and much of the policy impetus behind centralised biometric identification and payment systems in poorer countries has been driven by a desire to eliminate “intermediating dealers.” A similar logic has been applied to the forgers and fixers who have historically provided access to paperwork for many people living in the former colonial world. Biometric identification systems are explicitly designed to exclude such actors, even in cases where no fraud is intended or carried out.

At the same time, very large-scale systems—such as Aadhaar, M-Pesa, or Fayda—often rely heavily on subcontracted private agents who are paid per registration event. These agents play a crucial role in resolving the many small technical and bureaucratic breakdowns that accompany mass registration programmes. When applications for identity registration are blocked—whether on an individual basis or through large-scale identity-blocking initiatives—affected individuals frequently turn to NGOs, community-based organisations, public-interest law firms, tribal authorities, guilds and trade unions, and even political parties in their efforts to secure redress from intransigent and under-resourced bureaucracies. Intermediaries are also well positioned to defraud people or to exploit their privileged access to private data stored in bulk.

These non-state intermediaries operate in fluid and plural capacities that can also be understood as a form of outsourced operations attached to society-scale digital infrastructure. This is especially evident where such actors are pressed into the often uncompensated service of “inclusion” mandates promoted by multilateral agencies and development finance institutions, operating alongside more conventional forms of direct service provision. At a higher policy level, perhaps as a hedge against past failures and scandals, advocates increasingly stress abstract forms of governance—such as holding environments, multistakeholder mechanisms, and impact assessments—that obscure the problem of who administers redress and how.

The absence, criminalisation, or delegitimation of intermediaries can be decisive in shaping the large-scale political effects of any digital identification project. Similarly, the effective operation of even a robust privacy protection regime often depends on the availability and affordability of private legal representation. Where states move to restrict such representation or limit access to court remedies—as in India’s Digital Personal Data Act or South Africa’s Ministerial Task Team on Home Affairs—they remove critical instruments through which ordinary people contest mass exclusion or routine bureaucratic harms. Comparable processes of disintermediation, often justified in the name of privacy protection, are also implied in the enthusiasm for technical self-sovereignty embedded in the design of decentralised digital wallets.

Digital identification and registration systems are increasingly designed to standardise identification, automate access to rights and entitlements, and minimise the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats and senior officials in administrative encounters and decision-making procedures. The user interfaces of these systems typically prescribe tightly ordered steps that must be followed meticulously to complete registration and verification processes. In practice, however, frontline staff and senior back-office officials frequently develop creative tactics and informal practices to retain discretionary authority—and, in some cases, opportunities for additional income. Moreover, informal practices and discretionary judgement are often essential to making registration systems function at all in moments of failure, friction, or breakdown. Rather than being eliminated, informality and discretion are therefore renegotiated and reconfigured within digital identification regimes.

The presence, authority, and capacities of intermediaries can thus be said to determine much of the politics of biometric population registration. We invite papers that examine these dynamics from a wide range of perspectives.