Like many countries in the Global South, Sierra Leone has recently embarked on the biometric identification of its citizens and residents in the aim to achieve ‘legal identity for all’ (Sustainable Development Goal 16.9). Given their limited access to documentation, many people rely on self-reporting or recommendations in the registration process. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines the work of Justices of the Peace to deliver affidavits (documented oaths) as a central avenue for the biometric enrollment of undocumented, often-marginalized citizens in Sierra Leone’s civil register. Their case suggests that intermediaries between the digitizing state and citizens indeed work as ‘brokers of citizenship’, because beyond only certifying citizenship, their intermediation brings citizenship in four different meanings into being. They provide crucial orientation on the meaning of citizenship, fix citizens’ identities, perform their own understandings of citizenship with potentially exclusionary effects and distribute responsibility for citizenship claims along a wider citizenship infrastructure.
WISER Seminar Papers
- WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Monday afternoon from 16:00 - 17:00 SA time during the teaching semester. Forthcoming seminars are available here, and past events are detailed in our archive.
- Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
- Participants should please read the paper (below) prior to the seminar; it will typically be available by the Friday preceding the seminar.
In this semester, the Trust seminar will explore questions of credit and debt on the African continent. In contrast with the argument that trust and confidence are synonymous (most evident in the Edelman Trust Barometer and the reporting around it), some of the most convincing scholarship argues for the direct association of trust with credit. Other researchers, studying informal African institutions, have found credit everywhere on this continent, but little that can be associated with trust. Some state institutions (like SACCOs in Kenya) and simpler penalties, like efficient bankruptcy laws, seem also to be instrumental in shaping the politics of credit. One key driver of credit systems is a secondary market, which depends in part on institutions and information that derive from (and support) fiduciaries. These are especially important in the contemporary tensions between firm-based and individualised credit systems. The seminar series this semester will explore some of these dynamics, examining how they have shaped the cultures and politics of debt and credit from the precolonial to the contemporary period.
