Since the 1990s, biometric companies have become intermediaries in the identification of citizens across the world. While working in support to the national sovereignty of individual states, the companies develop IT systems both to protect the borders of Western countries and to produce civil registries, national identity documents, and manage elections in postcolonial states. How has the biometrics industry come to specialize in both security and citizenship practices? What role do colonial relations play in the emergence of this shared infrastructure? Whereas existing scholarship reads the industry growth as a consequence of the 1990s/2000s “migration crisis” and “war on terror”, two early biometric computer projects launched in 1970s/1980s for civil purposes – one in Senegal to produce an electoral roll and one in Cameroon to create a national ID database – rebuild the link between the industry and colonial moment. The arrival, in the second half of the twentieth century, of independence from imperial rule and the subsequent extension of citizenship rights to postcolonial populations generated uses, and users) that enabled for criminal identification - to a new market (new production biometrics computers emerge as – at a technology for the contexts, clients, time conceived only ordinary citizens (civil biometrics). Biometric computers emerged from practices of digital value production rooted in postcolonial stateandcitizenship the other demandsofcolonial formations, and modernity (border only after that connected to control), gradually becoming the generic infrastructure for governing our shared postcolonial citizenship.
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.