The Difference that Difference Makes

The Difference that Difference Makes: Classification, Certification and the Politics of IDs in Africa. Public Inaugural professorial lecture by Amanda Hammar.

This lecture takes as its starting point the assertion that difference always matters. When, where and how differences are constructed and institutionalized, by whom, raises key questions about the nature of power within relationships at multiple scales and levels: not least, the relationship between states and citizens. In this lecture, I explore some of the ways in which social, political, cultural and economic categories and classifications of hierarchised differences get constructed, articulated, bureaucratized and contested within national and local regimes of certification and identification, drawing on selected African settings. I am especially interested in how the meanings and manifestations of difference shift continually and contextually, and in what work ‘difference’ does – both conceptually and empirically, explicitly and implicitly – in the simultaneous and always relational processes of citizen making and state making.