CERTIZENS: Certifications of Citizenship in Africa

CERTIZENS GHANA

Kojo Opuku Aidoo (CERTIZENS Ghana Project Coordinator)
Certifications of Citizenship in Ghana: The National Arena

This project focuses on the inter-relatedness of historical and political dimensions of Ghana’s national citizenship certification regimes, which are traced from colonial through to post-colonial eras. It will address the ways in which changing political ideologies and governance types over time have affected the evolution of such regimes and their related policies and practices. The project is especially interested in how such systems have generated or denied the authenticity, eligibility and inclusion of citizens within various marginalized groups and among ethnicities that straddle the national borders.

PhD 1: Isaac Owusu Nsiah
Intimacies of Identification and Lived Citizenship Among the Fulani at Agogo                                                      

This research considers the interplay of formal national identification systems with intimacies, nuances, logics and dynamics of identification and lived citizenship, focusing on the experiences of Ghanaian Fulanis in the Ashanti Region. Firstly, it examines Fulanis’ engagement with official structures of identification, their experiences of recognition or denial related to specific IDs, and particular access barriers they face. Secondly, the project considers the implications of these experiences for their ‘lived citizenship’, including their everyday life, livelihoods, access to public services and resources, political participation, and property ownership.

PhD 2: Agnes Doe Agbanyo
The Dynamics, Bureaucracies and Practices and Certification in the Ghana-Togo Borderlands    

This study investigates the dynamics of citizen identification, registration and certification in relation to two different kinds of ID documents within the districts of Ketu South and Ketu North, located along the Ghana-Togo border, namely the Voter Identity Card and the Ghana Card. It will entail ethnographic studies of the relevant local bureaucracies on the one hand, and of diverse local citizens-as-ID-clients on the other. Exploring and comparing the meanings and value attributed to the respective ID cards at different moments, my project will ask: How do citizens navigate the relevant bureaucratic systems and processes in order to be certified as citizens? In doing so, how do they perform their own citizenship or membership of the state, and in turn how are they shaped by these encounters with its bureaucratic actors, practices and structures? Finally, what makes borderlands particular kinds of social and political administrative spaces with regard to certification, registration and identification?

CERTIZENS UGANDA

Godfrey B. Asiimwe (CERTIZENS Uganda Project Coordinator)
Certifications of Citizenship in Uganda: The Intimate Arena.  Interrogating governance and intimate implications of citizen certification in Uganda 

This project examines the relationship between Uganda’s national regime of citizen certification – with its hierarchical classification of citizenships – and the consequential intimacies of lived citizenship in practice among selected groupings of differently situated and formally differentiated citizens. It will explore both the possibilities and limits generated by tensions between forms of governing and forms of living, in relation to a given yet changing and uneven national context of certification.

Toke Møldrup Wolff (Project Researcher)
Certifications of Citizenship in Uganda: The Intermediate Arena

This project explores the ongoing transition from pre-existing technologies and logics, to emerging and increasingly digitalized infrastructures, of certification and ID management in Uganda, and their implications for state making and citizen making. It will focus especially on: a) the changing materiality and business of producing ID documents; b) the workings of selected bureaucracies of certification; and c) the state-citizen encounters within which registration, certification and documentation of citizens takes place.

PhD 2: Milcah Abasabyona 
Intimacies of Identification and Lived Citizenship Among the Ghetto Youths in Kampala 

This research project focuses on the experiences of ‘ghetto youth’ living mostly without legal forms of identification in a selection of Kampala’s poorest slums or informal settlements. Through an ethnography of those living as unregistered, unrecognized, and uncertified, the research investigates how young people find alternative ways to assert their personhood, a sense of belonging and citizenship in practice through informal or illicit forms of IDs, or ‘self-certification’. In addition, the project is interested in questions relating to how state identification and citizenship certification practices influence citizens' sense of belonging and purpose and their life trajectories.

PhD 1: Martin Buhamizo 
Bureaucracies of National Digitisation and Citizen Certification in Uganda 

Uganda, like many other countries on the African continent and elsewhere in recent years, has been engaged with introducing new digitised forms of registering, certifying and identifying its citizens. This research project investigates both the broader bureaucratic processes, practices and procedures involved in Uganda’s national certification and identification systems, and more specifically in their digitised forms, and the roles these systems play in both nation-building and state-making. Among other things, the project focuses on the implications of recently introduced digitisation technologies on the making and unmaking of differentiated citizens.

INTERNATIONAL POLICY PROJECT

Amanda Wendel Malm (PhD Researcher)
Certifications of Citizenship: the International Arena.  ‘Global’ ID policies as travelling models and their encounters in Ghana and Uganda

This project explores the formation and mobility of so-called ‘global’ citizenship identification, registration and certification policies and how these encounter, and are adapted (or not) locally within, national certification settings in Africa.  It focuses on the dynamics of policy processes and practices within and between various multilateral organizations promoting policies and strategies related to systems of identification and certification for development, and looks at how these travel and articulate with national governments and other relevant actors specifically in Uganda and Ghana.

OVERALL CERTIZENS COHERENCE, LEARNING AND EXCHANGE

Amanda Hammar (CERTIZENS Project Leader)

Key to the overall CERTIZENS Project is ensuring meaningful coherence in relation to its multiple arenas and elements, alongside intellectual openness and ongoing learning.  A core task of the Project Leader is to sustain an overview of all conceptual, methodological and empirical dimensions of the wider Project, make relevant analytical links between them, and support regular exchanges and cross-fertilisation both among all CERTIZENS researchers, and with scholars, policy makers and practitioners engaged with related work outside the CERTIZENS Project frame.