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Paper short abstract

Analyzing UK and Caribbean Digital ID programmes, we expose how official empowerment narratives conceal agendas of control and colonialism. Disregarding inclusion and equality goals, Digital ID systems co-produce digital authoritarianism, serving surveillance capitalism over human development.

Paper long abstract

As Digital ID systems become a global standard, they are frequently promoted through optimistic official narratives of efficiency, safety, and transformation. Reimagining development in an uncertain world requires that we interrogate whether these technologies foster genuine digital citizenship or co-produce new forms of digital authoritarianism. This paper critically examines this tension through a comparative analysis of two distinct case studies: the United Kingdom’s proposed "Brit ID", and the push for digital identity across the Caribbean.

We argue that official government Digital ID discourses conceal ‘untold narratives’ of control, colonialism, and structural exclusion. Juxtaposing UK’s history of resistance to forms of ID and its recent failures with digital-only visas against the Caribbean’s reliance on externally driven development, integration and harmonization agendas (Grubb et al. 2024), we expose how lived realities often contradict policy goals. Therefore, Digital ID initiatives appear better explained by neoliberal logics of algorithmic power, profit, and colonialism (Bloom, 2017; Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Zheng et al., 2018) than by their explicit rhetoric. Furthermore, in both contexts, these systems disproportionately fail the most vulnerable, often exacerbating their marginalisation rather than alleviating it.

Theoretically grounded in concepts of technocolonialism (Madianou, 2019) and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2023), our analysis suggests that these programmes reconfigure citizens as subjects of extraction rather than agents of development, creating mechanisms of "structural (dis)empowerment" (Mariën and Prodnik, 2014, p. 35). We contend that the current trajectory of Digital ID actively reinforces colonial-style dependencies and entrenches new infrastructures for surveillance and geopolitical control.