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Paper short abstract

Digital ID systems promise to formalize state-citizen relations through computerized and standardized identification. Research in four countries shows that informal practices remain essential to digital ID operations. In so doing, revealing everyday material politics of citizenship.

Paper long abstract

Modern state rule relies on formalization: it renders society and nature legible through bureaucratic abstraction and impersonal procedures (Scott 1998; Weber 1968). Today, digital identity systems further formalize state-citizen relations through the utilization of computerized, standardized, and sometimes automated identification processes. Such systems are designed to minimize human discretions and tampering from influencing formal identification practices, processes, and decisions. Our ethnographic research on digital ID implementation in four countries, however, illustrates that informal practices are indispensable in the operation of digital ID infrastructures. This findings align with tradition that suggests the deep imbrication between informality and formal orders (Koster and Smart 2019; Scott 1998; Hart 1985). Informal practices that we are highlighting particularly emerge “in spite of” (Polese 2023; Polese et al. 2018) the state’s formalization project. These practices include peer-based digital mentorship in Estonia, electronic ID card street-side repair in Indonesia, frontline discretion as survival strategy in Malawi, and documentary brokerage in Sierra Leone.

We argue that examining the nesting of informal practices in digital ID infrastructures designed to further formalize state-citizen relations offers a productive entry point for analyzing material citizenship politics among de jure citizens. Here, citizenship politics does not manifest in ruptural pursuit for visibility or right-based contestations, but around pragmatic enactments of citizenship through everyday engagement with documents, devices, tools, and other humans.