ID Wars in Côte d'Ivoire. Interview with Richard Banégas and Armando Cutolo
While it is well acknowledged that identity documents provide rights to citizenship and social inclusion, they can also generate violence and conflicts. In their recently published book entitled ID Wars in Côte d'Ivoire. A Political Ethnography of Identification and Citizenship (Oxford University Press), Richard Banégas and Armando Cutolo explore Côte d'Ivoire's 'ID war' as a paradigmatic case of a citizenship crisis, centered on the access to national identity cards and certificates. They answer our questions in this interview.
Can you remind us of the general context of what you call the Ivorian ID war, and what special status the national identity card held in this conflict?
The war that broke out in Côte d'Ivoire in September 2002 and officially ended in April 2011 with Alassane Ouattara's victory was described as an "identification war", a "war for papers", by the rebels who took up arms against Laurent Gbagbo's regime. They demanded full recognition for citizens from the north of the country, who were violently discriminated against. The radicalisation of the ethnonationalist ideology of "Ivoirité" under Bédié's regime in the 1990s, the excesses of the junta that constitutionally enshrined this "Ivoirité" in 2000, and the Gbagbo government's questioning of civil status and identification in the name of autochthony ignited a powder keg of identity issues. These events reshuffled the national question in Côte d'Ivoire.
The conflict, however, was not limited to this dimension alone. It was largely constructed as a justification by rebels who had other political and economic power objectives. Nonetheless, the national identity card held a particular status: it was not just a legal identification document. Possessing or lacking it determined one’s civic inclusion or exclusion from the national community. It was also seen as an object one needed to be socially recognised as a legitimate subject in Ivorian society, where certain segments of the population were deemed to have "suspicious nationality".
Our book studies the genealogy of this crisis and the politicisation of "papers" in Côte d'Ivoire's history, which from the 1960s to the 1990s was built on a form of informal documentation. This reflected a kind of economic citizenship, where immigrants in particular were included in the single party's patronage networks. The opening to multiparty politics and the economic crisis of the 1990s radicalised the debates on national belonging, excluding entire segments of the population in the name of an ethnonationalist concept of citizenship. This was symbolized by the ideology of "Ivoirité", developed by President Henri Konan Bédié for political reasons, notably to exclude Alassane Ouattara from power.
National suspicion materialised in identity documents, which acquired a totemic status in public debate. The politicisation of identity papers intensified further after General Gueï's coup in December 1999 and Laurent Gbagbo's rise to power in October 2000. Gbagbo sought to overhaul civil status and identification based on an even more autochthonous perspective. During the decade of war, all peace negotiations prominently featured the issue of papers as a solution to end the crisis, albeit unsuccessfully. After the conflict, in 2011, Ouattara's government initiated reforms with significant support from donors and multinational corporations to address the identity issue.
Post-war Côte d'Ivoire presented itself as a vast "identity adjustment plan" under the influence of new biometric technologies, which were touted as a panacea to solve civil status deficiencies, prevent conflicts, and promote development, with the clear intention of depoliticising the issue. Our book challenges this technopolitical narrative of post-conflict liberal emergence, revisiting the war and post-war periods by considering identity papers as empirical and analytical tools for a better understanding of citizenship.
But beware! The title of the book, ID Wars, is plural because our work is not limited to the crisis and armed conflict that lasted about ten years. Beyond this "war for papers", the book also focuses on everyday battles for identification at civil registry counters, as well as the mundane and daily struggles of ordinary citizens to obtain their identity documents, status, and recognition.
You understand the notion of citizenship above all as a principle underpinning social struggles for inclusion and recognition. What does it mean to be a citizen in Côte d’Ivoire?
Our book starts from the idea that the conflict experienced by Côte d’Ivoire was, first and foremost, a crisis of citizenship centred on the question "Who is Ivorian and who is not, or not entirely?" "What is the nation, and who belongs to it?" It was a conflict over the rights conferred by holding identity papers, which involved two radically opposed conceptions of citizenship: one open and cosmopolitan, inheriting a long history of inclusion of "foreigners" into the plantation economy and the patronage networks of the party-state, and the other based on a political ideology of autochthony, which also draws on the long-term history of colonial and postcolonial times.
This opposition has structured political debates and shaped representations of national belonging since before independence. This history is fairly well known. What remained unknown was the documentary materialisation of these antagonistic conceptions of citizenship. Our book fills this gap by linking the socio-political history of individual and collective identities to their material expression in “papers” and identification devices (dispositifs in the Foucauldian sense). We show that the legal identification of citizens is embedded in a “practical sense” of community identities, inherited from the colonial “ethnographer state” (Chauveau and Dozon 1987), which has profoundly marked the imagination of the nation. This practical sense, which is fairly widely shared, goes beyond the rules of law and determines common representations of citizenship according to certain ethno-regional stereotypes. “Among ourselves, we know each other”, people generally say, half-heartedly, to signify who is an Ivorian citizen and who is not. This extension of the principle of local inter-knowledge to the scale of the nation continues to mark the practical norms of legal identification, even in the era of biometrics, which is supposed to depoliticise and de-socialise individual identities. This contributes to the mechanisms of exclusion that we are studying, for example, in the case of people of Voltaic origin, known as people “at risk of statelessness”, who have lived in the vicinity of the town of Bouaflé since the 1930s.
You write that the book examines citizens' relationship with their papers in Côte d’Ivoire, as a way to revisit the issues of citizenship and identification from a broader comparative perspective. Can you tell us in a few words about your comparative analytical findings?
We believe one of the major findings of our research is that we have investigated the tension between reform and modernisation projects related to population registration, which are currently transforming the citizenship infrastructures of several African countries, and the reality of local identification systems for individuals. In Côte d’Ivoire, as we have shown, the identification of individuals still fits into a chain of social relations and spaces of belonging—especially community-based—that largely determine the (re)cognition of a person. This social construction of identities, which in itself is relatively common, takes place here within a particular political history that, since the colonial period, has classified citizens into a culturalist and hierarchical representation of the communities to which they are supposed to belong. In fact, this classification resists reforms through practical norms and informal arrangements, social intermediaries, and brokerage practices that demonstrate the undeniable ability of social actors to adapt, but especially to "heteronomically" appropriate, so to speak, new technologies.
The reforms related to registration and identification are often based on biometric technologies that assign a unique identifying number to each citizen. These tend to isolate the individual from the social coordinates that are instead used by the documentary state: names, kinship relations (parentage, marriage), place of birth, place of residence, etc. By identifying the individual through their body (by coding their fingerprints, iris, etc.), biometric technology seeks to do away with these elements of social recognition found on "papers". Thus, hyper-individualised, the citizen would now find themselves isolated in their direct relationship with the state, the only entity authorised to recognise them. However, we have shown how in Côte d'Ivoire, the recognition mechanisms operating daily tactically take hold of biometric identity to serve specific social purposes—for instance, managing to associate a false name with a biometric template, which, although digital, must be paired with a "written" civil identity to function in ordinary social life.
Thus, we have demonstrated—and this appeared very important to us in the context of biometric reforms that many African countries are currently experimenting with—that the documentary state does not really disappear in the face of the biometric state. The polarity between these two logics, while useful at a theoretical and conceptual level, should not be viewed as a historical teleology, because the strategies of social life, along with the relative autonomy of African societies, generate lines of escape that are undetermined and unpredictable. We sought to highlight some of these through our ethnographic research. For example, in the registration offices of the metropolis of Abidjan, the small commune of Bouaflé, or in the rural context of the Anno region.
How have you worked together for this book, knowing that the issue of citizenship and identification has been a long-term research focus for both of you? Can you give us more information about your methodology?
This book is indeed the product of a long collaboration and an intellectual friendship that began in the mid-2000s when we were both working on the military-political crisis, particularly on the "patriotic galaxy" of pro-Gbagbo militants and militias. Throughout all these years of fieldwork during the war (and even before, during the time of "Ivoirité"), we had already begun to reflect on these issues of identity papers and citizenship, which were at the heart of the conflict. We had already collected many archives, testimonies, and ethnographic observations, which we have remobilised for this book. Notably, in the patriotic "agoras" and "street parliaments", where we gathered numerous speeches and observed the public staging of this "war over identity papers" (Cutolo and Banégas 2012).
This book is therefore the result of our long engagement with the Ivorian "crisis", which, by its very nature, imposed on us this combined issue of identification and citizenship. But it is also, and above all, the product of a large collective research project, mentioned earlier, on "The Social and Political Life of Papers in Africa", which, over five years, brought together around fifteen researchers—historians, political scientists, anthropologists—working in about a dozen African countries. A collective book, two journal issues (Awenengo and Banégas 2018; Awenengo, Banégas, and Cutolo 2018; Awenengo and Banégas 2021), numerous articles, a photo exhibition, and a web series were produced within the framework of this project, which deeply nourished the present book on Côte d’Ivoire.
Our methodological approach is rooted in a perspective of political sociology and anthropology, attentive to the historicity of social facts, but also to the contingency of political struggles, which often produce unexpected or paradoxical outcomes. For example, the peace negotiations that took the form of an interminable standoff—"arms for papers" (chapter 4)—led to reducing the question of citizenship to its electoral dimension alone, in ways that intriguingly reversed democratic theory. We paid close attention to these twists of history and the ambivalence of the reforms undertaken before and after the war to secure identities using biometrics. As we walked the sidewalks of the courthouse alongside the "margouillats", those informal intermediaries in the civil registration system, we discovered that these new technologies, far from eradicating fraud, could sometimes reinforce the use of fake papers by embedding them into the new biometric databases.
Our research also favoured a "politics from below" approach, attentive to the "social life of papers", allowing us to step away from the state-centred perspective that often characterises work on the identification of people. Of course, we also approach this from "above", as a technology of power, especially in chapters 2, 3, and 4, where we examine how controversies surrounding the mechanisms of the documentary state shaped the boundaries of the national imagination and the mechanisms of civic inclusion and exclusion. Our investigations certainly did not ignore the central administrative levels and their local branches, where we conducted numerous interviews and observations, including in police stations, town halls, sub-prefectures, and other administrative services, to observe the issuance of papers at the "counter". This book is thus also, in some respects, a contribution to the long-standing debate on the state in Africa, renewed here by the global context of e-government and digital capitalism.
In truth, readers will quickly realise that we spent more time investigating in the world of the "veranda" than in the world of the "air conditioner", to borrow the famous metaphor by Emmanuel Terray, who distinguished between the real political world of networks and social relations and the official institutional space. It was mainly in the streets and from the grassroots that we approached these issues of citizenship and the identification of individuals. Many interviews were conducted with ordinary citizens to understand their difficulties in obtaining "papers", to grasp the importance and meaning they attached to these processes, and more broadly, their uses of documents. We also followed some through their administrative "battle" to obtain a certificate of nationality. In total, more than 2,000 pages of interviews were transcribed and analysed for the writing of this book, which also drew from a significant body of archival material, primary sources (both public and private), and numerous ethnographic observations. Finally, through photography, we paid attention to the materiality of identity documents, notably by collecting self-produced cards made by social actors themselves to assert their membership in a group and claim their citizenship. These practices of self-registration are analysed as "bureaucratic writings of the self", in reference to a famous article by Achille Mbembe, which we revisited with a nod alongside Sévérine Awenengo.
Can you tell us a bit about the book’s general structure?
Our book addresses the issues of identification and citizenship from a broad comparative perspective, allowing us to situate the Ivorian experience within the global context of the “biometric turn” that has affected the world, particularly the African continent, since the 2000s. Chapter 1 outlines this comparative analytical framework and the main hypotheses guiding our reflection. The following three chapters delve into the historical specificity of the Ivorian "paper war". Rather than a linear narrative of the country’s identification policies since the colonial period, they offer a genealogy of the citizenship crisis, which crystallised in the armed conflict of the 2000s, and the post-war solutions proposed to resolve it.
In this genealogy, five historical configurations are distinguished, each materialising in a specific identification system (understood—in the Foucauldian sense—as a set of technical and legal provisions, bureaucratic practices, as well as ideological and moral representations that, at certain moments in history, impose themselves as regimes of identity verification). The first three forms of governance by paperwork are studied in Chapter 2, which shows how an economic conception of citizenship, based on documentary informality, became politicised and radicalised under the influence of "Ivoirité" and a nativist conception of nationality, aimed at imposing legal identification systems rooted in ancestral land. It was against these nativist identification systems that the 2002 rebellion officially rose. Chapter 3, which is dedicated to this topic, explains how, during the conflict, Laurent Gbagbo’s government lost its monopoly over national identification policy to the rebellion and to increasing international interference, which brought the issue of paperwork to the centre of peace negotiations. Papers were then negotiated in exchange for the laying down of arms in a politico-military standoff that produced paradoxical results. Chapter 4 examines a fifth configuration: the regime of Ouattara, which, in the post-conflict reconstruction context, sought to depoliticise the identity question and implement civil registration and biometric identification reforms in support of its neoliberal “emergence” project. A detailed examination of these reforms, particularly the creation of a unique identification number, reveals the ambivalences and uniqueness of the Ivorian trajectory toward biometric identities. Notably, it highlights the ironic “revenge” of civil registration over new technologies.
The following chapters shift in scale and observation space to analyse these identification issues. Chapter 5 moves between the micro-local sphere of the so-called "Voltaic colonisation" villages near Bouaflé and the transnational space of the "undocumented" cause to recount how, under the influence of the UNHCR and a few ministerial advisers from Ouattara’s government, citizens who had been established in Côte d’Ivoire for decades came to be reclassified as "persons at risk of statelessness". It shows that their documentary uncertainty is rooted in a singular history of "colonial natives" and argues that biometric reforms could paradoxically exacerbate their "risk of statelessness". Chapter 6, meanwhile, navigates between the top-down and bottom-up dynamics of legal identification, focusing on the production and use of "fake papers"—or “real-fake papers”—in social life. It invites the reader to journey between two time-spaces of what we conceptualise as a moral economy of identification: first, on the sidewalks of the Abidjan Palace of Justice, alongside the "margouillats", intermediaries who operate between the administration and citizens to "get papers", including nationality certificates known as “kamikaze papers”. Then, in the intimacy of rural families in the Anno region, where, by observing the intrafamily use of certain forged civil status papers, the famous "René Cailliés", we attempt to understand the practical sense of legal identities and their social significance in a moral economy that shapes the ordinary relations between citizens and the state—whether documentary or biometric.
Finally, in a seventh concluding chapter, we shift the focus even further downward, examining identity documents self-produced by social actors within their various collective engagements: cards for Dozo militias, certificates for demobilised combatants, registration cards for victims of an ecological scandal, political party cards, pro-Gbagbo patriotic agora cards or pro-Ouattara grin cards, membership cards of a rural region, or cards for a union or church, among others. We argue that these material identity traces constitute bureaucratic writings of the self and instruments for claiming rights, demonstrating the deep social embeddedness of the state’s documentary reason and its biometric extension. These moral credit cards, in the end, provide us with keys to reconsider the dyadic oppositions of the documentary state and the biometric state, reframing them within a complex triangulation of identification, debt, and recognition.
Interview by Miriam Périer
Pictures by Richard Banégas
