The Fabric of Statelessness

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 makes a further step on identification and citizenship by focusing on rural communities displaced from Haute Volta in the 1930s and settled in ‘colonial villages’ in central Côte d’Ivoire. It asks how and why an old local issue of citizenship and documents came to be recast in terms of the ‘risk of statelessness’ by the government and international organizations. Despite their legal recognition as national citizens, these people were kept in a liminal status of juridical exception and political dependence from the ruling party. The chapter recalls their historical discrimination and their struggle for ‘papers’. It shows that neither the civil registration nor biometric reforms have radically altered their documentary insecurity and the old stereotypes that continue to structure national belonging. Far from reducing the risks of statelessness, the chapter concludes by assuming that new technologies of identification may even pave the way for its digital consolidation.