Between Belonging and Individuating: Data, Identification, Diaspora
My name is Emnet. This is how I usually share who I am while I am here in my far-away home in North America.
If we were in Ethiopia, I would probably tell you that my full name is Emnet Tsige-Himanute Tafesse Tamuru Beyene Sendeku. Ethiopia is my family’s home country. My father’s family originated in the North and settled in the South of Ethiopia, while my mother’s family originated in the capital of the country. In Ethiopia, I’ve long observed that the line of where I end and you begin is blurry. Resolving this boundary is often subject to how mutual trust (or mistrust) is negotiated.
The more I trust you, the more data I am willing to share with you. Identity, both in the interpersonal sense and in the datafied sense, is central to this mutual trust. Identification, however, is increasingly becoming about belonging and human rights in ways that are not always as straightforward as discourses of “efficiency and inclusion” around data would suggest. For example, in accounting for my identity, noting that I am Ethiopian diaspora in a database connotes a different sense of my personhood than when I say that I belong to the Ethiopian diaspora. The former is an affiliation with a data category, while the latter is affiliation with a community.
The “biometrics” of recognizing kin and allies was a resource for community building; it was a way to recognize self in others.
My father tells me stories of traveling across Ethiopia as a young revolutionary. Without a formal identity, he would find his community because people would recognize his lineage just by his facial features. The “biometrics” of recognizing kin and allies was a resource for community building; it was a way to recognize self in others. This kind of recognition would offer him support and if he was lucky, a good story about one of his grandparents; if he wasn’t lucky, then this recognition could cause him greater harm. In these encounters, the reception and perception of his “biometric” data was more about belonging than individuating.
When I visited Ethiopia thirty years later, I traveled many of the same routes as my father. Despite having grown up in the US with an understanding the cultural value and the importance of data privacy, I found myself sharing my full name with strangers. It became a strategy to locate myself for them; to give them an idea of where my family came from, what religion I practiced, and what tribe I belonged to. While the stakes were not as high for me as they were for many Ethiopians caught up in previous and current waves of political unrest, it was evident to me that lingering perceptions of tribal and ethnic conflict colored other people’s perceptions of my place in particular cities. There is an inherent tension between identity data as something simultaneously intensely intimate and familial, and as something bureaucratic and dehumanizing; our names can, and do, play both roles.
The story of my travels across Ethiopia shows how identification and classification practices can be beautiful, offering belonging and connection to a community. It would be naive, however, to ignore that in the many circumstances these practices lay the groundwork for social control and oppression. Practices of ascribing belonging and identity through name, culture, and facial features are as old as processes of state building itself and have their own histories in every culture. As digital technologies have become pervasive, states have been able to more formally document persons by storing birth certificates, passports, visas, and other documentation in vast, interconnected databases. This allows for more rapid, and at times more dignified, population management.
Social security has been an equally important driver of digital identification practices as national security.
Particularly in global majority nations, many countries are investing in digital technologies of identification for reorganizing governance, especially distribution of social welfare. Social security has been an equally important driver of digital identification practices as national security. Examples include, but are not limited to, proliferation of cash transfer programs globally (Bolsa Familia in Brazil is a classic example of such programs) and biometrics-based identification systems such as Aadhaar in India. Data-driven governance can create conditions to offer care for citizens. However, there is a very fine line between nurturing communities and over-surveilling and controlling, which often results in fracturing of care. When people come into contact with these massive data infrastructures, they often have little choice in whether they participate or not.
Two regimes and 23 years later, when my father finally made his way back to Ethiopia after seeking asylum in the United States, he ran into some troubles during his interview for his application to receive an official Ethiopian identification card. The interviewer asked him what state affiliation he was, as Ethiopia consists of nine National Regional States. Fully aware of the many tribal tensions that continued in the country after he left, my father responded by saying that he was Ethiopian. This simple act of defiance was his way to push back against the status quo of tribalism.
The bureaucrat asked again. My father went silent.
The bureaucrat asked again. My father went silent. The bureaucrat resorted to a different strategy. He asked my father for his full name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his birth place, and a few other questions to infer his tribal identity and thereby, his state affiliation. My father had to begrudgingly answer. The bureaucrat had fit my father into the data categories of state-sanctioned identification practices in Ethiopia. He wrote down a prefigured affiliation then handed back a stamped ID card to my father. Despite the efforts of my father to assert a belonging to the Ethiopian state writ large, he was individuated to fall into the data category of his tribal affiliation as inferred through his answers about his ancestry. He became legible to the Ethiopian state through this process of data-driven individuation.
What my dad, and so many other stateless people learn, is that names do not belong solely to you and your family. The choice between either accessing human rights and lifesaving resources, or protecting your personal and biometric information, is hardly a choice at all. The United Nations Human Rights Commision (UNHRC) has been collecting biometric data on refugees since 2004. Digitalization has enabled a more dignified registration process, the seamless transfer of cash support and welfare to refugees, and the ability to foresee mass migration across borders. Unfortunately, there are also instances in which data can move without knowledge of the communities it is about through data sharing agreements between UNHCR and some state bureaucracies including the US’s Department of Human Services. This has made it more of a security database than an immigration one. This data even includes those who were referred for resettlement but never stepped foot in the United States. UNHCR controversially exchanged data on Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh with Myanmar earlier this year in order to vet people for possible repatriation. The data was originally shared in order to make smart cards — a card that gave them access to the most basic and essential services. UNHCR denied any misconduct or policy violations, claiming that all objectives of the data collection exercise were communicated and consented to.
The formalization of identity in documents by state powers is not new, but the proliferation of datafication of identities of those in the majority world (geographic regions where the majority of the human population lives) by state powers, empire, and international actors like the UNHCR is quite new. While these categories and data can produce conditions to facilitate efficiency in the distribution of welfare benefits and in receiving funds for housing, food, and other resources, they can just as quickly be used to assert power over those who are most in need under the guise of social security.
What we need is a way to think about data-driven identification practices of the digital welfare state as a resource to enact belonging, rather than a technology for individuating and targeting.
What we need is a way to think about data-driven identification practices of the digital welfare state as a resource to enact belonging, rather than a technology for individuating and targeting. As an ideal, this implies imagining welfare schemes as universal (where everyone belongs) with an option to opt-out, rather than the creating a set of eligibility conditions that inevitably target specific people and communities. As a practice, the tactic of designing for belonging rather than individuating is a step towards practicing relational ethics in design of algorithmic systems and rethinking personhood in a data-driven world.
What do relational ethics look like in the context of designing identification practices of the digital welfare state? How do we care for individuals with a tool that allows individuals to only exist with certain affordances that cannot fully express the nuance of human identity and belonging? Although the way forward is complicated, I believe that designing for belonging is the first step towards it.
This analysis and reflection by Data & Society Research Analyst Emnet Tafesse is the first in an upcoming 2022 series called Towards a Mindful Digital Welfare State, co-commissioned with Data & Society Postdoctoral Scholar Ranjit Singh.
To date, the series also includes:
- Good Welfare, Bad Platforms? by Silvia Masiero
- Critical Digital Education for All! by Soledad Magnone
- Code as Policy by Rajesh Veeraraghavan
- Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State by Alena Thiel
- Datafying Children by Grace Mutung’u
