that voter cards are reduced in value as identity documents. The decision on who is or is not a person entitled to identification as a citizen (a person eligible to vote) is thus taken away from the independent electoral commissions created across the continent after many years of struggle, and placed back with the executive – typically the ministry of the interior (a ministry that has a focus on national security and immigration control, rather than citizen empowerment). If identification is also disconnected from birth registration, it is removed from the domain of those whose focus is on universality, facilitating its conception as a national security project. The effort to reduce multiple registration processes has some logic as regards costs, but there are very few constitutionally established independent identification commissions – none in any African country – with the responsibility of determining eligibility to be issued an identity document. Even where semi-autonomous agencies exist, they are appointed by governments in power and do not have the mandate backed by constitutional guarantees that is provided to the most effective electoral commissions. The best-known example of a truly independent identity commission is Peru’s National Identification and Civil Status Registry (Registro Nacional de Identificación y Estado Civil, RENIEC), established by the 1993 constitution. RENIEC is responsible for birth registration and civil registration generally, and also for the national identity card. Significantly, from the point of view of state capacitybuilding, RENIEC started with the mandate to re-establish identification for adults as well as children after many records were destroyed during the Sendero Luminoso insurgency. It reached out to previously unidentified rural and indigenous communities, building up ‘one of the strongest and most inclusive national identification programs in the world’ (Reuben & Carbonari, 2017, p. 32; see also Harbitz & Boekle-Giuffrida, 2009). Any discussion of the best institutional arrangements to manage these issues must also focus on the reality that in contexts where a very large percentage of people currently do not have a birth certificate or any other official identity document, alternative systems for proof of identity must be devised for initial enrolment to take place. The only way to make the formal state processes work is to tap into the parallel systems for identity verification that exist in all societies, but are most prominent where state institutions are weak and customary law and traditional authorities dominate the regulation of everyday life. These linkages create ‘hybrid political orders’, where engaging solely with the formal state may be insufficient to reach desired developmental outcomes (Boege et al., 2008). There is thus a ‘need for a sharper rather than a more blurred analytical focus on regulatory shifts across the formal–informal divide’ (Meagher, 2012, p. 1097). In the context of identification systems, we need to analyse the ways in which admission to citizenship is regulated at the granular level, as procedures have moved beyond a dichotomy between ‘African traditions and Western modernities’ to accommodate new societal tensions (Halisi et al., 1998, pp. 346–347). This means understanding how ‘vernacular practices of identification are integrally connected to official modes and structures’ (Rader, 2016, p. 192, considering identification in Somaliland). The creation of more inclusive identification systems requires thinking carefully and in detail about regulation of the hybrid enrolment processes for national registries that commonly combine a requirement for state-issued documents with other forms of evidence. Commenting on ‘vetting’ procedures for issue of identity cards applied by the Kenyan government to Nubians and other communities, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights found that: 15