and many other rights, are based (Setel et al., 2007; AbouZahr et al., 2015). There is also a large amount of accumulated experience and guidance in relation to the legal and institutional frameworks for such systems. The ‘foundation’ civil registration creates for a person’s legal identity is thus stronger (or ‘thicker’) than an approach that collects biometric and other data but does not link to a civil registry. Civil registration is critical to legal status, especially for rights based on family connections: this applies both in countries where nationality is attributed based on birth in the territory, and in those where legally recognised descent from a citizen (or a person resident in the country at a certain date) is the rule (Manby, 2020). The Janus-faced nature of identification systems The recognition by international human rights law of the right to identity highlights the centrality of official recognition to the assertion of rights and obligations. The development literature focuses rather on the importance of registration programmes for planning and economic empowerment. Scholars of the history of registration and identification have recognised both these sets of claims, but they also emphasize the potential for registers of people and property to make negative as well as positive contributions; to empower authoritarian regimes as well as enable civic and commercial society. In a ground-breaking volume published in 2001, Jane Caplan and John Torpey argued that ‘the history of identity documentation is integral to an understanding of the expanding of state and police practices that have constituted the modern bureaucratic and welfare state’ (Caplan & Torpey, 2001, p. 12). This collection has been followed by several others. In 2008, Colin Bennett and David Lyon edited a set of contributions examining the role of national identity cards and the increasing securitisation of identity (Bennett & Lyon, 2008). Simon Szreter joined with Keith Breckenridge to publish an edited volume examining state registration procedures as official ‘recognition’, moving beyond a focus on registration systems for policing, border control and surveillance, or on vital statistics and the generation of demographic data, to show that identity registration has been a necessary ‘infrastructure’ of all functioning societies, not only the ‘modern’ world. They urged that ‘[t]he subject of registration itself needs to be “registered” in the academic world’ (Szreter & Breckenridge, 2012, p. 30). Explicitly building on Caplan and Torpey’s volume, Ilsen About, James Brown and Gayle Lonergan collated a set of contributions on the history of identification practices in 2013, highlighting the processes of identification as well as the final outcomes, and the increasing takeover by corporations rather than the state (About et al., 2013). A project on the ‘social life of identity documents in Africa’ coordinated by Richard Banégas and Séverine Awenengo Dalberto seeks to question the ‘democratic illusion of the universalisation of rights through technology’ and the risks of criminalising of those without documents, within the neo-colonial marketisation of state identification systems (Dalberto et al., 2018, p. 6). Foundational theorists for this scholarship are Max Weber, describing an inevitable pairing of increased democracy with increased bureaucracy (discussed in Caplan & Torpey, 2001, p. 5), and Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the birth of biopolitics, and the ‘endeavour, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 73). More recently, James C. Scott coined the concept of ‘legibility as a central problem in statecraft’, that in some circumstances can lead to disaster (Scott, 1998, pp. 2, 4). Both Weber and Scott emphasise the importance of checks and balances, the role 8