Key Reflections • Discrimination is one of the biggest obstacles in realising SDG 16.9. • Civil society and affected persons are currently not strongly represented in debates on digital identity systems which needs to change before these systems are established without the input of this citizenship / statelessness expertise. • There are risks inherent to digital ID systems and we must not forget these. Inclusion does not equate protection, and the visibility that can result from inclusion in digital ID systems can lead to further discrimination. • Digital ID systems are being rolled out at a fast pace as an ‘answer’ to exclusion but will generate new problems. These systems have the same biases as those who create them, which is also true for laws and policies, which collectively can generate or entrench statelessness. • We need to accompany technocratic solutions with awareness of socio-political contexts and social impact assessments. We need more evidence-based, country-based research when designing data collection surveys etc., to inform top-down policies and keep in mind that stateless people are often also ethnolinguistic minorities. • Catching up with the current backlogs of registration, pushing to register more people and issuing more documents might be an unattainable goal and we should not be looking to accelerate this race. Registration leads to categorisation which in turn leads to different types of documentation which thus enables differentiated access to different services, rather than bringing equality and inclusion. • The idea of both the ‘nation state’ and ‘citizenship’ are colonial legacies which have shaped the way people think about who they are. The hegemonic notion of citizenship is completely infiltrating and reorganising the relationships between the self and the other. • Colonialism is the origin of the conditions we see today but mobilising action requires us to understand structures as they are today and not be distracted by their colonial beginnings. 9