identity card (as well as voter registration). Whereas only a minority of the 54 African states (55, including the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) had in place a national identity card system at independence, this number has rapidly increased in recent years. At the same time, identity cards are being rolled out where they did not previously exist, and paper-based systems are being upgraded. Today, almost all countries in Africa have in place a formal requirement for national ID to complement a civil registration agency, and more than half of national ID cards are based on biometric technologies. Countries with laws and institutions establishing requirements for birth registration and identification in Africa, 1960-2015 Source: World Bank Identification for Development Dataset, available at http://data.worldbank.org/datacatalog/id4d-dataset. There have been some efforts to highlight the potential dangers posed by these new technologies in the absence of legal frameworks for data protection and privacy—even if the roll-out of new technologies largely proceeds regardless (see, for example, Privacy International 2018; World Bank 2017; for a listing of those countries with laws in place, see the Identification for Development (ID4D) Global Dataset 2018). Less remarked, however, is the assumption underlying these initiatives that the effort to roll out a universal national identification system is mainly a technical one, dependent on resources, administrative effectiveness, and a regulatory framework to guide questions such as access to and interoperability of databases. Yet identification of citizens is above all a legal and political process, unrelated to the technology used; and the history of Africa creates particular reason to be cautious. http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 56