Who belongs where? The African continent’s famously arbitrary borders, and history and current reality of migration, coupled with the weak administrative capacity that is equally the legacy of the colonial state, have made the management of “who belongs where” particularly challenging, even by comparison with other post-colonial regions of the world (see, for example, Bayart and Geschiere 2001, Geschiere and Jackson 2006, Dorman, Hammett, and Nugent 2007, Geschiere 2009, Bøås and Dunn 2013). In this context, a push to upgrade and insist on the universal application of identification systems that definitively distinguishes citizens from foreigners—between those whose identity card gives them access to rights and those denied such documents— carries serious risks as well as possible rewards. Whereas previously in Tanzania or Uganda, for example, access to health care or to schooling for children did not depend on official proof of identity, since 2016 a national ID card is needed for these and other purposes (Manby 2018a). Yet, thanks to citizenship laws that are interpreted to provide no rights based on birth in the territory but rather to be based on ethnicity, boxes of applications remain unprocessed, with no means of resolving doubts over entitlement—even if the applicants have no effective connection to any other state. In the absence of the civil law apparatus of court oversight of such decisions, legislation has established no effective mechanism to resolve these cases, leaving those affected likely in indefinite limbo. In other countries, such as Mauritania or Sudan, governments are deliberately using the introduction of new population registers—touted as major steps towards modernization and inclusion—as tools to denationalize those whose membership of the polity is unwelcome (Manby 2018b). “If these underlying frameworks are not adapted to a context where most people have never had proof of their right to live in a country, the drive to provide and require identification documents can greatly exacerbate the exclusion of some even as it increases inclusion for others” Those at risk of greater exclusion by the drive to identification encompass, in the African context, pre-independence and other long-term migrants and their descendants; members of ethnic groups living in border regions and found in more than one country, including nomads; vulnerable children in different categories, especially those separated from their parents; and other marginalized minorities that exist in any society. We end up with a paradox: documentation of “legal identity” is supported as a route to economic empowerment and inclusion, framed almost as an additional public service that the state must deliver. Yet this process of providing official documentation is dependent on existing legal and institutional frameworks governing citizenship and imhttp://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 57