This paper is concerned with the articulation between formal state authority, forms of certification and differentiated citizenship, and the effects on both states and citizens. A focus on processes of certification and on identity documents themselves requires consideration of both legal-statutory dimensions of citizenship associated with universalised, formal rights and obligations, and its substantive and situated forms, characterised by some scholars as ‘active’ or ‘insurgent’ citizenship (among others, Holston and Appadurai 1996, and Holston 2009). At the heart of both types of citizenship is distinction: between citizens and non-citizens, ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, those entitled or not to claim certain rights, resources, services, spaces, protections, pasts, futures. Such distinctions define and affect ways of moving, belonging and living in the world.
Central to the production of distinction are those legally designated the authority to govern. With this comes the authority to recognise, in both its senses: that is, to see and so make legible in certain ways the person who stands in front of you; and to acknowledge the existence, value and validity of a person or category of persons. In this regard one might define sovereign authority as having if not absolute monopoly then at least dominant control over the means of recognition. However, the power to recognise citizens itself needs to be recognised in order to reproduce such authority (Lund 1996). And mostly it is, in the sense that even while citizens might actively oppose the worst aspects of their classification or (forced) legibility, most prefer such disciplinary and sometimes violent inclusion to the cold isolation of absolute exclusion.
Much of the work that produces or reproduces distinction occurs in the realm of certification. This is a multidimensional space in which various acts of categorisation of difference manufacture the terms and technologies of recognition, verification and validation that govern lived citizenship. Such categories, as James Scott (1998, 83) argues, “organize people's daily experiences precisely because they are embedded in state created institutions that structure that experience". Yet as powerful and intrusive as many states are, there are also always counter-spaces of resistance whereby especially detrimental categories and the wider ‘apparatuses of identification’ (Caplan and Torpey 2001) are challenged or necessarily ignored by citizens subjected to them.
While situating the discussion within a wider purview of certifications of citizenship on the continent, the paper draws more specifically on selected sites and empirical cases from post-2000 Zimbabwe to explore the complexities and paradoxes of state making and citizen making occurring within the authority-certification-citizenship nexus. This includes insights from the Harare Passport Office, a peri-urban resettlement site in Bulawayo, and the Beitbridge border-post.