Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

Taylor & Francis

Oct 9, 2022 Source

Content

Cart

Search in: This Journal Anywhere

Advanced search

Publication Cover

Geopolitics

Volume 27, 2022 - Issue 1

Submit an article Journal homepage

Open access

8,061

Views

CrossRef citations to date

Altmetric

Listen

Articles

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

Margie CheesmanOxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UKCorrespondencemargaret.cheesman@oii.ox.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9521-4658

Pages 134-159

Published online: 04 Oct 2020

In this articleIn this article

ABSTRACT
Introduction
Background: Identification, Digital Identity and SSI
Materials and Methods
Results
Discussion and Conclusion
Footnotes
References

Articles

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

This paper critically examines the implications of ‘self-sovereign identity’ (SSI) for border politics and migration management. SSI refers to user-controlled, decentralised forms of digital identification. Closely linked with the distributed ledger technology blockchain, SSI is presented by advocates as a tool to empower marginalised groups, including refugees. Among other benefits, some claim that SSI removes the need for powerful, centralised institutional structures by giving individuals control and ownership of their identity information. However, through ethnographic research in an international aid organisation, I find that SSI is an embryonic technology with indeterminate properties and benefits. I identify a series of competing logics in the debates around SSI’s emancipatory potential, which relate to four issues: (i) the neutrality of the technology, (ii) the capacities of refugees, (iii) global governance and the nation state, and (iv) new economic models for digital identity. SSI is simultaneously the potential enabler of new modes of empowerment, autonomy and data security for refugees and a means of maintaining and extending bureaucratic and commercial power. I situate SSI in a genealogy of systems of identity control and argue that, in practice, it is likely to feed into the powers of corporations and states over refugee populations.

Introduction

When you’re a small farmer and let’s say you are disrupted by conflict, you cross a border, and all of your history is lost if you have lost your documentation. Even if you haven’t, it may not be valid. But if you’ve got something that is stored on a digital identity, you can use that history wherever you go. […] We talk a lot about the power of blockchain in terms of empowering individuals because they control access to their own data – self-sovereign data. But the people we are helping are a long way from understanding what it would mean to have self-sovereign data management. […] This is an empowering technology at the core, and the faster we can get it to people, the faster we can tackle issues like global hunger.

Robert Opp, United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)1

‘Self-sovereign identity’ (SSI) refers to user-controlled, decentralised forms of digital identification. In the quote above from an aid industry leader, SSI is presented as being not just a viable solution to the documentation issues associated with displacement. In facilitating a secure and permanent user-held identity record, it beckons forth the ideal future of humanitarian data management and border politics. SSI is widely attributed with emancipatory potential. Closely linked with the distributed ledger technology, blockchain, SSI is proposed as a tool to empower marginalised groups, including refugees. Among other benefits, some advocates claim that SSI removes the need for powerful, centralised state and corporate structures by giving individuals control and ownership of their identity information, which is a vital asset in contexts of forced migration.

SSI is gaining traction in the discourses of policymakers, researchers and practitioners working in aid and migration management. Notable interest includes UNHCR, the Red Cross, the UN Migration Agency and global government agencies (UNHCR 2018; Red Cross 510 2018; IOM & APSCA 2018. As a result, public-private initiatives have recently been set up to develop decentralised identity technologies. These involve established aid actors and national authorities as well as technology start-ups and companies such as Microsoft, Evernym, Consensys and Accenture (Allison 2019; ID2020 2019). An indicative example is the ID2020 Alliance pilot project in which the non-profit technology providers iRespond, associated with the Sovrin Foundation (part of the SSI software company Evernym), and the International Rescue Committee have used biometrics and blockchain to provide medical identities to refugees in Mae La camp, Thailand (Sovrin 2018). Their identification system is intended to enhance refugees’ informational privacy: individuals’ identities are verified at medical centres by iris scan, which links to a unique 12-digit code (stored along with the anonymised health data on a blockchain), and renders the in-situ sharing of paper IDs and personal information (name, address, date of birth) redundant (Piore 2020). Greater autonomy for refugees is putatively achieved as individuals now share their records with health professionals by allowing their iris to be scanned, with oral consent given each time this happens. However, questions about the necessity of blockchain and the assumption that iris-scanning is privacy-enhancing prevail. It is not clear that this identification system needs a blockchain as opposed to a more traditional database. The extent to which each refugee truly owns and manages their data is also unclear, and whether consent is truly meaningful in this context.

The Mae La Camp example reflects broader issues in how SSI is discussed and implemented. Its potential as a means of empowering refugees with blockchain-enabled privacy, control and autonomy in identification processes is alluring, and emergent scholarship dubs refugee SSI a ‘quest’ of crucial importance (Wang and De Filippi 2020, 10). Yet, SSI is a deeply contested concept and its capabilities are not fully understood. The indeterminacy around its potential is further fuelled by the lack of concrete examples: SSI is much discussed but rarely seen in practice. This paper responds to an urgent need to critically assess the potentials and implications of SSI in relation to refugee rights and border politics. Findings are based on ethnographic research with a large multinational humanitarian technology organisation, here known as Tech-for-Aid, and the SSI start-ups they were networked with. The research was undertaken during 2017, just after the emergence of blockchain as a widely touted ‘disruptive’ technology.

I suggest that a series of competing discursive logics are at play as participants encounter SSI and imagine how this technology may or may not enable the restructuring of border politics. The competing logics relate to four issues: (i) the neutrality of the technology, (ii) the capacities of refugees, (iii) global governance and the nation state, and (iv) new economic models for digital identity. I show that the emancipatory potential attributed to SSI comes into tension with key debates around technology politics, capitalist strategies, the state’s claimed monopoly to assign and verify claimed identities, and refugees’ technical capacities, which are routinely understood as limited – as reflected in the WFP representative’s statement