DIGITAL IDs DIGITAL IDs DIGITAL IDs BY MARDIYA SIBA YAHAYA and BONNITA NYAMWIRE

This data-as-bodies approach offers a situated perspective on the implica- Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht, “History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies tions of the datafied state for the lives of women, gender and sexual mi- 36, no. [...] States have and continue to play the role of creators of “legitimized” identities, the implementers of sys- tematic identification and artifacts that represent people’s identities, the in- terpreters of the data collected, stored, and continuously developed through identification systems. [...] 14 UC Berkeley International Human Rights Law Clinic and Haki Na Sheria The goal of the UPI, according to the government, was to provide accu- Initiative, “Digital Identity and the Legal Obligation to Conduct a Human Rights Impact Assessment in Kenya,” April 2023, rate insight and data on the country’s population. [...] The power to be the creator, arbitrator, custo- dian, and interpreter of people’s lives through digital IDs enables the state to have the discretion of what is considered legitimate identity or form of be- longing versus illegitimate. [...] Keywords of the Datafied State Data & Society 127 While the previous sections have illustrated the differences between the data-as-bodies approach and the data-as-state approach in understanding the politics of digital IDs, we conclude with a reflection of a deeper similarity between them.