(Re)Imagining Belonging in Latin America and Beyond - Day One

Over the next ten years, states are carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and digital existence by 2030.

Held by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies in collaboration with the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, our multidisciplinary symposium ‘(Re)Imagining Belonging in Latin America and Beyond: Access to Citizenship, Digital Identity and Rights’ included the participation of scholars, practitioners, policymakers and legal specialists to examine the impact of contemporary ID practices on the lived experiences of populations in the Americas and further afield.

The conference highlighted the complex and contradictory ways in which Indigenous, Afro-descended, and nonbinary populations, and others, experience ID systems. It underlined how historically many people have already faced widespread discrimination and exclusion from formal citizenship. The event therefore challenged the assumption that the universal provision of documentation will inevitably foment the social, and increasingly, financial inclusion of everyone.

Date: 7 July 2021