Citation:
Date Presented:
February 8, 2013Abstract:
In Zimbabwe, an usually high number of individuals from low-income families face difficulty in securing identity documentation such as birth certificates, national registration cards and passports. While these individuals are often viewed as casualties of an inefficient bureaucracy that suffers from poor government funding, I principally argue in my thesis that the struggles of individuals relating to identity documentation illuminate and signify contestations over the definition of authentic citizenship in Zimbabwe. These contestations have serious implications for who can make claims on the state and how they can do so; more specifically, they narrow options for many Zimbabweans to exercise their political agency through, for example, voting. This thesis presents and analyzes ethnographic data collected from interviews and participant observation conducted in one of the country’s first low-income townships situated in Bulawayo. Using this data, and situating it within a theoretical framework that builds from and interrogates the work of scholars such as Max Weber, James Scott, Jean and John Comaroff and their ideas on bureaucratization and democracy, state technologies of power and the cleavages associated with modernity, this thesis accentuates critical themes in Zimbabwe’s contemporary moment such as: a) political belonging in an age of transnational mobility, b) identity documents as forms of economic investment into the future by low-income people and c) the emergence of new economies and efficiencies out of bureaucratic structures.