In August 2022, MDMP project members joined the NIAS conference this year hosted at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. It was an opportunity to converse across areas studies and disiplines, and consider different dimensions of technologies and governance mechanisms in the region.

In addition to meeting new colleagues (and old!) we enjoyed some excellent keynotes and presentations from junior scholars. Thank you to all the organisers and student assistants for convening the event.

Identification technologies are changing rapidly in response to the development of digital technologies and global demands for registration.
Such new systems on the one side reconfigure and enforce existing forms of governance, and on the other change opportunities for applying the rights associated with formal registration for people in Asia.
The papers in the proposed panel will have in common that they focus on how states’ attempts of creating or changing systems of identification and registration of people and their rights are reconfigured in tandem with the people whom the registration technologies are intended to govern.
By studying how this tandem mechanism plays out across Asia, the panel adds to the limited knowledge of bottom-up approaches to state and big business processes of identification and registration. The panel thereby also engages in the viral global discussion of how identification (a state / big business project) corresponds with personal identities.