AO: Breckenridge notes that technologies of biometric registration are now seen as the most promising remedy for bureaucratic incapacity on the African continent. He is interested in how processes of identification working together make up an infrastructure of citizenship – a set of slowly emerging rules, standards and networks of communication – which give any state distinctive cen- tres and a distinctive political character.
AO: Breckenridge argues that a biometric state is “a state that is organised around technologies and architectures of identification that are very different – and which function politically very differently – from the older forms of written identification that have produced the modern state.” (8)
