Aid and ID: Making People Matter

We spend a lot of time talking, thinking and chewing through thorny questions about the use of AI—and not nearly enough time considering the foundational systems that humanitarians already depend on. In the new open-access book “Aid and ID: Making People Matter”, editor Margie Cheesman brings together key humanitarian practitioners to reflect on the most crucial of these systems: identity management. Drawing on their own experiences with the real-world complexities of identification in the humanitarian space, twelve experts provide critical new insight into how humanitarian principles and operational pragmatism produce new forms of politics and power to re-shape humanitarian work in practice. The collection also looks forward; asking what humanitarian organisations should prioritise as they rethink identity management in a time of severe funding pressures and renewed demands for efficiency.

This work was developed by the Digital Sovereignty Observatory, a project supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation.