Aid and ID: Making People Matter. Edited by Margie Cheesman. Download pdf
Humanitarian aid practitioners reflect on the pragmatics and politics of evolving identity management infrastructures.
ISBN 9781738404995. 86 pages with cover. 12 illustrations. Glossary. Design and artwork by Edwin Mingard.
This work was developed by the Digital Sovereignty Observatory, a project supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation.
Editor Margie Cheesman is the author of When Blockchain Meets Aid: The Human Costs of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2026), a landmark study of a key financial technology experiment in humanitarian aid.
The contributors to Aid and ID are experienced international aid practitioners working at the intersection of humanitarian action and technological innovation: Karl Steinacker, Volker Schimmel, Ryan Beech, Tina George Karippacheril and Juul Pinxten, Amalraj Nallainathan, Joseph Oliveros, Jaki Mebur, Amos Doornbos, Melyn McKay, Sandra Hart, Bronwen Manby.
Humanitarian aid is undergoing a profound transformation as budgets shrink, institutions retreat, and digital systems take on ever greater responsibility. Identity management has quietly become one of the defining infrastructures of contemporary humanitarianism.
Aid and ID offers a timely, practitioner-led account of this transformation and its implications for the future of humanitarian action. Tracing historical shifts from paper records and indelible ink marks to biometrics and digital credentials, this collected volume reveals the political struggles embedded in the systems used to make crisis-affected groups legible. It asks whose interests these identification systems will serve as they persist long after the emergencies they were designed to address.
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