Identifying personal documents and information, or the lack thereof, are often of central importance in conflicts surrounding forced mobility. The proposed dissertation project centers around the role of 'identity clarification' (Identitätsklärung) in the context of the German deportation regime, exploring issues of governmentality and resistance. Relying on both multi-sited ethnography and a genealogical approach, I plan to trace the term's increasing centrality within the German Residence Act and to consider different technologies of control through which the pressure to 'clarify' one's identity is enacted. Moving away from a state-centered understanding of control to also consider, for example, economies of deportation, the everyday practices of street-level bureaucrats, or humanitarian discourses, the project examines how a specific notion of identity is generated in each of these settings. A few initial objects of consideration include everyday bureaucratic practices at German immigration offices, shifting norms within the German Residence Act, European funding for civil status databases in West Africa, and the document verification procedures of German embassies. While at once exploring the implications of these practices for our understanding of governmentality, I also look for the fissures and incompleteness of facades of control and think about what space might remain for lines of flight. Peripherally, the project also asks how research might be reimagined as a practice of producing knowledge with practical relevance for social movements.