During the 2010s, Cameroon, like many other African countries, adopted digital technologies to enhance the quality of its electoral system. In 2013, Elections Cameroon, the body tasked with electoral and referendum issues since 2006, ushered in biometrics in elections for the first time. Manual procedures have long been accused of undermining their credibility. Since then, the implementation of biometrics, as a sign of a new regulatory practice in political competition, is supposed to strengthen the credibility and quality of the electoral process, according to official discourse, but it has yet to fulfil its promises in Cameroon. Paradoxically, a close look reveals that despite the implementation of this public electoral policy, which is nevertheless embedded in a social context increasingly governed by technics, its entry into the Cameroonian electoral field has rather exacerbated the political tensions than it was supposed to alleviate. This research emerges out of this paradox as it seeks to understand the social dynamics structuring the implementation of biometrics in the electoral process in Cameroon. Based on a hypothetico-inductive approach, this thesis advocates the idea that public action linked to the implementation of biometrics in the electoral field is constructed in a double polarity between the logic of institutional objectification and the dynamics of subjectification in the electoral game by various social actors, thus transforming this public electoral policy into an object of extension of strategic social relations to the battles of appropriation and misappropriation of biometrics in the electoral field.

Ultimately, this thesis has allowed us to highlight the sociohistorical construction of electoral reforms and the new forms of conflicts between actors generated by the immersion of this political technology in the electoral arena. The results show that the operational mitigation of the results of the implementation of electoral biometrics in Cameroon is made intelligible by a set of factors in the dynamics of appropriation of biometrics in a field where the mobilisation of actors' capital orchestrates a configuration of action logics at the interface of reappropriation, endogenisation and hybridisation of a transnational public policy.