Julia Schweers of frequent amendments to laws on citizenship, the 1979 Constitution eased citizenship provisions and was not amended again until the 1990s when Ghana gave itself a new, democratic order.9 Since the mid-1990s, Ghana’s citizenship regime has been on a path of liberalisation – unlike its direct neighbour, Côte d’Ivoire. In the 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire introduced the ‘ivoirité’ principle to its citizenship legislation. Questioning the ‘true’, indigenous Ivorian citizenship of people from the North of the country, it denationalised large parts of the population – including presidential candidate Alassane Ouattara (Babo 2017; Cheeseman, Bertrand, and Husaini 2019). The ivoirité legislation constituted a significant factor in the lead-up to the outbreak of the Ivorian civil war in 2002. Manby suggests that Ghana's legislative history provides an explanation as to why Ghana did not face a comparable crisis: ‘it seems plausible to suggest that at least part of the contrast with Côte d’Ivoire is explained by […] not just changes in political rhetoric, but changes in law. Ghana’s very early abandonment of jus soli citizenship as politically unacceptable forced the discussion on what rules on belonging would, in fact, obtain consensus support’ (Manby 2018). In other words, because Ghana did have the legislative history of the 1960 and 1970s, it did not have an identity crisis such as the Ivorian one in the 1990s and 2000s. This argument is corroborated by the Ghanaian parliamentary discussions of the 1990s which led to the dual citizenship reforms of 1996 and 2000. A central narrative in favour of liberalising Ghanaian citizenship used the Ghanaian illiberal history of denationalisation as well as the developments in Côte d’Ivoire as negative examples to urge for a different, more open approach to citizenship (Schweers 2024). Dual citizenship would not have been introduced in 1996 had it not been for the protest of the large Ghanaian diaspora who, once Ghana transitioned to democracy, claimed their right to Ghanaian citizenship without having to renounce their belonging in other countries. Since then, the Ghanaian notion of ‘diaspora’ has been widened to also include African Americans. The narrative behind this widening of the notion of diaspora is that Ghana offers African American descendants of the victims of slavery the right to belong in a country that was one of the main regions from which slaves were taken. The focus of the ‘Year of Return’ campaign on the US, as opposed to much poorer countries such as Brazil, Haiti, or Jamaica, however, indicates that economic calculations were a driving force behind this policy (Yeboah 2019). When lawmakers amended the constitution and passed the 2000 Citizenship Act to introduce dual citizenship, one of the hopes they harboured was that dual citizenship would encourage return migration (Schweers 2024) – which it seems to have. Today, return migrants with dual citizenship are calling for an end to the current ban on dual citizens in political offices and demand their full political rights in Ghana. While there is political manoeuvring around that issue, parties, in principle, approve of such a further relaxation of the dual citizenship provisions. It is, therefore, likely that Ghana will see an amendment of its citizenship laws so that dual citizens can run for offices they are so far excluded from. Despite these changes, there is still a great deal of continuity in the current provisions of Ghana's citizenship laws, dating from between 1957 and 1979. Ghanaian women still have a harder time conferring their citizenship onto their spouses than Ghanaian men. At independence, most African citizenship regimes discriminated based on gender, but since the 1990s, 24 African states introduced reforms to remove gender discrimination from their citizenship laws (Manby 2016, 63). So did Ghana, though it did not completely remove all 9 For Ghana, the 1980s were a period of stark rise in emigration; in 1983-85, moreover, Nigeria expelled 1.9 Million Ghanaian migrants (Adepoju 2010; Beauchemin 2018). Both facts might have contributed to a situation in which immigration into Ghana lost its relevance vis-à-vis issues around Ghanaian emigration. 18 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies - EUI