Post-colonial Citizenship and Decolonisation as a Turning Point: Continuities and Discontinuities in African states Post-colonial Citizenship Over Time and Across Geographies Africa is not the first region of the world to have been liberated from colonial rule, even if we restrict the inquiry to the modern era; nor the last, if we take the break-up of the Soviet Union and its satellite states as the most recent major episode of decolonisation. To understand the extent to which there is a common legal and political framing for citizenship in post-colonial states across geographies, we must set Africa’s history within this broader context. The first territories of the global European empires to be decolonised were in the Americas: the future United States, declaring independence from Britain in 1776; followed by the rebellion of what became Haiti from France in 1791; and, finally, the South American territories of Spain and Portugal in the first quarter of the 19th century. At that time, differentiated categories of citizenship were prevalent everywhere; among social, racial or ethnic groups, and of course between men and women. That is, the separation of nationality from citizenship was the norm – rendering the question of legal nationality less politically sensitive where post-colonial hierarchies remained essentially unaltered from the colonial era. Expansive jus soli rights were accordingly provided in the both the US constitution of 1787 and the new states of Latin America three decades later, based on the contemporary rules in Britain and in the Spanish Empire’s Cadiz constitution of 1812. The new leaders (almost all of European descent) could approve the automatic attribution of nationality to all those born in their territories (including indigenous Americans and those of African descent) without fear that they would thereby gain full citizenship and in the expectation that their labour could be easily exploited (Acosta Arcarazo, 2018, chaps 2 & 3; Miki, 2021). The political context of Haiti, however, produced a radically different framing (more similar to that in Africa), as the formerly oppressed struggled to establish control over the new state and its economy, creating preferences in favour of Blacks (Noirs) in citizenship acquisition and rights (Gaffield, 2007; Ferrer, 2012). A century later, as new states and territories were created from the ruins of the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires after the first world war, the international context was different again. The states gaining independence in the era of the League of Nations were created in a world in which nationality was envisaged as depending on cultural identity and descent. The borders of the new states in Europe were drawn, so far as possible, to create states in which one ethnic group was dominant, with protection for minorities (Mazower, 1997). Although the post-war treaties provided for nationality of the new states to be attributed in the first instance on the basis of habitual residence, adult men (on behalf also of their wives and children) had the right to opt for another nationality, based on ethnicity, language, or race. The echo of this framework remains in contemporary provisions in Egyptian nationality law (derived from the first law of 1926) for facilitated acquisition of nationality on the basis of Arab and Muslim identity. At the same time, the mandate systems created for the former Ottoman and German territories outside of Europe established the first limits on the previous absolute discretion of states to impose their nationality on colonised peoples, envisaging a (far-off) future in which ‘peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ might achieve statehood (Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations; see further Pedersen, 2015). The creation of the United Nations after the second world war, with its commitment to selfdetermination, then brought the promise of independence for all colonised territories, and of international law’s evolution into a truly universal normative framework. European University Institute 2