Bronwen Manby The states gaining independence in the post-war period had multiple and varied histories of precolonial and colonial regulation and imagination of belonging. Almost all, however, reached statehood with borders perceived as arbitrary or unjust in one way or another, with latent or open tensions between dominant and less dominant ethnic or religious communities, pre-colonial (and colonial) polities split by new international borders, or with only a shared history of colonial oppression as a unifying idea for a state consisting only of minorities. Unlike those European states where citizenship (as full membership of a political community) had been gradually (if not completely) achieved after centuries of contested civic space, independence in the end came rapidly: ‘the idea of citizenship was … forged simultaneously with the idea of the nation’ (Jayal, 2013, p. 12). The new states were thus inevitably ‘born with unresolved tensions between civic and ethno-nationalist aspirations’ (Sadiq, 2017, p. 185); in which minority claims for recognition had to ‘negotiate their relationship to the history of colonialism’ (Chatterjee, 1993, pp. 18, 26). India and Pakistan were the first to gain independence in this new world; an independence that was twinned with the trauma of Partition. The conundrum of determining nationality in the postPartition years, of deciding who belonged where, was framed and complicated by the mirrored identities of the two new states, as perceived at both elite and popular level (Shani, 2017, chap. 2; Ansari and Gould, 2019, chap. 4; Kapoor, 2021). The boundaries of citizenship in African states, as they gained independence in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, were shaped by different histories and demographies. In no more than a handful of cases could one ethno-linguistic group claim ‘ownership’ of the state. The debate over citizenship is thus radically different from the European model as imagined by the framework of the League of Nations treaties, in which there is an existing body of citizens – understood already to form a ‘nation’ in some way – which must accommodate recognised ‘national minorities’, as well as integrate new immigrants. The dynamic was also different from the typical context of the Hispano-American world; in Africa, solidarity among states of common heritage was seen from the perspective of the ‘native’ rather than the ‘settler’. Moreover, unlike South Asia – or the states formed at the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, or Russian empires – the politics of the new African states were not (with exceptions) dominated by rivalry with their neighbours; but rather by the need for collaboration with neighbours in opposition to the risk of ongoing political and economic exploitation by the former colonial powers. Federation and cooperation with other African states were envisioned as foundations for the creation of ‘an international order free from domination’ (Getachew, 2019, p. 23). Advocacy during the lead up to independence was indeed against the ‘balkanisation’ of Africa, especially French West Africa (Afrique occidentale française, AOF), and for the creation of federal structures to combat ongoing power imbalances with the former colonisers (Neuberger, 1976; Benoist, 1979; Getachew, 2019, chap. 4). The radical concept of a ‘Union government’ for Africa did not take root; but a number of transcontinental initiatives were very rapidly consolidated within the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), formed in 1963 (Wallerstein, 1966). Nonetheless, a rhetorical aversion to colonial borders was immediately challenged by the need to mediate territorial claims from some member states with a larger historical footprint (notably Morocco and Somalia) against their neighbours. Within one year, the OAU had adopted a resolution to respect existing borders; the corollary being that a route to selfdetermination for sub-national groups was closed (Touval, 1967). The newly independent states entered an international normative system that had been transformed since the end of the second world war, most significantly by the recognition of universal human rights. It was the language of human rights that was mobilised for political demands at international and national level, both before and after independence, rather than the discourse of citizenship that had developed in Europe. Human rights ‘were more capacious than competing utopianisms of classical political liberalism, doctrinaire socialism, and essentialist nationalism’, becoming a ‘perennial aspect of anti-imperial and postcolonial phraseology’ (Burke, Duranti and Moses, 2020, p. 6). 3 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies