Post-colonial Citizenship and Decolonisation as a Turning Point: Continuities and Discontinuities in African states Within the discourse of human rights, the political leaders that brought Africa to independence – as India’s leaders had also done (Khan, 2020) – emphasised above all the successful completion of the anti-colonial struggle as the precondition for the enjoyment of other rights (Getachew, 2019, p. 96). Economic and social rights were the next priority, challenging ‘the assumed primacy of individualcentered civil and political rights’ in Western thought (Ibhawoh, 2020, p. 41). At the same time, the colonial experience brought an insistence on an end to racial hierarchies of status and rights. Among the early initiatives of the newly admitted African and Caribbean members of the UN was to propose a convention on the elimination of racial discrimination – which in 1965 became the first human rights treaty to be adopted by the General Assembly (Jensen, 2016, chap. 4). Thirty years later, with the end of the cold war, sovereignty was (re)attained by the former subunits and satellites of the Soviet Union. Just as in Asia and Africa, these states had to grapple with the balance of civic or ethnic ‘nationhood’ as they established legal frameworks for membership and belonging. As in Asia and Africa, the simultaneous drafting of citizenship laws and attainment of independence created different dynamics in citizenship regulation from those in Western Europe or the immigrant-founded states of the Americas and Australasia. But in the broader European space, the conceptual starting point was still that of the League of Nations, in which each state had a ‘titular majority’, which had to find a way to accommodate minorities. The recognition of ethnic ‘nationalities’ within the Soviet empire was largely preferred over previous territorial traditions (Tabachnik, 2019, chap. 3). Among the central concerns in the post-Soviet territories were therefore the status and rights of former citizens of the prior larger state, including both co-ethnics elsewhere, and ethnic ‘others’ living within the newly sovereign territories (Shevel, 2017, p. 415). Compensatory provisions were put in place in some of the east central European states to right past wrongs, or recognise the rights of the diaspora (Liebich, 2009). The successor states to the former Yugoslavia retained or elaborated the complex cocktail of ethnic designations established under the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and the socialist period; but also added civic elements under pressure to manage the traumatic experience of break-up of the former federation and subsequent civil war (Dzankic, 2016). The African continent thus shares many of the challenges for the regulation of citizenship with other post-imperial regions, even as the especially nasty, brutish, and short experience of colonisation in Africa created a unique historical context. The next sections set out the specific colonial frameworks for legal status in Africa, and their continued influence on regulation of citizenship today. Colonial Regulation of Membership in Africa The partition of Africa by the Berlin Conference in 1885 expanded legal recognition (among Europeans) of European sovereignty over African territory from a few coastal enclaves to encompass the whole continent. Although control was not immediately consolidated, this partition of Africa marked the formal end to the pre-existing systems for regulation of membership of the multiple and diverse polities that had made up the African continent. It also marked the imposition of new rules of membership devised and adjudicated by the colonial authorities for their own purposes. There were important differences among the legal regimes imposed by the colonial powers, but all shared a set of assumptions about racial superiority and inferiority that regarded Africans as – at best – children, incapable of self-government, of citizenship in the broader sense (Lake and Reynolds, 2008). The colonial empires elaborated and maintained a complex set of graded statuses among the residents of their newly annexed territories. These gradations of course principally divided those of European descent, to whom the common law or civil codes of the metropolitan power applied, from ‘natives’ (indigènes in French; indígenas in Portuguese), governed by a version of customary or religious law as ultimately applied by European judges, ‘so far as it is not repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience’ (the standard language in the British territories). In the interstices between ‘native’ and European were non-African immigrants from other parts of the empire: South European University Institute 4