When powerful states play games with citizenship Lindsey N. Kingston* When my Sicilian grandfather Giuseppe “Joe” Carlisi petitioned to naturalise in 1957, he signed his English name and scrawled the words ‘I can go to work.’ He saw American citizenship as an escape from poverty, war, and discrimination. He was not alone: For generations, migrants across the world have considered nationality the key to enjoying fundamental human rights, or what Hannah Arendt called ‘the right to have rights.’ Citizenship supposedly offers national identity, indicates worthiness, and even proves one’s existence. Those without it are rendered vulnerable to an array of human rights abuses. Without passports or other state documentation, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says stateless people ‘officially don’t exist’ – well, at least on paper.70 Citizenship is not only a force for good, however. My work on the weaponisation of citizenship highlights how the same documentation that can protect migrants might also open them up to extensive social control and rights violations.71 This weaponisation impacts non-migrants, too; laws granting Indigenous peoples citizenship in settler states were used to privatise and ultimately seize their land, for instance. Important messages about who does (and does not) belong in a country are highlighted with the granting or revocation of citizenship, sometimes fuelling mass atrocity crimes like ethnic cleansing and genocide. These kinds of violations require us to look at citizenship with a critical eye – not only to recognise the potential for weaponising citizenship, but also to consider how to punish and prevent what Neha Jain calls “oppressive nationality”.72 She asks: What should the international community do when citizenship is wielded not to protect human rights, but rather ‘as a sword that states can command to harm or to oppress?’ Jain argues that international law should do more in these situations, especially since nationality attribution can oppress both individuals and states. Given the current political climate – I am writing eight months after Russia invaded Ukraine – it is understandable that Russia has played an important role in this conversation so far. Jain considers the issue of “passportisation” practices in her essay, citing the mass conferral of Russian citizenship in Crimea as a method of fast-tracking large-scale extraterritorial naturalisation.73 Eleanor Knott raises compelling questions about the timing of passportising Crimea’s residents, but ultimately argues that Russia has been weaponising both citizenship and what it means to be ethnically and/or linguistically Russian to create a pretext for intervention.74 Indeed, Jelena Džankić points out that even when extraterritorial citizens themselves initiate the acquisition of second nationalities, it may cause severe ramifications for the countries concerned and/or individuals affected.75 Yet while Russia is important in this conversation about weaponising citizenship, it is also vital to investigate the ways in which liberal democracies – so ready to declare themselves bastions of human rights – are guilty of using and benefitting from oppressive nationality. Just as the international community has built fundamental flaws into the human rights regime by relying on citizenship to identify human rights claimants, so too has the United Nations created vulnerabilities to weaponised citizenship by prioritising state sovereignty over individual rights.76 Liberal democracies such as the United States have “gamed the system”77 to manipulate the provision of citizenship to suit their ends, all while staying fully in line with international legal norms (as Džankić reminds us is often the case * Webster University 70 ‘What does it mean to be stateless?’, UNHCR, 18 October 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8xZpNG39oc&t=42s. 71 Kingston, L. N. (2021), ‘The weaponisation of citizenship: Punishment, erasure, and social control’ in Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship, Manchester University Press. 72 Jain 2022. 73 Id. 74 Knott E. (2022), ‘The Weaponisation of More than Citizenship’, GLOBALCIT, Weaponised Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution? - Page 3 of 12 - Globalcit (hereinafter ‘Knott 2022’). 75 Džankić 2022. 76 Kingston L. (2019), Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights, Oxford University Press. 77 “Gaming the system” can be defined as using the rules meant to protect a system to instead manipulate that system for a desired outcome. In other words, it means going against the intent and purpose of a system while technically followings its rules. 15 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies