What (Exactly) is Wrong with Weaponising Citizenship? Lior Erez* Neha Jain’s opening essay,274 as well as the subsequent contributions to this forum, highlight the multiple ways in which citizenship can be oppressively and aggressively used by states to advance their interests, often by “gaming the system”.275 As these contributions demonstrate, a political and legal response to the threat of citizenship weaponisation must be attuned to the nuance of the particular case and broader context,276 and cautious of unintended side-effects and spill-overs.277 Realistically, it will depend on more than the letter of international law, by expanding the scope of its existing norms,278 appealing to extra-legal resources such as power politics,279 and supported by the resistance of engaged citizens.280 Given these requirements, combatting citizenship weaponisation is certainly an uphill battle, although one we must attend to given the current political landscape. As Džankić forcefully puts it in her contribution, the question surrounding the morality and legitimacy of these practices will not be adequately resolved by evaluating their present legality.281 In this response, therefore, I would like to take a step back from the legal question to comment on the foundational normative assumptions at the heart of this debate. In brief, I will suggest that with regards to citizenship laws, problems of under-inclusion and over-inclusion are not symmetric from a normative perspective: the factors that account for the wrongness of under-inclusion do not clearly explain the wrongness of over-inclusion. As such, our evaluation of the weaponisation of citizenship must clearly distinguish between cases of oppressive attribution or “sticky citizenship”, which are aimed at facilitating rights violation and exclusion and therefore straightforwardly objectionable, and cases of ‘long distance nationality’ which are less decidedly so.282 If this analysis is correct, it provides additional support to the problem identified by Jacobs-Owens about the difficulty to ‘capture every relevant instance of “oppressive” nationality attribution without simultaneously creating a barrier to legitimate forms of facilitated, extra-territorial naturalization’,283 and casts some further doubts over the feasibility of Jain’s proposal for a “New New Law of Nationality” as a way to address the risk of weaponisation.284 Genuine Links and Harms to Individuals A primary contribution of Jain’s essay lies in her challenge of the implicit assumption in international law that ‘the problem to be addressed is not the attribution of citizenship but rather its absence’.285 This implicit assumption is, interestingly, shared by most of normative political theory, which is focused on the limits of the state’s right to exclude, expel, or expatriate. As Manby insightfully suggests, in turning to the question of unjust inclusion,286 Jain – ‘in some ways’ – returns to an earlier framework of international law, more concerned with wrongful nationality attribution than the deprivation of it.287 The qualifier is important here; the old normative landscape depended on views and values we now reject (as Peter Spiro argues elsewhere).288 To defend the idea of “unjust inclusion” in the era of human rights, one must provide an alternative justification for it. In other words, if citizenship is now a ‘sword to harm and oppress’, who, exactly, is harmed by unjust inclusion, and how? * 274 275 276 277 278 279 Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford Jain 2022. Kingston 2022. Knott 2022. Manby 2023; Jacob-Owens 2023. Bauböck 2023. Lori N. (2023), ‘Beyond Law: Alternative Mechanisms for Reigning in Weaponized Citizenship’, GLOBALCIT, Weaponized Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution? - Page 10 of 12 - Globalcit (hereinafter ‘Lori 2023’). 280 Džankić 2022. 281 Id. 282 Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts 2015. 283 Jacob-Owens 2022. 284 Jain 2022. 285 Id. 286 Manby 2023. 287 Jain 2022. 288 Spiro 2011. 47 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies