Neha Jain Long distance nationality Commentators have emphasised that the ICJ’s decision in Nottebohm did not pronounce upon his status in the country of naturalisation––Liechtenstein––but as Spiro suggests, ‘only that his nationality could not be used as a weapon against another state.’10 But what does the international law of today have to say about the latter situation? What constitutes the use of nationality “as a weapon” against a state and how may international law respond to this weaponisation? Nottebohm, it is worth recalling, adopted a relatively orthodox approach to nationality to limit the reach of its narrow ruling on diplomatic protection, asserting that ‘nationality has its most immediate, its most far-reaching and, for most people, its only effects within the legal system of the State conferring it.’ This conception does not always hold true in cases of extra-territorial citizenship that see citizenship constellations emerging outside territorially circumscribed state boundaries in the form of naturalised citizens who do not, and may never intend to, reside on the territory of the state of naturalisation.11 (Fitzgerald, 2000) The motivations for states as well as individuals to enter into this relationship can be complex and varied––ranging from affective attachment to projects of state building––but the decoupling of territory and citizenship as status, identity, and practice means that nationality allocation may have impacts that transcend the Nottebohm conception. A particularly fraught case of extra-territorial citizenship are “passportisation” practices consisting of fast-track and large-scale extraterritorial naturalisation of individuals resident on the territory of another state. Though the term came to be widely used in the wake of the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, scholars such as Anne Peters claim that Russian passportisation efforts started even earlier with the mass conferral of Russian citizenship in Crimea in 1991, which was then repeated in the contested territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia beginning in 2002.12 The legal basis for the passportisation was the 2002 Federal Law on Citizenship of the Russian Federation providing a simplified naturalisation procedure for citizens of the former Soviet Union as part of a policy of creating long-distance ethno-nationalists to use a term coined by Benedict Anderson.13 For Anderson, these are emigrés who live their politics ‘long distance, without accountability’ and ‘with no serious intention of going back to a home, which, as time passes, more and more serves as a phantom bedrock for an embattled metropolitan ethnic identity.’14 Russian long-distance nationalism was intended to be just that: the would-be nationals were not expected to migrate to and take up residence in the “homeland”; rather, Vincent Artman argues that ‘[b]y conferring citizenship en masse to the residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia discursively extended its sovereignty into territory legally owned by another state’.15 Russia has since refined and improved upon its passportisation technique in other spaces, amending its citizenship law in 2014 to operationalise the fast-track naturalisation of a new legal category of Russian speakers following the annexation of Crimea and subsequently expanding the list of eligible persons in 2019 to include the residents of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fast-track citizenship process has steadily been extended by Presidential decree to apply to individuals in Russian occupied zones in the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and, as of July 2022, to all Ukrainians.16 Russia’s justification for these measures has been put forward in legalistic human rights terms, as articulated in the statement of the Russian Federation’s representative to the Security Council in 2019, arguing that ‘For five years, the inhabitants of Donbas have been deprived of the ability to 10 Spiro P. (2011), ‘A New International Law of Citizenship’, American Journal of International Law 105(4) 694–746 (hereinafter ‘Spiro 2011’). 11 FitzGerald D. (2000), Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship: Mexican Migration and the Transnational Politics of Community, University of California Press. 12 Peters A. (2010), ‘Extraterritorial Naturalizations: Between the Human Right to Nationality, State Sovereignty and Fair Principles of Jurisdiction’, German Yearbook of International Law 53 (hereinafter ‘Peters 2010’). 13 Act No. 62-FZ of 31 May 2002 on Citizenship (Text No. 2031) (Russian Federation). 14 Anderson B. (1992), Long-distance nationalism: World capitalism and the rise of identity politics, The Wertheim lecture. 15 Artman V. (2013), ‘Documenting Territory: Passportisation, Territory, and Exception in Abkhazia and South Ossetia’, Geopolitics 18(3) 682-704. 16 ‘Putin extends a fast-track Russian citizenship to all Ukrainians’, New York Times, 11 July 2022, Putin Extends Fast-Track Russian Citizenship Process to All Ukrainians - The New York Times (nytimes.com). 3 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies