Imperial citizenship and the weaponisation of international law Timothy Jacob-Owens* Neha Jain raises concerns regarding the nefarious uses of citizenship by states – illustrated, inter alia, by the Russian “passportisation” tactics in Georgia and Ukraine – arguing that these demonstrate the need for international law to ‘restrict oppressive nationality attribution’.119 More precisely, she suggests that international law should ‘pro-actively guide and constrain nationality ascription’, including by ‘proscribing mass naturalizations outside the state’s territory’ and ‘establish[ing] principles for evaluating what types of conduct would constitute valid individual consent for the purposes of extraterritorial nationality attribution’. While I share Jain’s concerns about the specific cases she discusses, I am sceptical that international law offers the most effective means of addressing them. My scepticism stems from the simple observation that, in principle, states may have good reason to offer targeted routes to citizenship acquisition for groups outside their territories. On Jain’s view, such practices only become ‘oppressive’ if they have ‘negative consequences for purported beneficiaries’ and/or ‘threaten or destabilise vital interests of other states’. In order to identify a genuine instance of “weaponised citizenship”, international law will therefore need to be able to accurately determine the interests of both the target group(s) and the affected state(s). As Eleanor Knott demonstrates, this requires considerable “empirical nuance”.120 With this in mind, I argue that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to formulate a set of globally applicable standards with sufficient precision that they could capture every relevant instance of “oppressive” nationality attribution without simultaneously creating a barrier to legitimate forms of facilitated, extra-territorial naturalization. I illustrate this argument by reference to the unresolved politics of citizenship and decolonization in the United Kingdom (UK). I begin by discussing the historical weaponisation of citizenship (or subjecthood) as a tool of British imperialism. I then turn to contemporary efforts to facilitate access to British citizenship for (formerly) colonized groups, focusing on the case of the Chagos Islanders, before reflecting on how such efforts might be stymied by a “new international law of nationality”. Imperial subjecthood as weaponised citizenship The core of British subjecthood, as articulated in Calvin’s Case of 1608, was a reciprocal relation between the subject and sovereign, wherein the former owed an obligation of allegiance and obedience in return for the protection of the latter: protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem (protection draws subjection, and subjection protection).121 On this basis, following the ius soli principle, anyone born within the Crown’s ‘power and protection’ was automatically deemed to be a British subject, necessarily owing a concomitant obligation of allegiance and obedience, thereby ensuring that territorial conquest and the subjection of colonized peoples went hand-in-hand. British imperial subjecthood can thus be considered an early form of what Jain calls “long distance nationality”: the involuntary attribution of subject status to colonized peoples beyond the metropole served to bolster the image of a unified political community stretching across the territory of the Empire. While superficially uniform (and unifying), British subjecthood was also, as Devyani Prabhat discusses, substantively “indeterminate”, masking an unequal distribution of rights between white colonizers and racialized, colonized populations.122 For the latter, British subjecthood was in practice often no more than the “zombie citizenship” Jain describes in her kick-off contribution. A relatively recent illustration of this appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as documented * 119 120 121 University of Edinburgh Jain 2022. Knott 2022. Calvin’s case, The reports of Sir Edward Coke, knt. [1572-1617], #25 - The reports of Sir Edward Coke, knt. [1572-1617]. ... v. 4. - Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library. 122 Prabhat D. (2020), ‘Unequal Citizenship and Subjecthood: A rose by any other name..?’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 71(2), 175191. European University Institute 24