Imperial citizenship and the weaponisation of international law Mauritius and the Seychelles, where the Chagossians form an Afro-Creole minority.136 This raises potential issues of consent: if their only other option is marginalization and discrimination in Mauritius or the Seychelles, are the Chagos Islanders and their descendants really in a position to freely consent to acquiring British citizenship? Indeed, the priority for many Chagossian campaigners is not access to British citizenship and the UK mainland, but rather access to their ancestral home, which the UK government continues to deny them. According to Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos Refugees Group, ‘[w]e are not against giving citizenship to the third and fourth-generation descendants […] but it is most important that the UK government should give us the right to live on the Chagos Islands’.137 In the absence of this right, for at least some members of the Chagossian diaspora, British citizenship remains no more than a “zombie citizenship”. The measures to facilitate access to British citizenship also do nothing to resolve the UK’s ongoing territorial dispute with the former colony of Mauritius, from which the Chagos Islands were unlawfully separated prior to independence.138 From a Mauritian perspective, as Vishwanath Petkar argues, ‘the UK government’s move seems like an attempt to retain control over the islands and stem domestic dissent, rather than actually fix the conflict’.139 In this way, the measures bear a striking resemblance to the passportisation tactics deployed by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine, offering a ‘fast-track naturalization’ route targeting a specific population resident in a foreign State with whom there is an ongoing territorial dispute. On this basis, and particularly in light of the historical weaponisation of British imperial subjecthood described above, the extension of British citizenship to all Chagossian descendants might be viewed as perpetuating a form of weaponised “long-distance nationality”, undermining the interests of both Mauritius and (some of) the Chagos Islanders themselves. Weaponising international law Lindsay Kingston argues that Jain’s proposed international norms would have no meaningful effect on the citizenship practices of powerful and persistent “outlaw” states, who disregard international legal norms as and when it suits their interests.140 My concern is that such states might instead strategically deploy these norms to reinforce their imperialist practices. Had these norms been in force at the turn of the 21st century, for example, the UK government might have exploited the ongoing territorial dispute with Mauritius and the divergent interests among the Chagos Islanders to deny calls to facilitate their access to full British citizenship, arguing that this would constitute a prohibited form of nationality attribution and hence a breach of international law. This risk is by no means limited to the case of the Chagossians, but rather applies to any targeted, facilitated route to citizenship acquisition that seeks to right the wrongs of the past. In the UK context, for example, the same issues might also arise in relation to the registration route for British Nationals (Overseas) who have historical ties with Hong Kong,141 and the facilitated naturalization scheme for members of the Windrush generation, who came to the UK from its former colonies in the Caribbean.142 There are also parallels, as Jelena Džankić discusses, with the measures introduced in Spain and Portugal to facilitate access to citizenship for Sephardic Jews.143 The crux of the issue is the difficulty of distinguishing – in both formal legal and policy terms – between oppressive nationality and reparative citizenship. My claim here is not that these measures necessarily should be considered a form of oppressive nationality attribution, merely that they could plausibly be framed as such. In turn, 136 Response To the proposed Nationality and Borders Bill 2021, Chagossian Voices, UK Parliament. 137 Syal R., ‘Evicted Chagos Islanders��� descendants to get British citizenship’, The Guardian, 1 September 2022. 138 Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 2019, p. 95. 139 Petkar V., ‘Mauritius dispatch: UK Chagos citizenship scheme raises concerns for former and current islanders’, Jurist, 30 March 2022, Mauritius dispatch: UK Chagos citizenship scheme raises concerns for former and current islanders - JURIST - News. 140 Knott 2022. 141 British Nationality Act 1981, s.4 (United Kingdom). 142 See Windrush Scheme: full eligibility details, Windrush Scheme: full eligibility details - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). 143 von Pezold v. Zimbabwe, ICSID Case No ARB/10/15, https://ic-sid.worldbank.org/cases/case-database/case-detail?CaseNo=ARB/10/15. European University Institute 26