Paper-sword citizenship Peter Spiro* Neha Jain and other contributors to this forum elegantly highlight how the attribution of citizenship can be something other than an unalloyed good.178 Citizenship can be a burden. That is the key element in defining weaponised citizenship: that it has been imposed without an individual’s consent. Consent remains the touchstone in defining the international law parameters of its attribution. How that consent is established emerges as the critical test of legitimacy in particular cases. But even where we see violations of the consent principle, how much of a weapon is citizenship in the hands of states that would abuse it? In most cases, it will not be an especially powerful one, against either individuals or against other states. Unwanted citizenship is less consequential than one might suppose, imposing few distinctive obligations and (in most cases) not resulting in the dispossession of other national ties. To the extent it does make a difference, other states appear to be pushing back. In the end, perhaps there is not much need for a coordinated international legal response to state attempts to weaponise the institution, which are being adequately addressed through non-formal international legal mechanisms – the horizontal appraisal of and response to state action by other states and other international legal actors that fuels the establishment and maintenance of international norms. How oppressive can citizenship be? Citizenship will be oppressive to individuals only where it implicates material costs. In theory, there are a number of ways in which imposed citizenship could harm individuals. In practice, there a few contexts in which such harm results. Perhaps the greatest historical cost associated with imposed citizenship is now largely a thing of the past. The acquisition of nationality, regardless of its basis, once invariably resulted in the loss of original citizenship. That was a major element in the emergence of the consent norm. Latin American states in the late nineteenth into the twentieth centuries sought to automatically naturalise noncitizens after a certain period of residency. An important motivation for this form of nonvolitional naturalization was to deprive American and European immigrants of the diplomatic protection of their home state’s nationality which would have terminated by operation of law upon acquisition of the additional citizenship. In that context, loss of original citizenship would have posed a major cost for the affected individuals. It remains true today that loss of original citizenship would in many cases pose a major cost along various dimensions. Citizenship may come with domestic and global mobility privileges. It will often have expressive value, reflecting an affective tie with the state. Any imposed citizenship that implicated loss of original citizenship would qualify as oppressive for these reasons. But that does not appear to be a part of the cases that Jain highlights. Indeed, states that are attempting to weaponise their own citizenship generally will have no control over other states’ attribution of citizenship. When Russia imposed citizenship on individuals in the breakaways and elsewhere, it could not dictate loss of original citizenship. Although Ukraine vigilantly enforces a prohibition on dual citizenship, it rejected the legality of Russian naturalization in occupied territories,179 thus allowing affected individuals to retain Ukrainian nationality. I am not aware of any contemporary case in which imposed citizenship has resulted in involuntary loss of original nationality. * Temple University 178 Jain 2022. 179 ‘Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on the provocative and unlawful decision by Kremlin to issue Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in occupied territories’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, 24 April 2019, Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on the provocative and unlawful decision by Kremlin to issue Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in occupied territories | Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine (mfa.gov.ua). European University Institute 32