Rainer Bauböck direct legal consequences, but also how they aim to force other states to react in a way that will escalate a conflict at the expense of vulnerable groups. This applies to the recent weaponisation of migration by regimes in Turkey, Morocco and Belarus as much as to the weaponisation of citizenship.202 The citizenship policies of Russia203 but also of the United Arab Emirates and other cases discussed in this forum are weapons that inflict harm through massive deception rather than mass destruction.204 They promote misleading claims about belonging and state responsibilities and fake solutions to the plight of minorities lacking effective citizenship rights. This does not make them innocuous. Exploring and strengthening the capacities of international law to censure policies of weaponising citizenship seems therefore an important task within the broader agenda of preserving and strengthening a rules-based international order, at the heart of which are the principles of equal sovereignty of states and universal human rights. Even if the sceptics are correct that current international citizenship law is weak and riddled with contradictions, this is no good reason for abandoning efforts of thinking through how international law should and could be developed further to prevent abusive state policies. International law has only weak enforcement powers to back it up. International organisations and courts do not have their own weapons to fight against the weaponisation of citizenship. They depend on states’ willingness to do so. But a progressive evolution of international law could at least remove the veneer of legality from aggressive and oppressive citizenship policies and thus provide a mandate for other states to sanction transgressions. A sliding scale of international norms As Neha Jain and Peter Spiro point out,205 there are already a host of principles in international law that could be invoked in attempts to outlaw the weaponisation of citizenship. The problem is that these principles are often in tension with each other and how one evaluates individual cases depends on how much weight is given to each. The two most important principles at stake are both derived from the basic norm of equal sovereignty: States must respect the territorial integrity of other states and they have the right to determine under their own law who are their nationals. The solution to the apparent conflict is that the former aspect of state sovereignty ought to be clearly ranked above the latter. Such a ranking of principles should put to rest the worries of Džankić and Jacob-Owens that it is not possible to distinguish in this regard between extraterritorial naturalisations carried out in contested territories;206 the granting of citizenship to ethnic kin minorities in neighbouring states; remedial naturalisation of descendants of minorities that have suffered historic injustices; or the effects of unlimited ius sanguinis transmissions that create large numbers of citizens in destination countries of historic emigration waves. Where passportisation is used as a pretext for infringing on the territorial sovereignty of another country – as in the Russian military intervention in Georgia in 2008 and the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 – it seems clear enough that international law condemns such aggression. This verdict should be extended to cases where claiming citizens in another country has – for the time being – primarily a destabilising effect, by creating client territories and de facto states that are dependent on, or controlled by the citizenship granting state, as is arguably the case in Transnistria. In such cases, territorial integrity is infringed not through overt military intervention, but through depriving a state of sovereignty over a part of its territory through sponsoring irredentist forces. 202 Miholjcic N. (2022), Migration as an Instrument of Modern Political Warfare: Cases of Turkey, Morocco and Belarus, Jean Monnet Network on EU Law Enforcement Working Paper 12/22. 203 Salenko A. (2012), Country report: Russia, EUDO Citizenship Observatory, Country Reports, 2012/01. 204 Alsabeehg Z. and Kuzmova Y. (2022), Report on citizenship law : United Arab Emirates, GLOBALCIT, Country Report, 2022/07. 205 Jain 2022; Spiro 2023. 206 Džankić 2022; Jacob-Owens 2022. 37 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies