Regulation against weaponisation: a double-edged sword? Jelena Džankić* Prologue My nationality was changed four times. I was never asked. It was given to me and taken away from me as if I were a “thing” to be numbered; an object marked by its barcode. This is not the start of a dystopian novel. Anyone who has lived through territorial secession will have had their nationality changed by default. I am now a national of tiny Montenegro with a population of less than a million. Since my birth in the early 1980s, I was “filed into” different jurisdictions each time the state whose nationality – and thus citizenship – I was given would fall apart. Therefore, I very much agree with Neha Jain that nationality attribution can be oppressive and weaponised.29 It can easily be instrumentalized by states to persecute individuals or make territorial claims against other states. Involuntary nationality attribution can also turn individuals into weapons of war, by providing the legal basis for military conscription. This was common practice during the wars of Yugoslav disintegration.30 The laws of the socialist Yugoslav federation provided for total mobilization in the case of war. When the country fell apart in 1992, the leadership of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), one of the successors to the socialist federation, was heavily influenced by the wartime ambitions of the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. They deliberately postponed the adoption of the new citizenship act until 1996.31 This enabled the FRY authorities to draft refugees arriving from Bosnia and Herzegovina, because they were still considered citizens of the same state even if that state no longer existed. The refugees were then forcibly recruited into the army of the Republika Srpska and sent back to Bosnia and Herzegovina to wage Milošević’s war. While the increasing abolition of military duty has made such scenarios less likely than in the 1990s, Jain convincingly illustrates other ways in which nationality assumes bayonet-like qualities. Where her argument is less convincing – at least for a political scientist – is when she suggests that regulating nationality matters through international law would put an end to states’ abusive practices; at best, it could diminish them in some limited cases. There are three key reasons for this. First, paradoxically, in many cases citizenship used to deprive individuals of rights or as a weapon against other states is often formally fully in line with international legal norms. Second, in many cases weaponised citizenship has not been attributed by states but acquired voluntarily by individuals. Third, international law has shown substantive weaknesses in regulating matters that touch upon the core of sovereignty: the links between individuals, territories, and states. It’s all by the book, but does this make it right? The main problem of the weaponisation of citizenship is not that it is contrary to any human rights or international norms. Rather, it is most often fully in line with them; and it would likely continue to be so, whichever other rules were agreed upon at the international level. Most of the problematic citizenship acquisitions or attributions that states instrumentalise to harm individuals, groups, or other states are permissible. In The Global Market for Investor Citizenship,32 I explored a number of problematic aspects associated with citizenship by investment programmes: from the inequalities they perpetuate, to the long-distance citizens they create, or to the corruption they are breeding. * European University Institute 29 Jain N. (2022), ‘Weaponised Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution?’, GLOBALCIT, Weaponised Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution? - Globalcit (hereinafter ‘Jain 2022’). 30 Džankic J. (2015), Citizenship in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro: Effects of Statehood and Identity Challenges, Routledge. 31 Stiks I. (2011), A Laboratory of Citizenship: Shifting Conceptions of Citizenship in Yugoslavia and its Successor States, CITSEE Working Paper 2010/02, A Laboratory of Citizenship: Shifting Conceptions of Citizenship in Yugoslavia and its Successor States by Igor Stiks :: SSRN. 32 Džankić J. (2019), The Global Market for Investor Citizenship, Springer Link. 7 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies