Timothy Jacob-Owens these ambiguities could allow states to reject reparative citizenship claims as potential violations of international law. In this way, Jain’s proposal might have the perverse effect of legitimising oppressive nationality denial, rather than challenging oppressive nationality attribution. We might imagine that this risk would be averted if the proposed new norms were to be accompanied by a new international adjudicatory body charged with their enforcement. Indeed, Jain makes reference to the establishment of ‘fora in which host countries could challenge [extraterritorial nationality] attribution’.144 However, a cautionary tale might be drawn from the 2015 Von Pezold arbitral award, in which an international tribunal found that Zimbabwe’s post-independence policy of land expropriation and redistribution was racially discriminatory against white landholders. A seemingly progressive international legal norm – the prohibition of racial discrimination – was thus interpreted as proscribing domestic efforts to meet local demands for land reparations, eliding the wider context of colonial dispossession, as Ntina Tzouvala has shown.145 This finding does not necessarily mean that a ‘new international law of nationality’ would hinder (post-)colonial reparative citizenship claims. But the long-standing constitutive relationship between international law and European imperialism – illustrated, as Kanad Bagchi explains,146 by the “Chagos tragedy” itself – is far from reassuring. I do not wish to suggest that there is no hope for a more comprehensive set of international norms of the sort Jain envisages, subject to strict conditions along the lines proposed by Ramesh Ganohariti.147 But it strikes me that there is always a risk that imperialist states would weaponise the international law of citizenship just as easily as they do its domestic counterpart. 144 Jain 2022. 145 Tzouvala N. (2022), ‘Invested in Whiteness: Zimbabwe, the von Pezold Arbitration, and the Question of Race in International Law’, Journal of Law and Political Economy 2(2), 226. 146 Bagchi K., ‘Imperialism, international law and the Chagos Islands,’ Volkerrechtsblog, 1 March 2019, Imperialism, international law and the Chagos Islands - Völkerrechtsblog (voelkerrechtsblog.org). 147 Ganohariti R. (2022), ‘Conditions for regulating the weaponisation of citizenship’, GLOBALCIT, Weaponised Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution? - Page 5 of 12 - Globalcit (hereinafter ‘Ganohariti 2022’). 27 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies