What (Exactly) is Wrong with Weaponising Citizenship? One possible answer proposed by Jain is that unjust inclusion incurs ‘negative consequences for purported beneficiaries’. On the face of it this claim seems puzzling – how can inclusion be harmful? Here, normative political theory offers some useful insights as to the harms causes to individuals by unjust citizenship laws. On similar lines to Bauböck’s support of a positive version of the principle of genuine link,289 most normative theorists argue that the legal status of citizenship must follow some factual connection to the state, conceptualized as social membership290 or jus nexi.291 The individual’s “genuine link” to the state imposes a duty on the state to offer a pathway to citizenship. The state’s failure to do so explains the injustice of, among others, permanent alienage292 or arbitrary expatriation.293 This may also motivate arguments against making citizenship conditional, for example in by imposing citizenship tests294 or financial burdens on naturalization.295 The normative role of the genuine link, on these accounts, is as a sufficient condition for grounding the individual’s right to citizenship (and the correlative state’s duty to offer it). The upshot of this understanding of the normative role of the genuine link is that it is sufficient for explaining the injustice in the cases noted by Jain and the other contributors, without the need to appeal to the notion of unjust inclusion. For example, in the case of “offshore citizenship” offered to the Bidoons in the UAE (Lori),296 it seems reasonable to suggest that the wrong committed was, originally, not providing a pathway to citizenship in the state where the Bidoon had social membership, and the conceit that membership is fungible and can be substituted by another state’s citizenship. Similarly, in case of “sticky citizenship”, as described by Macklin,297 the wrong committed is not the overinclusion, but the use of foreign citizenship as a way to deprive individuals of citizenship in a state that owes it to them. If we add to that the presumption against the coercive imposition of citizenship, evident in both of these cases as well as, arguably, in the case of Russian “passportisation” that is the major focus of this debate, these carry much of the weight of the harm taking place. The notion of unjust voluntary inclusion arises only if we interpret the genuine link, as Bauböck explicitly does, as a sufficient and necessary condition for the allocation of citizenship.298 Admittedly, Bauböck extends the concept beyond habitual residence to cover ‘also first generations of emigrants and their offspring whose lives remain entangled with their country of origin’. This rules out, he argues, ‘unlimited transmission of citizenship iure sanguinis or selling passports to investors’. Yet I remain unpersuaded that this interpretation is justified. In brief, I share JacobsOwens’ intuition that ‘states may have good reason to offer targeted routes to citizenship acquisition for groups outside their territories’,299 including reparative and honorific conferment of citizenship. Citizenship laws need not be uniform between states, and – within limits – could allow for extraterritorial naturalizations for a variety of reasons. I also agree with Spiro that acquiring citizenship voluntarily is rarely, in itself, harmful to the individual in question, excluding particular cases were deception was involved.300 What is needed here, in other words, is some alternative explanation for the wrongness of such policies. 289 Bauböck 2023. 290 Carens J. (2013), The Ethics of Immigration, Oxford University Press. 291 Shachar, A. (2011), ‘Earned Citizenship: Property Lessons for Immigration Reform’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 23, 110– 158. 292 Oberman, K. (2017), Immigration, Citizenship, and Consent: What is Wrong with Permanent Alienage?. Journal of Political Philosophy, 25: 91-107. 293 Lenard, P. (2018), ‘Democratic Citizenship and Denationalization’, American Political Science Review, 112(1), 99-111. 294 Sharp D. (2022), ‘Why citizenship tests are necessarily illiberal: a reply to Blake’, Ethics & Global Politics, 15:1, 295 Lim, D. (2018), ‘Migration, Entry Fees, and Stakeholdership’, Analyse & Kritik, 40(2) 243-260. 296 Lori 2023. 297 Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts 2015. 298 Bauböck 2023. 299 Jacob-Owens 2022. 300 Spiro 2023. European University Institute 48