Take a country like South Sudan for example. Of course they have their citizenship laws over there. However, how did the first citizens of the nation acquire it? It can’t be based on whether you were born there or not because there was no defined country for you to be born in. And if it’s based on descent, same problem. Your parents couldn’t have been born in a country that doesn’t exist. Did South Sudan just not have de jure citizens at first?
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Generally, everyone who lives within the new country’s borders when it forms becomes a citizen. If the country wants something different, they would need to include it in their founding documents.
The country will pass a law that unilaterally accepts some people as their citizens.
For example, when the Soviet Union dissolved, the new countries had passed a decree that say: “all USSR citizens in our borders are now our citizens”.
Countries can give citizenship to whoever they want.
Take for an extreme example the Vatican. No one is born a citizen of the Vatican, but when you work for the Pope he will give it to you and he can also take it away.
If a new country is formed they generally give it to everyone in their borders.
It’s most likely going to be people who live within the boundaries the country is formed. After all those are usually the people who are behind the country being formed. They may try to exclude people by ethnicity or open up to people outside their borders based on ethnicity.
Part of the citizenship rules with Israel is that any Jew who wants to has the right to become a citizen. Even if they don’t want to resend another citizenship. A non-jew would have to give up their other citizenship go through waiting periods and other rules in order to become a citizen of Israel.
Generally, they just say “everyone who lives here gets citizenship”. There are exceptions though. When Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, they didn’t actually declare independence, but rather declared the restoration of their independence, a continuation of the Lithuanian Republic that was conquered by the Soviets in 1940. They also said that only those who had ancestors with Lithuanian citizenship in 1940 would get Lithuanian citizenship. This was a problem for the hundreds of thousands of Russians that had been planted in Lithuania by the USSR during the occupation. These people didn’t get Lithuanian citizenship, but because they didn’t live in Russia, they also didn’t get Russian citizenship.
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