International Theory (2025), 1–30 doi:10.1017/S175297192500003X RESEARCH ARTICLE The spectre of statelessness Lucia M. Rafanelli Political Science and International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA Email: lmrafanelli@gwu.edu (Received 26 March 2024; revised 11 December 2024; accepted 11 March 2025) Abstract A prominent theory of political obligation argues that, to avoid the dangers of statelessness (basic needs deprivation, rights violations, and political disenfranchisement) people should establish, maintain, and obey states. This theory underwrites a statist ideal that presents states as the primary guarantors of justice and democracy. I challenge this statist ideal, arguing that statist institutions are ill-equipped to provide full justice, especially for stateless people. I argue that statelessness is a product of the state system’s structure and that eliminating the dangers of statelessness therefore requires challenging the core organising principles of the state system. I conclude that stateless people have broad prima facie moral permissions to resist the state system’s constitutive norms, practices, and institutions; that others may have obligations to support their efforts; and that addressing the dangers of statelessness requires resisting rather than obeying statist institutions. I also offer a corrective to the literature on refugees’ political obligations, illuminating how even obedience to a relatively just state or camp authority can uphold a state system that is unjust overall. I examine these issues in conversation with empirical scholarship on stateless people’s activism, like Hong Kong’s ‘Refugee Occupy’ movement. Keywords: statelessness; ethics of resistance; political obligation; global justice; transnationalism Political theorists often appeal to the dangers of statelessness to justify acquiescence to state power. To avoid the ‘state of nature’, they say, we must establish, obey, and maintain states—even if they are not fully just. Such appeals are prominent in both historical and contemporary works,1 and they encourage the adoption of a statist ideal that recommends obedience to states and exalts the state as a political form. These works invoke the spectre of statelessness to justify a general obligation to obey and maintain states. But rarely do these invocations consider the condition of actually stateless people. If a state’s citizens may obey it and bolster its power—even if it sometimes wields that power unjustly—to lessen their already minuscule risk of 1 E.g., Hobbes 1994 [1651]; Kant 1996a [1797]; Stilz 2009; Wellman 2001. © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press