26 Lucia M. Rafanelli deliver justice. Thus, if she does not advocate limiting states’ discretion over membership—and therefore does not reject the Sovereignty Principle—the version of the state system she endorses will be organised around the same two principles as the status quo state system. Consequently, it will still empower states to perpetually re-create classes of stateless people. Granted, her modified version of the state system may make certain states less likely to exercise this power in ways that make quite so many people stateless. But it would not, on its own, eliminate the underlying problem: that the state system attaches basic needs fulfilment, rights protection, and political enfranchisement to state membership and empowers states to deny that membership at will. Stilz appears to be in a double bind. Either her proposals really do limit states’ sovereignty and discretion over their membership, in which case they represent a radical challenge—not a friendly amendment—to the existing state system. In this case, it is not clear why we should rely on states and statist institutions to enact such a radical challenge to the very system they are designed to uphold. Or Stilz’s proposals do not undermine states’ sovereignty or discretion over their membership, in which case they do not solve the problem of the state system empowering states to continually create and re-create classes of stateless people. Moreover, even if she could escape this double bind, Stilz’s view faces another challenge arising from her reliance on states to be the agents bringing her proposals to fruition. If successfully implemented, Stilz’s proposals would arguably make the world order more democratic by ensuring more refugees were politically enfranchised via incorporation into states. However, insofar as Stilz relies on states—in which stateless people (including refugees) are typically not enfranchised—to enact her proposals, the process of their enactment will suffer from a democratic deficit. The political processes through which Stilz’s reforms would be enacted, the negotiations that took place therein, and who was or was not empowered in those negotiations, would inevitably affect the shape of any resulting policies, treaties, and institutions. If stateless people were thoroughly disenfranchised in these political processes—because they had not yet been incorporated into the statist institutions on the table for reform—whatever reforms were adopted might not reflect their perspectives. Even if stateless people were enfranchised within states after Stilz’s reforms were adopted, the specific nature of those reforms—which presumably would determine the terms of stateless people’s incorporation into the state system—would have been designed largely without their input. This criticism also applies to versions of state system legitimacy theory that similarly emphasise states as the primary actors who should repair the state system’s defects. For example, when discussing what would need to be done to adequately reform the state system, Owen focuses heavily (though not exclusively) on the responsibilities of states.124 He rightly recognises that states play a crucial role in upholding the current structure of the state system—but he treats this mainly as a source of responsibility for states.125 However, we must also acknowledge that states’ role in upholding the status quo system (including its disenfranchisement of stateless people) makes them ill-suited to fundamentally change it. This is because whatever 124 Owen 2016, 280–3, 285–7; 2020, 49–50; see also the discussion of Owen in Sharp 2024, 296, 298–9. For a brief discussion of non-state actors’ responsibilities, see Owen 2020, 56–9. 125 Owen 2016, 287. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press