International Theory 27 they do to pursue change will also work to entrench the status quo—as when their pursuit of reform by incorporating stateless people recreates the latter’s disenfranchisement by excluding them from the processes through which the terms of their incorporation are decided. The foregoing analysis shows why the modified accommodationist objection fails. The injustices faced by stateless people, and the overarching injustice that the state system empowers states to perpetually create new groups of stateless people, would not be effectively addressed by incorporating stateless people more fully into the current state system or a modestly reformed version of it. And we have good reason to think active resistance against the state system and its organising norms is a promising route to addressing these injustices where statist institutions cannot. Perhaps we should also reform the institutions making up the current state system, maybe even adopting some of Stilz’s preferred reforms. But we should not count on states and statist institutions alone to bring about the kind of radical restructuring of the state system full justice would require—nor should we ask stateless people to count on them. Conclusion I have argued that we should understand statelessness, and the continued vulnerability to it, as a product of the state system—not the mere absence of a state. Once we do this, we should doubt the conventional wisdom that the solution to the problem(s) of statelessness is more state power. After all, since statelessness is a product of the state system, stateless people may be best served by contesting the terms that the system imposes on global order. More specifically, since the state system’s current organisation around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles creates and re-creates the problem(s) of statelessness, adequately addressing statelessness requires abandoning at least one of those two principles. Moreover, I’ve argued that channelling political activity through statist institutions entrenches the state system’s current structure—centred around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles. Thus, working within and empowering statist institutions in turn works to reproduce the condition of statelessness. This means we should doubt whether statist institutions can provide justice for stateless people. Even if one group of stateless people can be effectively incorporated into and served by statist institutions, the state system that has been thereby empowered will be able to produce new classes of stateless people indefinitely. This represents a powerful challenge to the statist ideal adopted by many prominent political theorists, which presents states as the best guarantors of justice and democracy. So, I argue, resistance against statist institutions is a more promising way to challenge the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles—and therefore an important avenue via which stateless people can seek justice for themselves, as well as a necessary corrective to the state system’s flaws. Though I haven’t provided a blueprint for the institutions that should ideally replace dominant statist ones, I have shown that a statist international order organised around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles is inadequate to deliver full justice—particularly for stateless people—thereby discrediting the statist ideal. I have shown that, if we want institutions capable of delivering full justice and addressing the problems of statelessness, we must look for some alternative—and I have surveyed several possible alternatives, illustrating how each could challenge the https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press