2 Lucia M. Rafanelli statelessness, what may actually stateless people do to oppose the systems that make them so?2 With at least 10 million stateless people and over 6 million living in refugee camps worldwide,3 this is a pressing question. Here, I adopt a capacious understanding of statelessness, including anyone effectively lacking state membership and stable access to its associated benefits. This encompasses both de jure and de facto stateless people, and people (like refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants fleeing ‘failed states’) who do not have effective membership in either their states of origin or residence.4 With this broad understanding of statelessness in mind, I re-centre stateless people and re-cast the dangers of statelessness not as a reason to maintain state power, but a reason to resist it. I propose that statelessness—and a continued vulnerability to statelessness even for those who presently enjoy state membership—is produced by the state system’s organisation around two core principles: Political Authority Principle: because states are the world’s primary political authorities, reliable access to basic needs fulfilment, rights protection, and political enfranchisement is conditioned on state membership. Sovereignty Principle: because they are sovereign, states may grant or deny membership at will. In an international system designed around the Political Authority Principle, stateless people lack legal standing and suffrage and are often denied access to education, health care, and employment opportunities and are disproportionately vulnerable to basic rights violations like assault and trafficking.5 Understanding ‘stateless people’ broadly, as I do, to include refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants escaping failed states, only makes this case stronger—as many people fitting these descriptions suffer the same disadvantages.6 Moreover, in an international system designed around the Sovereignty Principle, stateless people can be kept vulnerable to these disadvantages indefinitely if states continue to deny them membership. Further, I argue, the current state system maintains itself by channelling political activity through statist institutions, reinforcing its existing structure. By statist institutions, I mean those that operate according to the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles. So, international institutions that do not challenge at least one of these principles are statist despite being international. If, as I argue, statelessness is a product of the state system’s current structure and the state system maintains that structure by channelling political activity through statist institutions, then we cannot remedy the disenfranchisement and injustice 2 My suggestion resembles Delmas’ (2018) argument that many principles often invoked to ground citizens’ obligations to obey their states actually ground obligations to resist. However, my work departs from Delmas’ in focusing on the transnational sphere (Delmas’ discussion of transnational obligations is very brief, see, e.g., Delmas 2018, 105–6) and focusing on the state system (rather than individual states) as a site of injustice and contestation. 3 USA for UNHCR 2021; UNHCR n.d. 4 For overviews of legal understandings of statelessness and different types of statelessness, see U.S. Department of State n.d.; Owen 2018, 303, 313. 5 UNHCR n.d.; USA for UNHCR 2020. 6 See, e.g., USA for UNHCR 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press