International Theory 21 Putting it in terms of the Hong Kong case, Stilz and Wellman could claim asylum seekers would be permitted to resist the government if it were illegitimate. But my point is that we do not need to know whether Hong Kong’s government is legitimate to conclude that asylum seekers are permitted to resist it. If asylum seekers’ moral permissions to resist were grounded in Hong Kong’s illegitimacy, the Hong Kong government could nullify those permissions by enacting reforms to bring it in line with the standards of legitimacy (whatever those may be). But my argument is that asylum seekers’ permissions to resist are grounded in the fact that Hong Kong’s institutions help comprise and entrench a state system that (because it is organised around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles) produces and reproduces statelessness. This would remain true whether or not Hong Kong’s government qualified as ‘legitimate’. Thus, on my view—unlike on views like Stilz’s and Wellman’s—stateless people’s moral permissions to resist are robust even against many admirable reforms individual states might make, because they reflect the flaws in the underlying structure of the state system, which even legitimate states can entrench. This also marks a difference between my view and ‘state system legitimacy theories’, which say that ‘a state’s legitimacy is conditional upon its playing some role in a legitimate state system’.97 Typically, such views hold that the existing state system’s treatment of refugees (among others) undermines its legitimacy, which in turn undermines the legitimacy of the states comprising it and sometimes generates permissions to resist those states.98 In other words, state system legitimacy theorists argue that the illegitimacy of the state system transfers to individual states—meaning that any state within an illegitimate state system is itself (at least somewhat) illegitimate and that this may ground permissions to resist it. While compatible with this core claim of state system legitimacy theories, my view does not depend upon it. What matters for my argument is that a state system organised around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles creates statelessness; that operating within the rules of the institutions comprising this system will entrench it, thereby entrenching the problem(s) of statelessness; and that stateless people therefore have broad moral permissions to resist such institutions. It is irrelevant to my argument whether a given state’s role in upholding the existing state system renders that state illegitimate. Among other things, this means endorsing my view does not require explaining how the illegitimacy of the state system could transfer to individual states or endorsing the counterintuitive conclusion that even very just and well-performing states are illegitimate if they exist in an imperfect international system—two significant challenges Sharp identifies for state system legitimacy theories.99 Instead, endorsing my view only requires agreeing that it can be justified to resist a state when complying with it would uphold the kind of state system that produces and reproduces statelessness—regardless of whether this reality undermines that specific state’s legitimacy. My analysis also reveals a related problem in the literature on refugees’ political obligations. This literature acknowledges that a refugee’s obligations to their host state or camp authorities can be weakened or nullified if their particular host state or camp authorities are egregiously unjust. However, it typically ignores how the (in) 97 Sharp 2024, 294, emphasis in the original. For an overview, see Sharp 2024. 99 Ibid., 298–9. 98 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press