4 Lucia M. Rafanelli which often ignores how requiring obedience to even a reasonably just state can entrench a state system that is unjust overall. Insofar as others have reasons (and sometimes obligations) to help ensure stateless people are treated justly, they may also have reasons and obligations to support stateless peoples’ anti-statist resistance movements. Moreover, a fully just world would not only guarantee remedies for the specific people who are currently stateless but would also be structured to guard against others experiencing statelessness in the future. This would require abandoning the Political Authority Principle or the Sovereignty Principle (or both). In other words, it would require radical departures from the state system as we know it, grounding independent reasons, and possibly obligations, to resist or thwart the state system. To some extent, my argument resembles Arendt’s—that dividing the world into nation-states and making human rights protections conditional on national membership produced a class of people with neither membership nor rights protections.13 Arendt, too, critiqued how the world order’s structure allowed people to become stateless, then cemented their exclusion from the rights protections that depended on possessing membership in a political community (the dominant form of which was the nation-state).14 And others have explored how Arendt’s account of statelessness applies to today’s stateless people.15 That said, I depart from Arendt and her prominent interpreters, who focus on understanding the political dynamics by which statelessness is created and contested, and the subjective experience of statelessness, without necessarily drawing clear normative or moral conclusions. For example, Güngdogdu’s ‘aporetic’ reading emphasises Arendt’s reluctance to construct normative arguments or make policy recommendations to ‘resolve’ the contradictions and ‘perplexities’ she identified in the simultaneous assertion of human rights’ universality and their effective denial to stateless people.16 Instead, Güngdogdu writes, Arendt attempts ‘to carefully examine how these perplexities become manifest…as well as how political actors navigate and renegotiate them.’17 This critical analysis is necessary, but alone cannot detail different actors’ moral permissions and obligations as they navigate the political terrain it describes. Thus, though I, too, explore the political dynamics that generate statelessness, I also draw on my account of these dynamics to develop arguments about stateless persons’ moral permissions to resist statist institutions, others’ moral obligations to support their resistance, and the limits of our moral obligations to the state system and its constitutive institutions. I therefore draw out the implications of the political dynamics surrounding statelessness for the ethics of resistance and the nature of political obligation in a way others have not. Appeals to the dangers of statelessness in defence of state power Many political theorists invoke the dangers of statelessness to justify state power and defend the claim that individuals have strong reasons—or obligations—to establish, obey, and maintain states. This section surveys some prominent examples to 13 Arendt 1968, 290–302. See Siegelberg 2020, 95, 186–92, 205–9; Gündogdu 2015, 2–3. 15 See, e.g., Bhabha 2009; Gündogdu 2015. 16 Gündogdu 2015, 14. 17 Ibid. 14 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press