12 Lucia M. Rafanelli state model.57 More recently, Mayerfeld has advocated an international human rights regime where states’ relationships to international law resemble U.S. states’ relationships to national law as understood in Madisonian federalism—an arrangement Mayerfeld argues is incompatible with certain conceptions of sovereignty and possibly with a state-centric world order.58 Or, as another alternative, imagine granting more governing power to sub-state or non-state groups. Many writing about Indigenous governance have made promising proposals in this vein, which might be adapted to other contexts. Think, for example, of devolving governing power to sub-state groups as Lu suggests,59 rejecting Westphalian models of sovereignty and constructing non-state governing institutions on alternate normative foundations as Alfred advocates,60 or institutionalising a legal pluralism that allows state and non-state institutions to govern on equal footing without either claiming a monopoly on power, as Duthu recommends.61 Gandhi, too, proposed non-state governance of a sort, arguing that the plight of stateless people in interwar Europe revealed the limitations of Western state-centric models of governance and advocating instead for village-level governance.62 Depending on how they were executed, either of these alternatives—more robust international institutions or devolution and power-sharing—could challenge either the Political Authority or Sovereignty Principles, or both. For example, restructured international institutions might deny states discretion over their membership, rejecting the Sovereignty Principle. A pluralistic legal system might allow individuals to access the benefits currently tied to state membership via membership in various sub-state or non-state groups, perhaps with overlapping jurisdictions, challenging the Political Authority Principle. Disentangling membership in a political community from territorial sovereignty—either through restructured international institutions or devolution and power-sharing among sub-state and non-state groups—might challenge both the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles by establishing other ways (besides state membership) people could access the benefits of political community and denying states the sole discretion to define and bound political communities. Insofar as these alternatives would involve abandoning at least one of the Political Authority or Sovereignty Principles, any of them would address the core problem I’ve identified with the statist world order—that its organisation around the combination of these two principles is the root cause of statelessness. However, this leaves open the question of which alternative is best, all things considered. Answering this question is beyond the scope of this article. After all, an institution’s effectiveness at addressing the root cause of statelessness is only one metric by which its moral merit can be measured. Identifying the ideal institutional arrangement would necessitate weighing many other moral considerations about the forms of political representation required for true justice and democracy and complex pragmatic considerations about what kinds of institutions could feasibly deliver these goods. For example, one might argue against the anarchic solution by pointing out that—imperfect as they are, states do provide many benefits to many people—perhaps making the world overall better off than it would be under anarchy. One might criticise the restructured international 57 Ibid., 187. Mayerfeld 2016, 14–5, 217–27. 59 Lu 2019, 269. 60 Alfred 2004. 61 Duthu 2013. 62 Siegelberg 2020, 78. 58 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press