International Theory
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Insofar as the source of injustice is the structure of the state system itself—
specifically, its organisation around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles—rather than any one state’s behaviour or migration policy, the injustice cannot
be remedied by making reforms that leave the background structure intact. This idea is
also reflected in some resistance movements led by stateless people. Focusing on
asylum-seeker-led protest movements in Germany and Austria, Saunders argues that
the asylum seekers do not only demand asylum, but also critique the international
human rights and refugee policy regimes and more generally the ‘political and socioeconomic structures of global life’ that effectively keep them in positions of vulnerability.105 Saunders argues that only some of protesters’ demands can be accommodated by the human rights and refugee policy regimes currently dominant on the
international stage.106 Other demands challenge these regimes’ fundamental underlying principles, especially the idea that one’s home state is and should be the primary
guarantor of one’s human rights.107 That is, they challenge the Political Authority
Principle, which attaches human rights protections to state membership.
The second problem with the accommodationist objection arises because 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 going forward. This—insurance against the production and reproduction of a class of stateless people—would require radical departures from the state
system as we know it. Specifically, it would require abandoning at least one of the
Political Authority or Sovereignty Principles. This is because, as argued in previous
sections, as long as the state system is organised around these principles, people will
always be vulnerable to statelessness. Insofar as the state system attaches basic needs
fulfilment, rights protections, and enfranchisement to state membership (the Political Authority Principle) and grants states the discretion to deny membership at will
(the Sovereignty Principle), it sets things up so that new groups of people will
predictably be made stateless and suffer the corresponding deprivations as time goes
on. This would be true even if every currently stateless person were offered remedies
for the deprivations they had suffered up to this point. Thus, challenging the
organising principles of the state system—accomplished by resisting the statist
institutions that uphold it—seems integral to achieving genuine justice, as opposed
to merely improving the conditions of the state system’s latest victims.
A modified version of the accommodationist objection acknowledges that it would
be insufficient to incorporate stateless people into the state system as it is currently
constituted, but argues that full justice could be achieved by incorporating them into a
reformed version of the state system that was nonetheless still state-centric. One
might imagine, for example, layering international or cosmopolitan institutions or
inter-state agreements on top of existing statist institutions without challenging the
underlying structure of the state system. Stilz endorses such a view in her later work,
where she offers ‘a qualified defence of a territorial states system’.108 (I will treat Stilz’s
view as emblematic of the modified accommodationist objection.) Stilz argues that
the state system cannot be fully legitimate unless it is made to align more thoroughly
with the values underlying its justification (occupancy rights, basic justice, and
105
Saunders 2018, 848.
Ibid., 854.
107
Ibid.
108
Stilz 2019, 249.
106
https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press