International Theory 3 stateless people face via statist institutions. Many normative theorists (despite their other disagreements)7 adopt a statist ideal, presenting statist institutions as those most capable of delivering democracy and justice. I challenge the statist ideal, arguing instead that statist institutions are ill-suited to achieve justice for stateless people. I propose that resistance against the state system’s power (e.g., via transnational activism challenging statist institutions) is a more promising route to justice and enfranchisement for stateless people. Below, I explore this possibility in conversation with empirical scholarship on stateless people’s activism, such as Hong Kong’s ‘Refugee Occupy’ movement, in which asylum seekers protested the humanitarian assistance regime to which they were subject.8 There are sizeable descriptive, empirical, and ethnographic literatures on refugee and migrant activism, which illustrate the importance of recognising refugees and migrants as political agents and examine their struggles against the ways in which states and the state system police, constrain, and oppress them.9 I will not comprehensively survey these literatures, nor do I aim to contribute to them. Rather, I draw on them to inform and illustrate the real-world implications of my normative arguments. For example, Vecchio and Ham’s discussion of Refugee Occupy and Saunders’ discussion of asylum-seeker-led protests in Germany and Austria illustrate how the state system both marginalises stateless people and further entrenches itself by channelling their political activity through statist institutions.10 This informs my normative conclusions about the state system’s (in)capacity to deliver full justice and the resulting need to pursue justice by challenging its structure. Likewise, I draw on Vecchio and Ham; Ilcan; Pincock, Betts, and Easton-Calabria; and Saunders to illustrate what it could look like in practice for stateless people to exercise the moral permissions I argue they have to resist the state system.11 I do not claim to give original descriptive accounts of the cases these works discuss or that these cases are representative of all stateless people’s activism. Instead, they provide a proof of concept—showing how the political dynamics I discuss and the normative recommendations I make can manifest in the real world. ‘State of nature’ narratives and the statist ideal they underwrite suggest obedience to or exaltation of the state as the correct response to the dangers of statelessness. However, I argue that understanding the dangers of statelessness—including how they are produced and reproduced by the state system itself—recommends resistance against the state system. In essence, statelessness as it occurs in our world is a product of state power, not of its absence. Therefore, the remedy is not more state power, but the development of alternate channels by which stateless people can secure for themselves what the state system denies them. I do not claim stateless people are obligated to resist the state system. Rather, I argue that, insofar as resisting statist institutions is a precondition of stateless people enjoying justice, they have broad prima facie moral permission to resist. This insight provides a needed corrective to the literature on refugees’ political obligations,12 7 E.g., Stilz 2009, 2019; Walzer 2011, 2015; Ypi 2012. Vecchio and Ham 2018. 9 In addition to Vecchio and Ham 2018, see, e.g., de Genova 2009; Ilcan 2018; Mezzadra 2022; Pincock, Betts, and Easton-Calabria 2020; Saunders 2018; Stierl 2019; Tazzioli 2018. 10 See Saunders 2018; Vecchio and Ham 2018. 11 See Ilcan 2018; Pincock, Betts, and Easton-Calabria 2020; Saunders 2018; Vecchio and Ham 2018. 12 E.g., D’Cruz 2014; Gates and Klosko 2022; Rescher 1992. 8 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press