28
Lucia M. Rafanelli
Political Authority or Sovereignty Principle (or both). I have also illuminated one
core consideration anyone attempting to choose among alternative institutional
arrangements should account for—one that is obscured by the statist ideal. Namely,
if the chosen option is to adequately address the problem(s) of statelessness, it must
challenge at least one of the organising principles at the heart of the state system (the
Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles). As my discussion of Stilz and the
modified accommodationist objection shows, simply layering international or
cosmopolitan institutions or inter-state agreements on top of existing statist institutions would not stop the state system from creating vulnerability, injustice, and
disenfranchisement for stateless people. Rather, adequately addressing these issues
requires radically challenging the underlying structure of the state system itself.
Acknowledgements. Thank you to Emma Alzner for her excellent research assistance and the Institute for
International Economic Policy at The George Washington University for facilitating her research assistantship. I am also grateful to Ugur Altundal, Chuck Beitz, Samuel Chan, Shuk Ying Chan, Ingrid Creppell,
Marty Finnemore, Eric Grynaviski, Joe Kochanek, Catherine Lu, Heather Penatzer, Nathan Pippenger,
Jen Rubenstein, Annie Stilz, Anum Syed, Diego Tapia Riquelme, Inés Valdez, Victor Wu, and audiences
at McGill University, Southern Methodist University, Dartmouth College, the University of Milan, Yale
University, the University of Virginia, Princeton University, the GW Political Science Department International Relations Workshop, the GW Political Science Department Political Theory Workshop, and the
2023 APT Annual Conference for helpful feedback.
Competing interests. The author declares none.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press