Introduction 9 means that this is how things are at present. Based on this fact about the world, any attempt to develop a just society will need to make use of State and interstate insti tutions, or else disband them and start from whatever results. It is within the context of the system of States that international organisations like the UN have been created. They ostensibly try to mitigate the ill-effects of having States, to control their power and to ameliorate human life globally. Such organisations function because of an underlying respect for the institution of the State. Irrespective of whether States (including those self-defining as nation-States) are ideally beneficial or necessarily existent, and irrespective of what one feels about the existing inter national organisations, theory must take them into account. This book, then, adopts a moral cosmopolitan account within the empirical context of a society-of-States. This forms an important part of the backdrop here. There are many ways to understand what is meant by a ‘State’ and indeed one may draw upon different aspects of States at different times. This book mainly refers to the State qua institutional structure (though this is in fact often tightly tied to territorial jurisdiction and citizen-membership, for example). The analysis here focuses on the institutional structure in order to examine directly the nature of the political relationships of individuals with systems of institutional power and organ isation. This is not the only, or even the most, valid approach, but it is the one taken here. There are places in this book where person-to-person or intra-group relation ships play a more central role, or where the relationships between noncitizens and citizens, or the noncitizenry and the citizenry, are considered. In such cases this is made explicit. The common convention of using the upper case ‘State’ is adopted throughout. This book also adopts the wording ‘s/he’ and ‘her/im’ for example. This is to avoid assuming binarity, while retaining the plural use of ‘they’ and ‘them’ which can sometimes be made difficult to express when these latter are adopted to refer to singular individuals. Her/im is used rather than her/him to avoid binarity. Some read this phonetically, others pronounce it ‘ze’ and ‘zer’. The book draws upon a range of text-based and other sources. This includes the work of visual artists and photographers. The images that have been selected either chal lenge or illustrate what is being discussed in the text and are used as sources along side those text-based sources which are cited or discussed. This book is intended to speak specifically to the considerations of States and multi-State institutions arising out of liberal frameworks. This is not because it would not be a useful exercise to address other frameworks, but because that is something for another book and another project. Liberal democratic thinking has been important globally in the development of the contemporary assumption of citizenship. As such, addressing a liberal democratic audience addresses more than the local jurisdictional concerns in ostensibly liberal democratic States and groupings. It also speaks to those international institutions for which these ways of talking have traction. This book argues for the recognition of noncitizenship as a fundamental liberal concept, coexistent and intertwined with citizenship, and suggests a basis for identifying the obligations that arise as a result. This is what I refer to as noncitizenism.