18 Lucia M. Rafanelli and protection, fighting for our rights, dignity and future when these are not clearly provided as per international and domestic legal frameworks.86 Though this kind of resistance didn’t (directly) involve lawbreaking or physically confronting the executors of state power, it did involve asylum seekers rejecting the norms dominant in their social context, which said they should be passive and obedient and should ingratiate themselves to their would-be benefactors. Members of Refugee Occupy and Refugee Union also rejected the dominant understanding of what it meant to be a ‘refugee’ in Hong Kong—an outsider to the political community, either a passive recipient of whatever aid the state or private charity deigned to give, or, if found to be exerting agency, deviant and dangerous.87 And they dared to live according to a different model—by asserting their agency, building a supportive and empowering political community of asylum seekers, and contesting the terms of the political institutions to which they were subject. Thus, Vecchio and Ham argue that Refugee Occupy ‘produced a significant identity shift for asylum seekers in Hong Kong. Asylum seekers resolved to take ownership of the ‘refugee’ label, renegotiating their socioeconomic degradation by asserting their rights and taking pride in… reaching and surviving Hong Kong’.88 Thus, participants in Refugee Occupy posed a clear challenge to the Political Authority Principle. Whereas the Political Authority Principle identifies state membership as a prerequisite for political enfranchisement, assuming people can and should exercise political agency through their states, members of Refugee Occupy asserted their political agency despite lacking state membership. Arguably, participants in Refugee Occupy also challenged the Sovereignty Principle by asserting and enacting their membership in Hong Kong’s political community despite Hong Kong’s refusal to grant them formal membership, thereby contesting the notion that states should have full discretion over their membership. Hence, my conclusion is that Refugee Occupy does contain anti-statist elements—or, more precisely, elements that challenge the current structure of the state system. Though some of the protesters’ demands could be interpreted simply as calls for Hong Kong’s government to behave differently, their acts of protest also represent challenges to the state system’s two organising principles, the Political Authority Principle and the Sovereignty Principle. Earlier, I proposed that—though I discuss Hong Kong as an illustrative case— directing political activity through statist channels could entrench statist institutions in other contexts as well. Similarly, stateless people can engage in anti-statist resistance in other contexts; this phenomenon is not unique to Hong Kong. Indeed, there are ample examples of such resistance—where stateless people assert their political agency against a background of norms and institutions that assume political agency must always be exercised through one’s state. For instance, Pincock, Betts, and Easton-Calabria examine how refugees in Uganda and Kenya undertake collective action to provide protection and aid within their own communities.89 Similarly, Ilcan presents refugees’ activism in Uganda as a kind of political claims making that can create novel forms of political subjectivity and community and challenge states’ 86 Refugee Union 2014. See Vecchio and Ham 2018, 207, 210. 88 Ibid., 212. 89 Pincock, Betts, and Easton-Calabria 2020. 87 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press