20 Lucia M. Rafanelli plausible accounts of people’s obligations to pursue justice will place similar limitations on the gravity of the costs they are obligated to absorb in its pursuit. Thus, if stateless people are in situations where pursuing justice (for themselves or others) via resistance is prohibitively costly, they are not required to do so. Indeed, such considerations seem to have led some Hong Kong asylum seekers to forego resistance. Some asylum seekers refused to participate in Refugee Occupy because they believed ‘protesting and becoming too visible…would reinforce their stigmatisation’ and ‘worried that the little they had achieved over the years could be swept away by law enforcement to restore the order that the Occupiers had disturbed’.94 If they, or other stateless people, judge the costs of resistance too high to bear, I am in no epistemic position to doubt them. So, I do not suggest a general moral obligation for stateless people to resist statist institutions. However, I have shown that one commonly invoked rationale for state power and for the claim that people have strong reasons (or obligations) to uphold and obey states is weaker than often thought. Namely, the claim that people should uphold and obey states to avoid the dangers of statelessness arguably doesn’t apply to stateless people, for whom the state system is the origin of much harm and injustice. I have argued it is statist institutions that create the condition of statelessness—by entrenching the state system’s current structure, which makes it the case that not everyone is guaranteed state membership and makes the lack of state membership synonymous with lacking reliable access to basic needs fulfilment, rights protections, and political enfranchisement. But if this is so, it hardly makes sense to ask stateless people to uphold statist institutions to escape the dangers of statelessness, since it is those same institutions that subject them to the dangers of statelessness. And insofar as resisting—rather than upholding—statist institutions is a precondition of stateless people enjoying justice, they have broad prima facie moral permissions to resist. Granted, even thinkers, like Stilz and Wellman, who invoke the dangers of statelessness to ground obligations to obey states, could agree that asylum seekers in Hong Kong (and perhaps elsewhere) would be permitted to disobey the government if it were illegitimate. After all, Stilz95 and Wellman96 only claim people are obligated to obey legitimate states. They could argue that, taking the Hong Kong case as an example, Hong Kong’s government is illegitimate and asylum seekers living there therefore have no obligation to obey it. If Stilz or Wellman made such an argument, one might conclude that there was no real difference between my view and theirs, since we would all agree asylum seekers in Hong Kong (and other similarlysituated populations) were morally permitted to disobey the government. However, a crucial difference would remain between my view and Stilz’s or Wellman’s, even on this interpretation. Namely, my claims about stateless people’s moral permissions to resist the state they reside in do not depend on an assessment of the state’s legitimacy. On my view, stateless people’s permissions to resist are grounded in the idea that a state system structured around the Political Authority and Sovereignty Principles creates statelessness and that cooperating with the institutions comprising this system entrenches it (thereby perpetuating statelessness). This reasoning stands regardless of whether any given state qualifies as legitimate. 94 Vecchio and Ham 2018, 215. Stilz 2009. 96 Wellman 2001. 95 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press