International Theory 9 state membership and stable access to its associated benefits. In this, I follow Arendt, who adopted a similarly wide definition of statelessness, warning that drawing the category too narrowly could obscure how those who possessed a legally recognised nationality but were denied the usual protections of national membership were made vulnerable in similar ways to those with no legally recognised nationality.44 Similarly, I define statelessness broadly not because I assume the experiences of all stateless people so understood are identical, but because they are all routinely vulnerable to rights violations, basic needs deprivations, and disenfranchisement due to their lack of effective state membership (legal status notwithstanding). For the purposes of my normative arguments, it is morally significant that stateless people share this feature, whatever other differences mark their experiences.45 By the ‘state system’, I mean the version of the state system that currently exists, structured around the two principles identified above: Political Authority Principle: because states are the world’s primary political authorities, reliable access to basic needs fulfilment, rights protection, and political enfranchisement is conditioned on state membership. Sovereignty Principle: because they are sovereign, states may grant or deny membership at will. Some might argue that the state system is not structured around the Sovereignty Principle because international law concerning stateless people and refugees constrains states so they cannot deny membership (or its attendant protections) to anyone at will. However, states, as sovereign entities, must opt into the relevant conventions. Moreover, even states party to these conventions can circumvent them or comply with them in ways that do not involve granting state membership (or even reliable protection) to stateless people or refugees. States may simply refuse to comply with international law, as the United States has done by turning away asylum seekers at its southern border.46 Alternatively, states may act in ways that could be considered compliant with international law but that nonetheless deny state membership and protection to those who seek it. Consider high seas interdiction, where migrants are intercepted and diverted in international waters, sometimes without the opportunity to submit a request for asylum.47 Consider also ‘protection elsewhere schemes’, designed to ‘defend a legitimate state’s right to unilaterally exclude outsiders (including refugees)’ by allowing states where refugees arrive to send them to other, 44 Gündogdu 2015, 2; Siegelberg 2020, 206. I will not extend my arguments to cover people who do have effective state memberships but whose rights are still badly neglected or violated by their states. Even though many with effective state memberships are not treated by their states as justice requires, in the current state system, possession of an effective state membership is still extremely significant and has tremendous effects on one’s life prospects and ability to agitate for one’s rights. Even people with state memberships may be badly oppressed, but their oppression arguably takes a different form than that which stateless people face. Thus, I hesitate to treat stateless people and people whose rights are not fully protected by their states as one homogenous group. I leave it open that others may argue my conclusions should be extended to people who are not stateless but are also not adequately protected by their states. However, I will not pursue those extensions here. 46 Drake and Saldivar 2018; Mattiace and Gaubeca 2023. 47 See Wise 2013. 45 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press