The Human Rights of Non-citizens 15 “institutional, necessarily non-contractual, relationship of noncitizenship” gives rise to substantive rights and obligations of its own. As states seek to ensure that their citizens have access to goods, they “may also actively impair access to these goods for others.” As she explains, “a state has specific and institutional obligations towards those people who bear the burden of its existence and of its actions.” Writing from the vantage point of political theory, Bloom’s argument is that relationships of both citizenship and non-citizenship are essential to state construction and state legitimacy. By emphasizing responsibility, Bloom’s contribution is in conversation the work of several human rights scholars seeking to reinvigorate the concept of responsibility. In her recently published book No Refuge, Parekh argues that we must move beyond a frame of “rescue” toward a frame of political responsibility for conditions of structural injustice that deny refugees the minimum conditions of human dignity.45 The states that established the current refugee system “have created a situation in which the vast majority of refugees are effectively unable to get refuge in any meaningful sense; that is, they are not able to access the minimum conditions of human dignity.”46 This is a structural injustice that we – the citizens of those states and Parekh’s audience for her book – “share political responsibility for.”47 This is not the responsibility that one might have for a “direct injustice”48 like the US family separation policy, but rather a responsibility for an injustice that has resulted from the aggregate acts of people living their lives, which is then “assigned depending on how we are related to the injustice.”49 Kathryn Sikkink, in her recent work focusing on responsibility, has argued that some harms cannot be remedied without individual and collective action.50 As a result, “for the enjoyment and implementation of rights, other agents, including individuals, must take some responsibilities for the fulfillment of rights.”51 Recent work by Tendayi Achiume ties this responsibility to the entrenched global inequality caused by colonization.52 She argues that “Third World peoples” are not in fact political strangers to “First World political communities” – they “were brutally initiated into First World political communities under European colonialism and remain within these communities today.”53 Based on this, she argues that “First World states have no right to exclude Third World persons” and that “Third World persons are entitled to First World inclusion.”54 45 Parekh, No Refuge, p. 12 Ibid., p. 159. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 167 49 Ibid., p. 172. 50 Sikkink, The Hidden Face of Rights, p. 45. 51 Ibid., p. 52. 52 Achiume, “Re-Imagining International Law,” p. 143; see also E. T. Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization” (2019) 71(6) Stanford Law Review 1509–1574. 53 Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization” at 1533. 54 Ibid. at 1551. 46 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press