 If “represents” means what it does in the context of ordinary democratic politics, namely, A represents B if and only if A is authorized to act on B’s behalf through some appropriate public political process (such as an election), then this is a non-starter, since an oppressive regime is unlikely to allow any such process. This standard, institutionally-based understanding of representation would work as a criterion of rightful authority to initiate revolutionary war only if one of two conditions were satisfied. First, those who initiate revolutionary war were duly chosen as representatives prior to the advent of an oppressive regime (as when an authoritarian coup usurps an elected government). Second, the constitutional order included pre-authorization for revolution under certain specified conditions. It is worth noting that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen explicitly included a right (and indeed a duty) to resist tyranny and that the Inner Service Act of the Turkish Armed Forces (articles 35 and 85) goes farther, designating an agent of revolution by pre-authorizing the military to depose the government if it violates the constitutional requirement of secular government. Just as an advance directive for medical care enables a competent patient to pre-authorize agent to act on her behalf in the event of her losing the capacity to act, so a constitutional provision of this sort would enable a people under conditions of political freedom to pre-authorize some agent to initiate revolution on its behalf should the abuse of government authority undermine its ability to perform an act of authorization. Neither of these two conditions will be satisfied if the country in question never had a political system that produced bona fide representatives of the people or never had a constitution that pre-authorized revolution. Interestingly, current discussions of rightful authority for waging revolutionary war do not consider the possibility of pre-authorization for initiating and leading revolutions, thus following the unfortunate but widespread practice of discussing the morality of war as if institutions did not exist or were relevant only as instruments for applying a system of moral principles that can be fully worked out by eliciting intuitions from cases of individual actions considered apart from any institutional background (Buchanan 2006, 2015).