 Recent scholarship has thus seen a growing interest in grounding analysis of the justification of punishment in a political theory of the state. Many of these accounts are based on Rawls’s political theory or on other versions of constructivism (see Matravers 2000 and 2011b; Dolovich 2004; Brettschneider 2007; Flanders 2017; for critiques of such accounts, see Garvey 2004, Dagger 2011b). Several others are based on versions of republicanism (see Pettit 1997; Duff 2001; Dagger 2007 and 2011a; Yankah 2015; for other recent contributions showing the importance of political theory, see Brudner 2009; Brooks 2011; Sigler 2011; Markel 2012; Chiao 2016 and 2018). How far it matters, in this context, to make explicit a political theory of the state depends on how far different plausible political theories will generate different accounts of how punishment can be justified and should be used. We cannot pursue this question here (for two sharply contrasting views on it, see Philips 1986; M. Davis 1989), save to note one central point. For any political theory that takes seriously the idea of citizenship as full membership of the polity, the problem of punishment takes a particularly acute form, since we have now to ask how punishment can be consistent with citizenship (how citizens can legitimately punish each other): if we are not to say that those who commit crimes thereby forfeit their status as citizens (see s. 6 below), we must — if we are to justify punishment at all — show how the imposition of punishment can be consistent with, or even expressive of, the respect that citizens owe to each other. (Punishment is also, of course, imposed on non-citizens who commit crimes within a state’s territory: on the primacy of citizenship in understanding criminal law and its authority, and on the status of non-citizens, see Duff 2013 and 2018: ch. 3; Wringe 2021.)