 We now turn to the question of whether we should distinguish the concept of political obligation from that of a duty to obey the law.  The answer may depend on whether we understand the term “political” to refer to the status in virtue of which a person has the obligation or to the entity or agent to whom she owes it. In the former case, political obligation refers to those obligations a person has as a member or citizen of a particular polity. So understood, a theory of political obligation will tell us nothing about the authority a state enjoys over non-members; for example, whether and why short-term visitors residing on its territory have a duty to obey its laws. That need not render it defective as an account of political obligation, but it does entail that we should not take the phrase “political obligation” to be synonymous with the phrase “a duty to obey the law simpliciter,” but only with the phrase “a citizen’s (or member’s) duty to obey the law.” In contrast, if “political” refers to the agent or entity to whom a person owes the obligation, then a theory of political obligation will be synonymous with a theory of the duty to obey the law, since it will aspire to explain why those who are subject to a particular state’s jurisdiction, be they citizens or foreigners, have a moral duty to act as it directs them to act. Arguably, certain solutions to the problem of political obligation fare better when “political” refers to the status in virtue of which a person has the obligation than when it refers to the entity to which she owes it, or vice versa. For example, membership or associative approaches to political obligation may have a leg up in justifying citizens’ duties to obey the law but face a significant challenge in accounting for the obligation of foreigners to do so (see §4.3). Conversely, natural duty theories may be able to explain why anyone, citizen or not, has a duty to obey the law (i.e., the laws of one or another legal system) but struggle to explain why anyone has a duty to obey the laws of the particular state of which she is a member (see the discussion of particularity at the end of § 2.3; see also §4.4). Attention to the ambiguity in the referent of the term “political” may also support a pluralistic or multi-principle solution to the problem of political obligation; e.g., a membership justification for the duty of citizens to obey the law, and a consent justification for the duty of foreigners to do so (see §5).