Failed states – political entities without a functioning government – pose an analytical embarrassment primarily to those theories that consider certain institutionalised human practices or relations as “grounds” for principles of justice. Most of the relations proposed as justice-triggering by practice-dependent theories are absent in Failed states. Failed states do not possess a cooperative societal structure, an institutionally mediated basic structure and do not provide central societal goods. Also, they lack an effective and centralised coercive authority. Ironically, where justice seems most urgently needed in practice, practice-dependent justice-theories cannot demand it. Given these difficulties practice-dependent theories seem committed to proclaiming failed states 'black justice-holes', that is zones where principles of justice can normatively not be demanded, or else to altering some of their premises. This paper argues that the reason for this embarrassing result lies in practice-dependent theorists' confusion between the existence-conditions and the realisation-conditions of justice. It proposes a Kant-inspired revised relational account of justice, where demands of justice are solely triggered by the existence of systemic domination and grounded in the normative presumption of individuals’ equal freedoms. Systemic domination describes those empirical relations, in which individuals are necessarily unable to observe their natural duty of justice not to arbitrarily violate others' external freedoms.