Rehearsing the State

Rehearsing the State presents a comprehensive investigation of the institutions, performances, and actors through which the Tibetan Government-in-Exile is rehearsing statecraft. McConnell offers new insights into how communities officially excluded from formal state politics enact hoped-for futures and seek legitimacy in the present. Offers timely and original insights into exile Tibetan politics based on detailed qualitative research in Tibetan communities in India Advances existing debates in political geography by bringing ideas of stateness and statecraft into dialogue with geographies of temporality Explores the provisional and pedagogical dimensions of state practices, adding weight to assertions that states are in a continual situation of emergence Makes a significant contribution to critical state theory

List of Figures viii Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgements x Note on Transliteration xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 Rethinking the (Non)state: Time/ Space/ Performance 17 3 Setting the Scene: Contested Narratives of Tibetan Statehood 40 4 Rehearsal Spaces: Material and Symbolic Roles of Exile Tibetan Settlements 61 5 Playwright and Cast: Crafting Legitimacy in Exile 92 6 Scripting the State: Constructing a Population, Welfare State and Citizenship in Exile 116 7 Audiences of Statecraft: Negotiating Hospitality and Performing Diplomacy 145 8 Conclusion: Rehearsing Stateness 171 References 190 Index 216