CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 66Migration, Refugees, and IntegrationChina's Ethnic Minorities and RelationsDiaspora, migration, transnational identity

Refusal as political practice: Citizenship, sovereignty, and Tibetan refugee status

McGRANAHAN, CAROLE·2018·American Ethnologist
DOI 10.1111/amet.12671
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Is it possible to be both a refugee and a citizen? For six decades, Tibetan refugees have refused citizenship in South Asia as part of their claims to Tibetan state sovereignty. They have lived in India and Nepal as refugee noncitizens, either undocumented or underdocumented, for multiple generations. But as Tibetans migrate to the United States and Canada, they gain citizenship through political asylum while maintaining their belonging to the Dalai Lama's refugee community. This shift in political practice is as situated in specific histories as it is in geographies. Tibetan citizenship practices in exile are not claims for recognition or forms of resistance; they are, rather, a refusal of international norms through a present‐day insistence on past and future political sovereignty.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/amet.12671

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Tibetan refugees resisted assimilation into their new host societies.

    “Faced with the fear of “scattering and being absorbed like water in sand” (Dalai Lama XIV 1984), Tibetan refugees resisted assimilation into their new host societies (McGranahan 2018).”

    From Communities of Absence: Emotions, Time, and Buddhism in the Creation of Belonging (2021) · cites this paper as McGranahan 2018

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 78

  1. 10.1111/amet.12595 · DOI
  2. 10.1525/ae.1990.17.1.02a00030 · DOI
  3. 10.1515/9781400825783 · DOI
  4. 10.1080/01459740.2015.1074576 · DOI
  5. 10.1215/9780822374725 · DOI
  6. 10.14506/ca32.3.04 · DOI
  7. Bohmer Carol, 2008, Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the Twenty‐First Century
  8. 10.7208/chicago/9780226283951.001.0001 · DOI
  9. 10.14506/ca32.3.02 · DOI
  10. Bosniak Linda, 2008, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership
  11. Burnett Christina Duffy, 2008, ‘They Say I Am Not an American’ …: The Non‐citizen National and the Law of American Empire, Immigration and Nationality Law Review, 29, 511
  12. 10.9783/9780812209808 · DOI
  13. 10.1215/9780822391302 · DOI
  14. Chari P. R., 2003, Missing Boundaries: Refugees, Migrants, Stateless and Internally Displaced Persons in South Asia
  15. 10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
  16. 10.1525/ae.2003.30.4.508 · DOI
  17. Coutin Susan Bibler, 2007, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States
  18. 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2011.01092.x · DOI
  19. 10.1525/9780520341234 · DOI
  20. 10.1111/amet.12566 · DOI
  21. DeVoe Dorsh Marie, 1987, People in Upheaval, 54
  22. Dhompa Tsering Wangmo, 2013, A Home in Tibet
  23. 10.1111/anti.12028 · DOI
  24. 10.1080/13504630.2017.1310039 · DOI
  25. 10.1525/california/9780520277700.001.0001 · DOI
  26. 10.1080/14736480802261459 · DOI
  27. 10.1525/can.2005.20.3.362 · DOI
  28. 10.1215/08992363-1890459 · DOI
  29. 10.1093/jrs/fen044 · DOI
  30. 10.1093/jrs/fes004 · DOI
  31. French Rebecca, 1991, Governments‐in‐Exile in Contemporary World Politics, 188
  32. Garratt Kevin, 1997, Tibetan Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Returnees, and the Refugee Conventions—Predicaments, Problems and Prospects, Tibet Journal, 22, 18
  33. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199373307.001.0001 · DOI
  34. Hepner Tricia Redeker, 2009, Generation Nationalism and Generation Asylum: Eritrean Migrants, the Global Diaspora, and the Transnational Nation‐State, Diaspora, 18, 184
  35. 10.11126/stanford/9780804760171.001.0001 · DOI
  36. Hindess Barry, 2005, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, 241
  37. Isin Engin F., 2002, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship
  38. 10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.09.005 · DOI
  39. 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01790.x · DOI
  40. 10.1525/california/9780520269460.001.0001 · DOI
  41. 10.1007/s12134-014-0382-0 · DOI
  42. Lokyitsang Dawa, 2017, Are Tibetans Indigenous?, Lhakar Diaries
  43. 10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.002431 · DOI
  44. 10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050 · DOI · Paper page
  45. Mamdani Mahmood, 1996, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
  46. 10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.04.001 · DOI
  47. 10.1068/d0711 · DOI
  48. 10.1080/00045608.2011.628245 · DOI
  49. 10.1002/9781118661192 · DOI
  50. McGranahan Carole, 2007, Imperial Formations, 173
  51. 10.14506/ca31.3.03 · DOI
  52. 10.14506/ca31.3.01 · DOI
  53. 10.1017/S0010417516000530 · DOI
  54. 10.1215/9781478002086 · DOI
  55. 10.5749/minnesota/9780816665372.001.0001 · DOI
  56. Norbu Dawa, 2001, Refugees from Tibet: Structural Causes of Successful Settlements, Tibet Journal, 26, 3
  57. 10.1146/annurev.an.09.100180.001315 · DOI
  58. 10.1111/1467-9655.12044 · DOI
  59. Roemer Stephanie, 2008, The Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile: Politics at Large, 10.4324/9780203928141 · DOI
  60. Samaddar Ranabir, 2003, Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000
  61. 10.1057/9781403984678_2 · DOI
  62. 10.1515/9781400828593 · DOI
  63. Shakya Tsering, 1999, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947
  64. 10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.04.001 · DOI
  65. Shrestha Tina, 2015, Kāgaj Banāune: A Collective Moral Practice of Suffering in the Asylum Experiences of Nepalis in the United States, Studies in Nepali History and Society, 20, 5
  66. Simpson Audra, 2007, On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship, Junctures, 9, 67
  67. 10.14506/ca31.3.02 · DOI
  68. 10.1080/13688790.2017.1334283 · DOI
  69. 10.14506/ca31.3.04 · DOI
  70. Stoler Ann Laura, 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things
  71. 10.1525/can.1989.4.3.02a00030 · DOI
  72. 10.1215/9780822373612 · DOI
  73. 10.1080/09672550701544571 · DOI
  74. 10.1525/california/9780520269040.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
  75. 10.1215/9780822397533 · DOI
  76. 10.14506/ca31.3.05 · DOI
  77. 10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.177 · DOI
  78. Zournazi Mary, 2002, Hope: New Philosophies for Change

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
McGRANAHAN, C.
Affiliations
University of Colorado Boulder (US)
Corresponding author
McGRANAHAN, CAROLE
ORCID
McGRANAHAN, CAROLE
Venue
American Ethnologist
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2018-08
Volume
45
Issue
3
Pages
367-379
ISSN
  • 0094-0496 (ISSN-L)
  • 1548-1425
DOI
10.1111/amet.12671
OpenAlex
W2888099820
Cited by
66
References
2
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 4
FWCI
9.65
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor, 20 d)
Locations
American Ethnologist (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • American Institute of Indian Studies
  • University of Colorado
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Migration, Refugees, and Integration
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations
  • Social Sciences › Demography › Diaspora, migration, transnational identity
Keywords
Tibetan refugees, citizenship, political asylum, state sovereignty, exile, Dalai Lama, irregular migration, international norms, political belonging, Tibetan diaspora, India, Nepal, United States, Canada

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review