| dc.description.abstract | Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and
practices in India, this thesis investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan
Government-in-exile (TGiE), based in India since 1960, remains internationally
unrecognised, has limited judicial powers and lacks de jure sovereignty over
territory in both Tibet and in exile. However, this exiled administration claims
legitimacy as the official representative of the Tibetan population, attempts to
make its voice heard within the international community and performs a number
of state-like functions in relation to its diasporic 'citizenry'. Given that conventional
political theory is premised on the territorially-bounded sovereign nation-state as a
container for political activity, and governments are legitimated according to the
territory over which they hold authority, this is an exceptional case of a
government which appears to refute these orthodox assumptions. As such, this
study of the form, functioning and limitations of TGiE and of its existence and
state-like operations within another sovereign state, raises important theoretical
issues which speak directly to political geography's concerns with power and space.
These include the nature of sovereignty, the extent to which sovereignty can be
disentangled from jurisdiction over territory, and the role of 'the exception' in
geopolitical discourses. Employing multi-sited ethnographic methodologies, the
broad aims of this research are to investigate what kind of political entity the TGiE
is, and to examine the nature ofthe sovereignty it articulates. To do so, attention is
paid to Tibetan settlements in exile as sites of sovereignty, TGiE's construction of a
Tibetan 'population' in exile and its management of livelihoods, the negotiation of
exilic political identities, and the strategic spatialities of TGiE's election systems.
Rejecting realist arguments that polities such as TGiE should be viewed merely as
discrepant forms of political practice, it is argued that if sovereignty is understood
as historically contingent and socially constructed - and the state, sovereignty, and
territory thereby conceptually disentangled - this opens up the theoretical
possibility of territorial-less sovereign polities. | en_US |
