Received: 6 September 2022 Accepted: 19 September 2024 DOI: 10.1111/plar.12580 RESEARCH ARTICLE Disaggregating citizenship: Tibetan refugees navigating identity, belonging, and exclusionary state policies in India Ishani Dasgupta Pozen Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA Correspondence Ishani Dasgupta, Pozen Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Email: ishanid87@gmail.com Abstract This essay explores the struggles of second-generation Tibetan refugees under an exclusionary Indian citizenship regime. Confronted with a national orthodoxy that entwines legal status, entitlements, and national identity, Tibetans respond by “disaggregating” citizenship. First, stateless Tibetans, born in India to refugee parents, won legal appeals by demonstrating that Tibetan nationality was no bar to Indian citizenship. In response, Indian authorities demanded that Tibetans give up refugee entitlements and remove themselves from their national space and political community in exile as the price of Indian citizenship. This article explores the diverse responses of Tibetans to the citizenship-on-offer: some aspiring for it, some accepting it, and others actively rejecting it. These responses illustrate strategies refugees employ to navigate citizenship regimes that often render them liminal. Refugees act both to mitigate the precarity of statelessness and to preserve their identity, community, and political aspirations against erasure. In doing so, they not only disrupt the national orthodoxy of states that negates refugee experiences but also reveal the incompleteness and contradictions of citizenship regimes. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2024 The Author(s). PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. 176 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/plar Polit. Leg. Anthropol. Rev. 2024;47:176–190.