POLAR During fieldwork, I frequently encountered Tibetans’ refusal of the “citizen” label, preferring to use “IC holders” or “passport holders” instead. This opacity is a form of “simply refusing the gaze, of disengagement” (Simpson, 2014, 106– 07). Second-generation Tibetans choose instead to recast political vocabularies to reflect their refugee experiences— as lives governed through documents and yet unaccounted for by the prevailing citizenship regime. By referring to themselves as document “holders,” Tibetans refuse the terms on offer and instead recast statist vocabularies to reflect their experience (see also McGranahan, 2016b). A few days later, I broached the topic of citizenship again. Jamphel responded: “I just got a document to travel. Simple as that.” CONCLUSION: BEYOND CITIZENSHIP Among Tibetans eligible for citizenship, some publicly claim it, some aspire to it; others reject it or advocate its acceptance for championing the Tibetan cause. Some Tibetans exercise the “right to opacity”—a form of refusal of both the categories of the state and the anthropologist. These varied positions reflect a commitment to a political subjectivity as Tibetan refugees and acknowledge the historical and cultural barriers that prevent a smooth transition into citizenship. That many eligible, second-generation Tibetan refugees continue to deny citizenship also exposes the incompleteness of the Indian citizenship regimes. Partha Chatterjee (2004) distinguishes between “civil society” and “political society” in explicating Indian democracy. The marginalized, lacking access to civil forums, negotiate with the state for basic needs through a “political society.” This also impacts noncitizens like Tibetan refugees. Acquiring Indian citizenship does not guarantee rights; rights often depend on navigating political networks (Björkman, 2021). Thus, for Tibetans, the loss of a representative community can pose a significant challenge. Intergenerational statelessness and precarity have led to an increased migration of Tibetan refugees to the West, where they face different challenges in acquiring citizenship. Carole McGranahan (2018) has noted that Tibetan refugees must “perform a convincing Tibetan identity” to satisfy Canada’s asylum criteria. Officials often demand refugees to embody statelessness and victimhood to authenticate persecution claims. As Shahram Khosravi (2010) illustrates in his powerful ethnography, seemingly irrelevant details can result in asylum denial. Furthermore, refugees endure temporal and existential experiences of “waiting” (Adhikari, 2021; Brun, 2015; Haas, 2023; Rotter, 2016), which do not always conclude with citizenship. Even when it does, refugees can find themselves in situations of unrelenting poverty and underdevelopment, a scenario exemplified in Eric Tang’s (2015) study of Cambodian refugees in the Bronx hyperghetto. Khatharya Um’s (2017) concept of “refugitude” highlights the enduring experience of refugees—asserting that the “conditions and consciousnesseses of being a refugee often outlasts the expiration of the politico-legal status.” For Tibetans in India, as with many other refugees around the world, legal status falls short of being the panacea it is purported to be. Citizenship regimes continue to be partial, racialized, and discriminatory, promising and yet preventing access to institutions and resources. Refugees, as a population rendered liminal, must confront additional layers of exclusionary violence. At the same time, the condition of being a refugee also requires surviving, rebuilding, and forging community. Tibetans have created a transnational political system, institutes of culture and education, and continue to build their community through care and shared resources. Through these acts, Tibetan refugees convert settlements from sites of displacement into spaces of national belonging. In their persistence, refugees resist erasure and claim the experience of their transmigratory lives. Their actions not only reveal the hollowness of citizenship regimes but also stand in defiance to the global hegemony of the nation-state system. 15552934, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/plar.12580 by Test, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 186