This book offers a critical analysis of the situation of Tibetan refugees in India through the lenses of human rights, refugee agency, refugee law, and refugee–host community conflict. The first book to mark the 1994 Dharamshala riot as a turning point in the Tibetan exilic trajectory, it situates local conflict and its wider implications for a community in exile over time within various conflict theories, something that has not been dealt with fully in recent decades. Moving beyond idealised narratives of harmonious coexistence, it documents instances of conflict, discrimination, and violence between Tibetan refugees and Indian host communities, drawing on ethnographic interviews. The book interrogates the absence of a national refugee law in India and demonstrates how this legal vacuum, combined with state policies and political discourse, suppresses refugee agency and normalises everyday violations of rights. It introduces the State–Society Dialogical Approach as a novel framework for refugee protection grounded in dialogue, participation, and human rights. This book will appeal to academics, students, NGOs and policymakers interested in refugee law, migration studies, sociology of race and ethnicity, political science, socio-legal studies, and peace and conflict studies. 

Hemaadri Singh Rana is an independent researcher with a PhD in Political Science from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. As an Assistant Professor, she taught political theory and public policy at Amity University and Graphic Era University, India. Her research was published in The Routledge Handbook of Refugees in India (2022), Modern South Asian Thinkers (2019), Journal of Society and Culture in South Asia and Economic and Political Weekly.