The Political Geography of International Advocacy

Abstract

Abstract Through a study of the Indian Central Relief Committee for Tibetans and the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees, this article maps the multiple dimensions of Indian and American civil society advocacy on behalf of Tibet in the immediate aftermaths of the Dalai Lama’s 1959 flight to India: anticommunism, imperialism, discourses of religious freedom and civilizational solidarity, domestic politics, and regional security interests. These contexts did not operate separately, but rather formed layered interactions, layers that eventually bound Tibetan autonomy. While the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan nationalists worked across the geographic and political spectrum to generate international support as a matter of practicality and necessity, the complex web from which this support came, and through which it operated, functioned as constraints as well as backing. Advocacy from such a disparate set of national, personal, religious, and political interests came with limitations that defined Tibetans as communist victims, an oppressed religious minority, and a humanitarian commodity, but not as nationalist claimants.