Rehearsing the State presents a comprehensive investigation of the institutions, performances, and actors through which the Tibetan Government-in-Exile is rehearsing statecraft. McConnell offers new insights into how communities officially excluded from formal state politics enact hoped-for futures and seek legitimacy in the present. * Offers timely and original insights into exile Tibetan politics based on detailed qualitative research in Tibetan communities in India * Advances existing debates in political geography by bringing ideas of stateness and statecraft into dialogue with geographies of temporality * Explores the provisional and pedagogical dimensions of state practices, adding weight to assertions that states are in a continual situation of emergence * Makes a significant contribution to critical state theory