Compelled exile performances: the precarity-performance-repression dynamic for exile activists from Bhutan

For those who flee into exile, transnational repression creates particular forms of tension around the public activities that exiles often feel they must perform. This paper explores that tension, focusing on two forms of compelled exile performance: highlighting home country abuses and initiating claims for asylum. The paper begins by sketching the connective tissue that brings precarity, performance and transnational repression into a dynamic relationship. Then it offers a review of the growing transnational repression literature, noting state perspectives and individual experiences. Then the paper examines the relationship between celebrity and power to problematize the ways in which performative action is a survival strategy for exile activists. Then, to fully demonstrate the ways that exile, performance and transnational repression are fully imbricated, the paper draws on the situation of Bhutan’s exiled population to demonstrate a range of compelled exile performances, and the resulting forms of transnational repression that followed.