Tashi Rabgey

Tashi Rabgey is Research Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School where she specializes in statehood, authoritarianism and territorial politics, with a focus on multilevel governance and the politics of scale in the People’s Republic of China. She also works on constitutional and international legal issues relating to special status arrangements of asymmetric states and autonomous regions in comparative global contexts. Her primary regional focus is Tibet and Greater China, with a specialization in the Sino-Tibetan dispute. She is completing a long-term study of Chinese statehood, elite and institutional politics and Tibet’s rule and governance during China’s global rise.

At the Elliott School, she directs the Research Initiative on Multination States (RIMS) which convenes a Track II dialogue process with policy researchers in Beijing on state asymmetry and territorial autonomy. She is also founding director of the Tibet Governance Lab, a research platform and incubator for policy research on Tibet that provides a dynamic hub for the exchange of research, practice-driven insight and approaches to governance in contemporary Tibet.

Before joining the Elliott School, Professor Rabgey was codirector of the University of Virginia Tibet Center where she was a lecturer in contemporary Tibetan studies. She is also cofounder Machik, a global nonprofit that has delivered strategies for Tibetan-language education, community empowerment and civic engagement in Tibet for over twenty years. She has been a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, a visiting scholar at Sichuan University and visiting professor at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr in Kurdistan (Iraq). She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, as well as law degrees from Oxford and Cambridge where she was a Rhodes scholar.