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Giorgio Shani's recent work provides a comprehensive account of the Sikh nationalist movement, which has sought an independent state in the Punjab region of India under the name Khalistan. Addressed to the fields of international relations, political science, and Sikh studies, the book accounts for the rise of a Sikh nationalist consciousness, its continuing relevance to some, and the way in which it has waned in recent years, in India and outside of it. Thus, the book also centrally addresses the field of diaspora studies, by explicating the dynamics of support for Khalistan outside India, and the ways in which more recent alternatives to a nationalist and territorialist conception of the Sikh community offer a particularly diasporic mode of imagining the community outside of "the Westphalian conception of territorialized sovereignty" (pp. 10-11). Shani thus challenges the field of international relations to pay attention to the workings of a nonstate actor, such as the Khalistani movement, within a larger state-centered system.
The book first addresses the "dialectical" relationship (pp. 12, 29) between the Sikh tradition and the colonial state, through which a more homogenized and territorialized Sikh identity was formed, such that "although the Sikhs, like Muslim and Hindu communities, may have constituted a panth after the institutionalization of the Khalsa, the development of a quamic