Sociological research has examined how temporary legal statuses suspend migrants’ lives between inclusion and exclusion in a polity. Yet scholarship analyzing the effects of temporary policy on the organizational terrain of migrant reception is scant. This dissertation addresses this gap by asking: How do explicitly temporary migration policies shape service provision for refugees? Specifically, how do forced migrants themselves—both as consumers and purveyors of services—shape these organizations? And what are the implications of these activities for refugees’ access to services? I answer these questions through a qualitative, longitudinal study of one organizational field in a case of forced migrant reception: healthcare provision for Syrians in Istanbul. In 2014, Turkey established the Temporary Protection Regulation, granting registered Syrians free access to state healthcare services. Yet, despite the extension of free state healthcare, Syrian doctors mobilized to provide care through informal, nonstate providers and have gradually institutionalized their services. Drawing on over 175 interviews with Syrian patients, Syrian doctors, Turkish doctors, NGO administrators, and government officials, the dissertation examines the persistence of these clinics, the factors driving refugees to seek out nonstate services, and the efforts of refugee doctors to formalize their work within a complex legal environment that both accepts Syrians and forestalls their full integration. Integrating scholarship on organizations, refugee reception, and immigrant entrepreneurship, the study traces how Syrian healthcare providers institutionalize in Istanbul’s urban fabric. The dissertation argues that when national policies are ambivalent about integration, immigrant organizations embed themselves in the host community by leveraging local and transnational networks for legitimacy and resources. First, it analyzes how informal immigrant organizations survive in “humanitarian niches” that emerge in host states shocked by large refugee populations. Next, it examines how providers adapt their work within shifting opportunity structures, as humanitarianism recedes as an organizing principle. Finally, it demonstrates how immigrant organizations gradually re-position themselves as facilitators of transnational economic exchange and essential providers in their localities. Over time, humanitarian organizations privatize, serving diverse groups of local immigrant beneficiaries and international tourists, even as national policies hinder their full legalization—a phenomenon I refer to as “cosmopolitan embeddedness”.

In the 1980s, a violent civil war in El Salvador led to the mass emigration of over a million Salvadorans, many of whom fled national territory only to seek refuge in the U.S. - the very country funding the military dictatorship in their homeland. Although many Salvadorans bunkered down in cities like Los Angeles in the years to follow, a cohort of politicized Salvadoran migrants remained entrenched in the struggle in their homeland, supporting the resistance movement there and partnering with North American activists to end U.S. military intervention. This dissertation focuses on one such group of Salvadoran immigrant activists and their quest to "reconcile their Americas," balancing allegiances to their new hostland and their homeland after the war's end. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on the activists' creation of the Salvadoran-American Day festival in Los Angeles, and its institutionalization at the federal level, as a platform for visibility, political change, and integration between their two country contexts. Drawing on over six years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, this dissertation teases out the activists' subjective orientation, practical methodology, the constraints and openings for action they encounter, and the costs and benefits they experience in the course of their transnational political work. At a theoretical level, the case study contributes to an understanding of the relationship between processes of immigrant integration and transnationalism. As a narrative, it tells the story of these individuals from their experiences of mass violence in El Salvador to their ambiguous feelings about U.S. citizenship, their eventual embrace of a life lived "in-between," and the long-awaited but complex reconciliation facilitated by the rise of a leftist political power in the homeland.

The dissertation traces the efforts of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein to influence United States foreign policy against Ba’thist Iraq between 1990-2003. Specifically, I examine the role of the Iraqi National Congress—an Iraqi opposition group led by the exiles Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya—to enlist domestic foreign policy elites to make regime change in Iraq the official foreign policy agenda of the United States. The dissertation draws on archival records from the Iraqi opposition and interviews with the architects of American foreign policy on Iraq. In emphasizing the non-domestic sources of American foreign policy on Iraq, I challenge and revise explanations for the causes of the 2003 war in Iraq which tend to focus on Saddam Hussein’s security threat to the United States or policymakers’ reactions to and compensation for declining American hegemony. I link the Iraqi opposition’s lobbying for policies against Saddam Hussein to a broader set of cases in which diaspora lobbies, governments-in-exile, and other transborder activists lobby host states for foreign policies against their home regimes. Drawing on the tools of political and cultural sociology and science and technology studies, I theorize the structural characteristics of the field of foreign policy, emphasizing elite control over foreign policy. I argue that a confluence of overlapping elite networks, epistemic authority, and cultural fluency positioned the Iraqi exiles in the INC to interfere with CIA efforts to covertly remove Saddam Hussein from power, to coauthor with neoconservative policymakers the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and to transmit an aggressive policy of de-ba’thification to the Department of Defense shortly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The dissertation makes contributions to the historical sociology of foreign policy, debates about agency and social change, and how we think about transnational activism and state power.

This thesis offers an ethnographic exploration of social transformation: it explores the processes of (re)stratification as experienced in one rural community - Sântana, in western Romania - as a means to understand how macro changes impact everyday life at the local level. I explore the articulation between macro-social historical transformations and the opportunities and constraints that the resultant political and property regimes presented for villagers. I build on the ethnographic analyses of rural Eastern Europe by adding an historical analysis of the configurations and reconfigurations of life trajectories across three successive generations. The villagers I study lived a succession of property and political configurations: democratic and authoritarian regimes grounded in free market and private property until 1947, a totalitarian regime of state-socialism until 1989, and a liberal democracy re-building a free market economy from 1990 until today. This succession of regimes altered, configured and reconfigured the life trajectories of Sântana's inhabitants.

In contrast with quantitative studies on re-stratification this qualitative study focuses on the villagers' own understandings of the changes they have experienced. I look at opportunities and resultant mobility (upward and downward) as experienced and accounted for by them. My approach toward social stratification is grounded in the classificatory schemes that my informants use in their life story narratives, which are classificatory schemes that position the subject with respect to others.

My project is mainly informed by the ethnographic method, through which the researcher immerses him/herself in the ocean of meanings and practices which structure and constitute the day-to-day life of those he/she studies. As a researcher who returned to the village where he was raised, and who interviewed his co-villagers (many of them friends and relatives), I was placed in the position of the insider or "native" ethnographer. In addition to ethnography, my study builds on a burgeoning set of methods: life course or biographical studies. The villagers' experiences with the three political and property regimes addressed are structured along generational lines: for each regime I collected five story accounts from the members of the same family, across three successive generations.

The dissertation is organized according to the three generations' experiences as these overlapped with the three political and property regimes. Chapter two offers an historical account of the site, introducing each of the three political and property regimes that constitute the background of my study. In chapter three I introduce a set of six life stories intended to give voice to the villagers' own understandings and explanations of change in their lives (people who grew up in the pre-WWII village). Chapter four covers the life stories of five individuals who are the children of those introduced in the previous chapter, people who grew up and established their occupational careers under state socialism. In chapter five I address the third generation of villagers, those born in the 1970s, who negotiated their life trajectories in the context of post-communist Romania. I sum up my findings in chapter six, where I describe these three generationally distinct configurations of class, status, party, ethnicity, education and gender among the villagers of Sântana, specific to each property regime, highlighting the manner in which the three political and property regimes altered the set of opportunities and constraints within which the villagers had to negotiate their daily lives.

My study allows me to make sense of how my co-villagers made their everyday lives meaningful as the world unfolded around them, and explore how they have navigated through the macro parameters of socio-political and economic change within their local possibilities to manage the ups and downs of their own and their families' lives.

Scholars have argued that the state has the power not only to decide who lives and who dies, but also has multiple “modalities of power deployment over the production and management of the dead,” known as necropower. However, the emergence of a forensics-based human rights social movement raises larger questions about how activists in post-conflict states are using forensic science to seize this nexus of state necropower. My research thus focuses on understanding: How are human rights activists using forensics and DNA testing to reframe histories of violence? How are these human rights activists using various mechanisms (globalized conceptions of human rights, transnational activist networks, international law, pedagogy, performance, embodiment)to further their goals of restoring identity, memory, and justice within a globalized context? This study seeks to explore these questions through a case study of the silencing of the past in Spain. My analysis draws on a mixed methods approach, including a 15-month participant observation study, over 234 in-depth interviews, and a historical analysis of secondary literature.

Chapter 2, Human Rights Forensics, A Global Movement Born in Death, focuses on the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who initiated and globalized this movement in response to the violent military regime that terrorized Argentina from 1976-1983 and left at least 30,000 people missing. It draws from a variety of data sources, including historical secondary literature, legal cases, and interviews with the leaders of the EAAF and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, as well as two months of observational data collected in Argentina in 2015. This chapter builds the groundwork of how forensics-based human rights transnational movement began, flourished, and spread. It shows that the Argentinean example may be one of the only fully successful cases of activists seizing control of a dominant narrative of state terror. Furthermore, chapter 2 problematizes the unforeseen challenges that forensics-based human rights can face when it reifies genetic kinship ties over other types of familial connections.

I further analyze the impact of the EAAF and the Grandmothers’ globalization of this movement in an in-depth case study of Spain’s most prolific human rights forensic organization—the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH). My analyses draw on a 15-month participant observation of the ARMH, over 230 in-depth interviews, and a discourse analysis of visitors’ guest books from ARMH exhumations. I approach the case study through an in-depth analysis of three key dimensions: Performance, Pedagogy, and International Connections. I argue that these three dimensions illustrate the complex, overlapping, and sometimes-contradictory tactics that ARMH activists use in their reframing of Spain’s violent past. Chapters 4-6 thus represent the core of the research, with each chapter directly corresponding to each of these dimensions.

In sum, I find that, by basing their claims in science, human rights activists transform perceptions of them from prejudiced activists with political goals into objective experts. Using science, international protocols, and tropes of modernity; activists depoliticize their version of state terror. I illustrate how, by using this ‘depoliticized approach,’ human rights activists successfully seize necropower from the state, meaningfully change how people understand and remember past violence, mold transitional justice efforts, restitute the identities of missing persons, and facilitate important death rituals for victims’ families. I further find, that in the Spanish case, due to an old and long history of institutionalized silence and fear, activists have to work harder to break the silence of the past. To do this, they use performative actions, such as teaching forensics classes to local Spaniards who are visiting mass grave exhumations. These performances promote the ARMH’s ‘de-politicized’ science driven narrative of Spain’s violent history, as well as introduce moral claims about the rights of the victims’ families and the need for transitional justice. Moreover, I find that the ARMH, as members of a transnational social movement, is influenced by the growth of the larger movement, whose sovereignty and legitimacy has risen—in many cases—above that of the nation-state.

My dissertation asks whether, when, and how the adoption of Evangelical Christianity by multiply stigmatized Roma (or Gypsies) in post-socialist Bulgaria has affected the status and engagement of Roma women in their families, communities, and the larger society. Scholars have shown that Evangelical Christianity has facilitated women's advancement in some patriarchal societies in the developing world. This raises the question of whether it might have a similar impact among Roma in Eastern Europe. In 2009-2010, I conducted a year-long immersive ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Sliven, which is distinctive for its large and heterogeneous Roma population. Against the background of economic dislocation, complex hierarchical interethnic relations, an indifferent state, and a changing religious marketplace, I examined the dynamic interplay between outside religious actors (foreign and Bulgarian), on the one hand, and members of local Roma communities that vary in the extent of their marginalization and in the degree of their adherence to traditional patriarchal attitudes and behaviors, on the other hand. I focused especially on the most marginalized Roma in the walled-in Nadezhda ghetto and the more integrated Roma in the Nikola Kochev neighborhood. I argue that participation in Evangelical churches has a minimal impact in the most marginalized communities, while it enhances women's status in more integrated Roma communities. The confluence of local and external religious actors in Nadezhda has created incentives for enterprising men to found and manage churches as a way of procuring external material resources in this extremely resource-poor environment. Manipulating the multiplicity of scales that characterize the Evangelical networks in which they are embedded, the Nadezhdan pastors have carved out a niche characterized by fluidity, ruthless competitiveness, corruption, and lack of bureaucratization and institutionalization. This has had significant consequences for the social dynamics in Nadezhdan churches and for their effects on gender relations. By underscoring the role patriarchal structures and practices play in the cycle of exclusion, and by illuminating the variable effects of religious participation, this research seeks to enhance the understanding of the persistent problem of the marginalization of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe.