Our oceans continue to fill with toxic waste and plastics as nations struggle to manage the growing amount of consumer generated debris. In facing this particular challenge, the global community has become aware of how this issue disproportionally impacts marginalized communities and requires international solutions that are ultimately grounded in local realities. Certain grassroots organizations on the frontlines of the global waste crises have chosen to form coalitions with powerful international actors, based on the assumption that doing so is necessary for successful campaigns. These international actors can, in turn, take the lead in unilaterally managing local campaigns, or they can work as support mechanisms that encourage local activists to take the lead. What is at stake in such approaches for developing environmental justice? Do transnational organizations empower communities to build long-term mechanisms of sustained environmental justice, or do they undermine this broader goal? In this dissertation I argue that international coalition partners, rather than unilaterally directing local organizations and actors on how to achieve justice should pay more attention the insights and ideas of the frontline communities they support. Based on such insights, I find that coalition strategies that support organizing and capacity development help local stakeholders confront the causes and symptoms associated with waste’s negative impacts; whereas mobilizing coalition partners around centrally developed approaches to environmental justice are suited primarily to addressing the symptoms.

To underscore this argument I trace the history of two leading transnational environmental non-governmental organizations (TENGOs) fighting toxic waste—the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and Greenpeace. In this analysis I pay particularly attention to how their ideas on environmental justice have evolved and how changes in their support strategies produced different outcomes for marginalized communities. My analysis utilizes primary and secondary documents and is based on participant observations and over 70 semi-structured interviews conducted in California, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and France with GAIA, Greenpeace and their coalition partners. Ultimately, this study reinforces my claim that developing long-term community organizing and empowerment are fundamental for addressing local and global injustices related to waste management and other issues of environmental equity.

This dissertation broadly asks: “What is the effect of ethnic conflict on the political behavior of the Kurds in Turkey?” It contributes to scholarly knowledge in five major fields: ethnic conflict, assimilation, ethnic identity, polarization, and political behavior. To understand the effects of assimilation and heterogeneities within the Kurds, it looks at central Anatolian Kurds. This dissertation advances five main arguments by analyzing novel survey data and three years of field research.It reexamines the literature on ethnic conflict and calls for a more comprehensive definition, as how we currently study ethnic conflict fails to recognize some day-to-day or subtler forms of ethnic conflict, which profoundly impacts the ethnic consciousness of the Kurds. I call this “the political scars of the mind.” Secondly, due to long-lasting assimilation and ethnic conflict, central Anatolian Kurds express their identities in unconventional rich ways. Their path of ethnic mobilization has a breaking point that I call “ethnic awakening,” where they realize their either forgotten or oppressed Kurdishness when they are in environments where they feel safer to reclaim their identity. Third, for central Anatolian Kurds, assimilation and fear of discrimination profoundly affect the willingness of the language transfer between Kurdish parents to their children. Fourth, regardless of their geography, all Kurds bear the feeling of the trauma of being a Kurd in Turkey. However, some Kurds purposefully move away from their ethnic identities as a response to assimilation and ethnic conflict. Fifth, the literature on polarization has exclusively focused on hardened ethnic identities and looked at how the dominant and minority groups polarize due to ethnic conflict. However, this dissertation examines how ethnic conflict leads some Kurds to move away from their Kurdishness and argues that ethnic conflicts also create polarization within a minority group, what I call dual polarization. In advancing this set of claims, this dissertation also proposes new avenues for further research into ethnic identity. Assimilation of ethnic identity can take a nonlinear trajectory, and it profoundly affects the expression of ethnic identities through new and unconventional forms that we need to take into account in the study of political behavior.

My dissertation project explores the question of how activist networks operate in a highly repressive country when outside intervention is restrained. People have seen how effectively the Chinese Communist Party has cracked down on transnational religious activisms sponsored by Falun Gong, the exiled Tibetan government, and the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Protestant advocacy groups from the United States and elsewhere enter China each year, despite the fact that the Party has stated that no Chinese church is allowed to receive any form of foreign support. I argue that understanding this variation in the success of transnational religious networks sheds light on the significance of an approach to transnational collaboration that is quite different from the "naming and shaming" strategy that dominates the literature on advocacy networks. I tested this strategic alliance argument with a mixed-methods research design, including face-to-face interviews, participant observations in four major cities, and a cross-provincial phone survey in randomly selected prefectures.

This project makes notable corrections to previous understanding about protecting minority groups in authoritarian states. First, it addresses the neglect of religion and religious activists in the scholarship on transnational social movements and activism. Second, the strategic collaboration that is demonstrated by religious activists and advocates provides an alternative to the "naming and shaming" strategy of conventional transnational activism that more or less relies on powerful Western states and the United Nations. Third, the project identifies two commonly overlooked causal mechanisms between effective activism and its networks: the alliance strategy of foreign advocates and the leverage provided by government-sponsored social entities. The role of government-sponsored social organizations has been largely ignored in the existing literature. Members from legal entities often help fragile advocacy networks by providing information, legal protection, and connections, while brokering acquiescence from pragmatic local officials. In return, the advocacy networks provide funding, services and, most importantly, necessary legitimacy from globally recognized norms and standards. This unique benefit makes local leaders who ally with the advocacy networks seem more legitimate in the eyes of their own constituency.