How do relatively weak ethnic minorities sustain coherent ethnic movements in the face of sustained state opposition? Although a large body of work analyzing ethnic conflict and national movements now exists, this literature provides surprisingly little help in understanding why ethnic minorities have become such prominent actors in world politics. This dissertation addresses this question through a qualitative case study on Kurdish politics in Turkey, where the Turkish state has consistently attempted to suppress all public expressions of Kurdish identity. I argue that an expansion in the twentieth century from territorial to "integrated" forms of resistance has provided ethnic rights activists with new political, legal, and economic resources for strengthening political agency. Unlike militant or armed activism, integrated resistance relies on inter-ethnic and inter-group alliances to perpetuate the ethnic rights movement. Drawing on recent social movement literature and applying it to cases of ethnic mobilization, I outline three recent forms of integrated resistance (public, representative, and transnational contention) that make it particularly difficult for even authoritarian regimes to eliminate ethnic-based political opposition. The 1937 Dersim uprising illustrates the difficulties isolated Kurdish rebels would encounter resisting state policies through territorially based armed resistance. But after several decades, as government documents, court records, memoirs, newspapers, and other sources indicate, Kurdish activists in the 1960s reconstituted the Kurdish rights movement within mainstream institutions through a coalition with Turkish socialists. The resulting "public contention" against state policies dramatically eroded the state's discursive hegemony. In the late 1980s political opportunities for new domestic alliances facilitated an even more systematic challenge to the state through "representative contention," in which accommodations between Turkish social democrats and Kurdish activists moved Kurdish resistance directly into the Parliament. This domestic challenge was mirrored internationally through "transnational resistance," when Kurdish rights were re-framed as part of a human rights agenda and promoted using transnational advocacy networks. The concurrent institutionalization of Kurdish claims in European non-governmental and multi-governmental spaces helped construct a "Virtual Kurdistan West" that encroached upon the Turkish state's governing prerogatives. Such non-state communities, I conclude, are influencing not only individual states but regional and world diplomacy.
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