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Abstract

A familiar sight on the streets of Istanbul is that of informal recycling workers pulling heavy carts filled with waste. For decades, waste collection has served as a vital lifeline for marginalized groups such as internally displaced Kurds, Roma communities, and noncitizens, who are systematically excluded from formal employment due to entrenched racial discrimination. Despite their indispensable role as the backbone of urban waste infrastructures, these workers are increasingly subjected to violence through prohibition, aggressive policing, and restrictive environmental policies. This dissertation draws on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul between 2022 and 2025 to examine how state interventions into informal recycling businesses institutionalize violence as a core logic of urban waste governance in Turkey, consolidating authoritarian control over everyday life. I analyze how violent border regimes intersect with Istanbul’s informal recycling sector by examining the distinct language of waste infrastructures and showing how displaced populations are rendered disposable through dehumanizing state violence. I describe how mass deportations of Afghan migrants have disrupted Istanbul’s waste economies and how these disruptions are further intensified by major disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the February 6th earthquakes. Exploring how recyclers navigate uncertainties during times of compounding crises, I highlight the many failures of Turkey’s disaster governance. This research also interrogates the entangled stigmatization of waste work and drug use—both typically perceived as “dirty”—and documents how drug prohibition policies in Turkey legitimize violent interventions into recycling businesses. Finally, exploring both collective and noncollective forms of resistance against systemic oppression, I illuminate the fragmented and asymmetric structure of the organized recycler movement in Turkey. I address the spatiotemporal constraints that inhibit sustained collective action, as well as the national, gendered, and ethnic inequalities that shape autonomous recyclers’ access to labour organizations. I emphasize how workers strategically challenge the power of Turkish nation-state and its bordering practices, asserting their right to collect waste and demanding recognition for their essential labour. Taken together, my ethnography contributes to a range of scholarly conversations, including linguistic anthropology, migration and mobility studies, disaster research, the anthropology of drugs, and social movement studies.