Notes on the 'Dog that didn't Bark': eco-internationalism in late Soviet Kazakstan

Ecological mobilization frequently assumed ethnonationalist forms in the late Soviet period. In Kazakstan, however, popular grievances defined in ethnic terms, which manifested themselves as republic-wide ethnic protest in 1986 and appeared to pose a profound ethnonationalist challenge to the Soviet state in the early years of its perestroika, did not fuel the environmental movement in that republic. On the contrary, ecological protest adopted inter-nationalist, rather than ethno-nationalist, tropes in late Soviet Kazakstan. This article employs theoretical insights from the social movement literature to argue that the processes by which political contestation becomes framed (framing processes) account for the critical variation between instances of nationalist and non-nationalist environmental mobilization. Specifically, it contends that in Kazakstan- a setting characterized by a poverty of finances, organizational apparatuses, meeting space, and expertise- a domestic mobilizational frame was selected to resonate with a transnational master frame to tap essential financial and symbolic resources and generate widespread support for the anti-nuclear Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement.