The Kurdish Women S Freedom Movement

Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians and activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political system that centres gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has often been essentialising and objectifying, brushing over a much more complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist tropes of the female freedom fighter, and the movement's own narrative of the 'free woman', Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with women politicians, martyr mothers and female fighters, she looks at how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict and resistance.

This book offers the first historical account of Kurdish women’s politicization in Turkey, starting from the mid-1980s. Çağlayan presents a critical feminist analysis through women’s everyday experiences, incorporating women’s self-narrations with her own autoethnographic reflections. The author provides an account of the socio-political dynamics which constrained women’s politicization, of the factors and mechanisms which enabled their political activism, and of the construction of women’s political history through their own narrations. Women in the Kurdish Movement is a highly original contribution to Kurdish women’s political history. It will be key reading for students and scholars across various disciplines with an interest in gender, political participation, everyday resistance, feminist methodology, nationalism, ethnicity, secularism, social movements, post-colonial studies, and the Middle East.

The Kurdish women's movement is at the heart of the most exciting revolutionary experiment in the world today: Rojava. Forged over decades of struggle, most recently in the fight against ISIS, Rojava embodies a radical commitment to ecology, democracy and gender equality. But while striking images of Kurdish women in desert fatigues proliferate, a true understanding of the women's movement remains elusive.Taking apart the superficial and Orientalist frameworks that dominate, Dilar Dirik offers instead an empirically rich account of the women's movement in Kurdistan. Drawing on original research and ethnographic fieldwork, she surveys the movement's historical origins, ideological evolution, and political practice over the past forty years. Going beyond abstract ideas, Dirik locates the movement's culture and ideology in its concrete work for women's liberation and radical democracy.Taking the reader from the guerrilla mountains to radical women's academies and self-organised refugee camps, the book invites women around the world to engage with the revolution in Kurdistan, both theoretically and practically, as a vital touchstone in the wider struggle for a militant anti-fascist, anti-capitalist feminist internationalism.

"From all four parts of Kurdistan and across the diaspora, Kurdish women from different geographical, political, and educational backgrounds pick up a pen, reflect, and remember. Going beyond exoticising stereotypes and patriarchal representations, Kurdish Women's Stories gives 25 women authorial freedom to write about their own lived experiences. With contributors ranging from 20 to 70 years of age, we hear stories of imprisonment, exile, disappearances of loved ones, gender-based violence, uprisings, feminist activism, and armed resistance, including first-hand accounts of political moments from the 1960s to today. Conceived as part of Culture Project's self- writing program, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the struggle of Kurdish women through their own words. Contributors: Diba Alikhani, Kobra Banehi, Khanda Hameed, Nazanin Hasan, Nafia Aysi Hasso, Deejila Haydar, Zhala Hussein, Ruken Isik, Seveen Jimo, Lanja Khawe, Nahiya Khoshkalam, Hero Kurda, Khanda Rashid Murad, Rozhgar Mustafa, Dashne Nariman, Bayan Nasih, Avan Omar, Nasrin Ramazanali, Mother Sabria, Bayan Saeed, Bayan Salman, Farah Sharefi, Susan Shahab, Simal (Anonymous), Shahla Yarhussein"--

Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities is a pioneering text that examines the ideas about social ecology and communalism behind the evolving political structures in the Kurdish region. The collection evaluates practical green projects, including the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, Jinwar women’s eco-village, food sovereignty in a solidarity economy, environmental defenders in Iranian Kurdistan, and Make Rojava Green Again. Contributors also critically reflect on such contested themes as Alevi nature beliefs, anti-dam demonstrations, human-rights law and climate change, the Gezi Park protests, and forest fires. Throughout this volume, the contributors consider the formidable challenges to the Kurdish initiatives, such as state repression, damaged infrastructure, and oil dependency. Nevertheless, contributors assert that the West has much to learn from the Kurdish ecological paradigm, which offers insight into social movement debates about development and decolonization.

The Revolution in Rojava captured the imagination of the Left sparking a worldwide interest in the Kurdish Freedom Movement. The Art of Freedom demonstrates that this explosive movement is firmly rooted in several decades of organized struggle. In 2018, one of the most important spokespersons for the struggle of Kurdish Freedom, Havin Guneser, held three groundbreaking seminars on the historical background and guiding ideology of the movement. Much to the chagrin of career academics, the theoretical foundation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement is far too fluid and dynamic to be neatly stuffed into an ivory-tower filing cabinet. A vital introduction to the Kurdish struggle, The Art of Freedom is the first English-language book to deliver a distillation of the ideas and sensibilities that gave rise to the most important political event of the twenty-first century. The book is broken into three sections: “Critique and Self-Critique: The rise of the Kurdish freedom movement from the rubbles of two world wars” provides an accessible explanation of the origins and theoretical foundation of the movement. “The Rebellion of the Oldest Colony: Jineology—the Science of Women” describes the undercurrents and nuance of the Kurdish women’s movement and how they have managed to create the most vibrant and successful feminist movement in the Middle East. “Democratic Confederalism and Democratic Nation: Defense of Society Against Societycide” deals with the attacks on the fabric of society and new concepts beyond national liberation to counter it. Centering on notions of “a shared homeland” and “a nation made up of nations,” these rousing ideas find deep international resonation. Havin Guneser has provided an expansive definition of freedom and democracy and a road map to help usher in a new era of struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and the State.

The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.

"Surrounded by enemies including ISIS and hostile Turkish forces, the people in Syria’s Rojava region are carving out one of the most radically progressive societies on the planet. Visitors have been astounded by the success of their project, a communally organised democracy which considers women’s equality indispensable, has a deep-reaching ecological policies, and rejects reactionary nationalist ideology. This form of organization, labeled democratic confederalism, is both fiercely anti-capitalist and boasts a self-defense capacity which is keeping ISIS from their gates. Drawing on their own firsthand experiences of working and fighting in the region, the authors provide the first detailed account of a revolutionary experiment and a new vision of politics and society in the Middle East and beyond"--Back cover.