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Kurdish Women in Rojava: From Resistance to Reconstruction
In: Die Welt des IslamsIn 2010, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan,PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, declared, “The freedom of the Kurdish people can be viewed as inseparably bound to women’s freedom.” This statement emphasizes a core tenet in the reinvention of the PKK’s ideology as articulated by Öcalan: the understanding that freedom can only be achieved through the defeat of the patriarchal system. The women of the PKK and its sister organization, the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD), represent the embodiment of the PKK’s new ideology, attracting international attention following Kurdish efforts to establish an autonomous region of governance in north-east Syria. This article focuses on a case study of the PYD’s Syrian Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ), and their defence of Kurdish-dominated enclaves in Syria. The analysis demonstrates the agency behind their engagement and the ideology that motivates their resistance to patriarchy in the Middle East. In so doing, the article compares the YPJ’s understanding of agency to media representations of YPJ fighters’ engagement, in an effort to see beyond the traditional victim/peacemaker articulation of gendered engagement, arguing instead for the need to recognize the politics behind Kurdish women’s participation as combatants in the Syrian civil war.
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2
Isobel Coleman, “Women and the Arab Revolts”, Brown Journal of International Affairs 18, no.1 (2011), 197-210. As an example of the regression in gender rights, polygamy became legal again in Libya in 2013 at the instigation of the National Transitional Council. See: Mustafa Fetouri, “Women face setbacks in new Libya”, Al-Monitor Pulse, 23 March 2015 <http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/03/libya-women-murder-situation-gaddafi-regime-militias.html#ixzz4VMEvBSS5>.
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See: J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007).
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Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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11
Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no.2 (1998), 242-69, doi:10.1080/014198798330007; Nira Yuval-Davis, “Gender and nation”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 16, no.4 (1993), 621-32, doi:10.1080/01419870.1993.9993800; Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State, (London: Macmillan, 1989).
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13
Robert M. Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power”, Journal of Communication 57, no.1 (2007), 163-73, on 164, doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00336.x.
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14
Jacob Groshek, “Coverage of the pre-Iraq War debate as a case study of frame indexing”, Media, War & Conflict 1, no.3 (2008), 315-88, on 316, doi:10.1177/1750635208097049.
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15
Arwa Damon, “We won’t stand for male dominance”, CNN, 6 October 2008 <http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.pkk/index.html?eref=onion>.
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16
David Ghanim, Gender and Violence in the Middle East (Westport, C.T.: Præger Publishers, 2009), 114.
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17
Hamideh Sedghi, “Third World Feminist Perspectives on Politics”, in Women, Gender and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies and Prospects, eds. Peter R. Beckman and Francine D’Amico (Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), 89-90.
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18
Jason Burke, “Daughters of the Revolution”, The Guardian, Dispatches, 11 May 2003 <http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/may/11/features.magazine27>.
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Jason Burke, “Daughters of the Revolution”, The Guardian, Dispatches, 11 May 2003 <http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/may/11/features.magazine27>.
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21
See Brigitte L. Nacos, “The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns in the News Coverage of Women in Politics and in Terrorism”, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28, no.5 (2005), 435-51, doi:10.1080/10576100500180352. It also corresponds to the framing of gender in the media in general. For example, women political candidates’ appearance, family status, domestic arrangements, and personal lives elicit as much interest as their politics. Dianne G. Bystrom, Terry A. Robertson, & Mary Christine Banwart, “Framing the fight: An analysis of media coverage of female and male candidates in primary races for governor and U.S. Senate in 2000”, American Behavioral Scientist, 44, no.12 (2001), 1999-2013, doi:10.1177/00027640121958456; Erika Falk, Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Kim Fridkin Kahn. The Political Consequences of Being a Woman: How Stereotypes Influence the Conduct and Consequences of Political Campaigns (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
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24
Shireen Taher, “‘We are so proud’ – the women who died defending Kobani against Isis”, Guardian online, 30 January 2015 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/kurdish-women-died-kobani-isis-syria>. Of the four portraits of Kurdish female combatants, only one combatant is described as motivated clearly by a political agenda. The other three are motivated by their personal histories.
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Dilar Dirik, “The Women’s Revolution in Rojava: Defeating Fascism by Constructing an Alternative Society”, in A Small Key Can Open A Large Door: The Rojava Revolution, eds. Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, (London:Combustion Books, 2015) <https://www.academia.edu/11963676/The_Women_s_Revolution_in_Rojava_Defeating_Fascism_by_Constructing_an_Alternative_Society>.
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29
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 1-2.
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31
Michael M. Gunter, Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War (London: Hurst & Company, 2014), 2.
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36
Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: NYU University Press, 2007), 173.
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38
Hugh Poulton, “Turkey”, in Middle East Contemporary Survey 1995, Volume XIX, ed. Bruce Maddy Weitzman (Colorado: Westview Press, 1995), 654. McDowall cites Medico International and the Kurdish Human Rights Project when noting that the population of Diyarbakir, in south-east Turkey, grew from 380,000 in 1991 to 1.3 million in 1996. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 440.
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Gunter, Out of Nowhere, 2. See also Michiel Leezenberg, “The ambiguities of democratic autonomy: The Kurdish movement in Turkey and Rojava”, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no.4 (2016), 671-90, doi:10.1080/14683857.2016.1246529.
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44
Can Cemgil and Clemens Hoffmann, “The ‘Rojava Revolution’ in Syrian Kurdistan: A Model of Development for the Middle East?”, IDS Bulletin, 47, no.3 (2016), 53-76, doi:10.19088/1968-2016.144.
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45
Can Cemgil and Clemens Hoffmann, “The ‘Rojava Revolution’ in Syrian Kurdistan: A Model of Development for the Middle East?”, IDS Bulletin, 47, no.3 (2016), 60.
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47
Melis, “Beyond Female Soldiers: The Feminism of Rojava”, Alternatives International Journal, 2 March 2016 <http://www.alterinter.org/spip.php?article4447>.
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48
Nihat Ali Özcan, “PKK Recruitment of Female Operatives”, Terrorism Focus 4, no.28 (2007) <http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=4394>.
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49
V.G. Julie Rajan, Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Dogu Ergil, “Suicide Terrorism in Turkey: The Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”, in Countering Suicide Terrorism: An International Conference (Herzliya: The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 2001), 105-28.
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Necati Alkan, “Youth and Terrorism: Example of PKK”, in Political Violence, Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Youth, ed. M. Demet Ulusoy (Washington, DC: IOS Press, 2008), 159-69, 163.
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Karen Jacques and Paul J. Taylor, “Female Terrorism: A Review”, Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no.3 (2009), 499-515, doi:10.1080/09546550902984042.
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61
Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution (Cologne: International Initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan – Peace in Kurdistan”, 2013) <http://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/liberating-Lifefinal.pdf., 43>.
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62
Wes Enzinna, “A Dream of a Secular Utopia in ISIS Backyard”, The New York Times Magazine online, 24 November 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/a-dream-of-utopia-in-hell.html>.
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64
Murray Bookchin, “The Meaning of Confederalism”, Green Perspectives: A Left Green Publication 20 (November 1989) <http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives20.html>.
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House Organ, “Rojava”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 26, no.1 (2015), 1-15. This publication also has a good critical assessment of democratic confederalism as put into practice.
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Necla Acik, “Kobane: The Struggle of Kurdish Women against Islamic State”, Open Democracy, 22 October 2014 <https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/necla-acik/kobane-struggle-of-kurdish-women-against-islamic-state>.
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75
Rosa Benathan, “Guns, Widows & What you don´t hear about in Syria: An Interview with Margaret Owen”, Bad Housekeeping: Writing a new generation of gender (online magazine), 17 January 2014 <http://web.archive.org/web/20140130022319> <http://www.bad-housekeeping.com/2014/01/17/guns-widows-what-you-dont-hear-about-syria-an-interview-with-margaret-owen/>.
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78
Interviewed in Newsha Tavakolian, “Meet the Women Taking the Battle to ISIS”, Time Magazine, 2 April 2015 <http://time.com/3767133/meet-the-women-taking-the-battle-to-isis/. (The quote is taken from subtext picture 8 of 16>.)
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79
Interviewed in Newsha Tavakolian, “Meet the Women Taking the Battle to ISIS”, Time Magazine, 2 April 2015 <http://time.com/3767133/meet-the-women-taking-the-battle-to-isis/. (The quote is taken from subtext picture 4 of 16.)
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82
Tanya Goudsouzian, “Kobane explained: What´s so special about it?”, Al Jazeera, 21 October 2014 <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/10/kobane-explained-what-so-special-about-it-201410216033364111.html>.
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83
Max Fisher, “Turkey´s twin terrorist threats explained”, The New York Times, 29 June 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/world/middleeast/turkeys-twin-terrorist-threats-explained.html?_r=0>.
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84
Bacik, “Turkey and Russia´s Proxy War and the Kurds”, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, January 2016 <http://www.gmfus.org/publications/turkey-and-russias-proxy-war-and-kurds, 2>.
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93
Jenna Krajeski, “Kurdistan’s Female Fighters”, Atlantic online, 30 January 2013 <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/kurdistans-female-fighters/272677́>
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Kurdish Women in Rojava: From Resistance to Reconstruction
In: Die Welt des IslamsIn 2010, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan,PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, declared, “The freedom of the Kurdish people can be viewed as inseparably bound to women’s freedom.” This statement emphasizes a core tenet in the reinvention of the PKK’s ideology as articulated by Öcalan: the understanding that freedom can only be achieved through the defeat of the patriarchal system. The women of the PKK and its sister organization, the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD), represent the embodiment of the PKK’s new ideology, attracting international attention following Kurdish efforts to establish an autonomous region of governance in north-east Syria. This article focuses on a case study of the PYD’s Syrian Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ), and their defence of Kurdish-dominated enclaves in Syria. The analysis demonstrates the agency behind their engagement and the ideology that motivates their resistance to patriarchy in the Middle East. In so doing, the article compares the YPJ’s understanding of agency to media representations of YPJ fighters’ engagement, in an effort to see beyond the traditional victim/peacemaker articulation of gendered engagement, arguing instead for the need to recognize the politics behind Kurdish women’s participation as combatants in the Syrian civil war.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1566 | 0 | 0 |
| Full Text Views | 2670 | 1560 | 66 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 1910 | 1282 | 151 |