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Understanding Rojava: Western Perceptions of Women Fighting ISIS
Abstract
As the Arab Spring dramatically transformed the political landscape in the Middle East, the previously forgotten Kurds of Syria suddenly emerged as potential game changers in the region. After proclaiming de facto autonomy in northern Syria in November 2013, Syrian Kurds started a radical experiment in democracy which made women’s liberation an utmost priority. Contrary to the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya where women’s question remained marginal during the process of post-revolutionary state-building, the movement in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) emerged as a women-led revolution. This paper analyzes the feminist revolution in Rojava from the perspective of post-colonial feminism with a focus on the challenges and criticisms it poses for Western liberal feminists. Since the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014, the West paid increasing attention to women fighting ISIS in the ranks of Kurdish forces. While the Western engagement with Kurdish female fighters provided the Kurdish national cause with greater visibility in the Western scholarly and policy circles, these engagements remained largely limited to the military aspect of women’s role in Rojava. What the present work views problematic is the refusal of Western feminists to engage with the long history of Kurdish nationalist struggle, politics and feminist practices. For some Western liberal feminists, Kurdish women are the new symbols of women’s liberation in the Middle East due to their militaristic engagements with ISIS, while for others, their struggle is non-feminist in nature because of their use of violence. What all these representations have in common is that they depoliticize Kurdish women’s cause and reduce them to ahistorical warriors fighting against bad guys. Within this framework, the paper first engages with the history of Kurdish feminist practices and explains what the broader political project in Rojava entails. Second, the paper moves towards critically analyzing various representations of Kurdish female fighters in Western media and feminist scholarship. The critical analysis of these representations draws mainly on post-colonial feminist literature, particularly Chandra Mohanty’s critical approach towards the production of “Third World Woman” in Western feminist texts. Methodologically, the paper adopts a critical discourse analysis perspective which allows for an understanding of how Kurdish women are invoked and linguistically generated in Western feminist texts and talks. The paper concludes with justifying why it is important for the West to enter into a conversation with Kurdish women in the context of the importance of building transnational feminist dialogues.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
Kurdish Studies