Despite the escalation of violence and conflict in Turkey, peace continues to be high on the agenda of the Kurdish political and women’s movement and many progressive Turks, particularly Turkish feminists. This proposed paper is based on the hypothesis that there has not been any real meaningful official peace process in Turkey. In contrast, official peace negotiations so far have deepened divisions not just between Turkish and Kurdish politicians, but more importantly, between and within communities. The aim of the negotiations – especially for the governing parties, currently the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – has been to monopolise power and violence. The various peace negotiations since the 1990s were not about risk-taking to make peace – but about risk-avoidance to maintain the status quo, and specifically to maintain current actors’ grasp on power. In this paper, I will argue that gender-based mobilization as part of a shift away from nationalist struggle to a vision of radical democracy at local, national and transnational level has been significant in articulating a desire for peace, creating common platforms for action and representation across and within ethnic communities. In terms of peace-building, it would be too simplistic to consider whether and how many women sit at the negotiating table of official negotiations, although that question is certainly emblematic of prevailing gender norms and power dynamics within any given context, including Turkish-Kurdish peace negotiations. In this paper, I will explore the significance of gender for understanding conflict and achieving peace. More specifically, my research intends to shed light on the way that peace is articulated and put into practise by actors whose conceptualization of conflict extends beyond national, ethnic and political violence to gender-based violence and conflict. I do so by looking at the specific empirical case of activists, politicians and intellectuals working for peace in the context of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Through a historically grounded and in depth qualitative research amongst Turkish and Kurdish women and men working towards and for peace, I address the question of how nationalism, peace activism and gender-based activism intersect. The multi-sited qualitative research for this article took place between February 2015 and January 2016 in four different locations: Diyarbakir, Istanbul, London and Berlin. I carried out in-depth, open-ended interviews with 40 respondents, including women’s rights activists, MPs, co-mayors, academics, journalists, and lawyers, in addition to seven focus group discussions.

The proposed paper challenges previous research on female genital cutting (FGC) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) but also more broadly, by approaching it intersectionally with other forms of violence against women. Previous research has focussed on the concept of ‘honour crimes’ and often mentions FGC rather descriptively without adequately elucidating how it fits in within the broader context of violence that Iraqi Kurdish women face. My paper attempts to advance the analysis further and examines the underlying factors that contribute to families deciding to cut their daughters. As the Kurds in Iraq have a history of war, political turmoil and ethnic oppression, I employ the feminist concept of “continuum of violence” (Cockburn, 2004) to explain FGC and wider gender-based violence as interconnected to wider forms of violence linked to the specific history of the KRI. One specific focus will be the tension between the roles that society (i.e. family, friends), governing institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have in both upholding prevailing gender norms and relations and in contributing to the steadily increasing rates of violence against women in the KRI. The paper will argue that, despite the political rhetoric of protecting women’s rights, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) protects ‘the family’ through official and unofficial laws. Furthermore, the potential scope of work for women’s NGOs is severely restricted due to counterproductive legislation and rigid social norms enforced by both the KRG and broader society. This paper grows out of my broader year-long qualitative research (2014-2015), conducted at a crucial time when the KRI was facing a severe economic recession caused by political discord with the central government in Baghdad over oil sales and the security threat of the Islamic State (IS) terror organisation. My material consists of informal interviews and participant observation with women, including housewives in rural areas and urban centres, professional women working in NGOs and women’s rights activists belonging to various social classes, in addition to a textual analysis of relevant legal documents and media coverage.

In 2009, the Turkish government announced the initiation of a process known as the “Kurdish Opening” with the intention to ‘resolve’ the Kurdish issue. Since then, several aspects of the conflict were open to political debate and some progress was made to the extent that the Turkish state, for the first time in its history, publicly announced its talks with the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan. However, most of the peace efforts concentrated on the legal changes needed to democratize the country and disarm and demobilize the PKK. Until now the peace process has not paid much attention to the gendered aspect of the long-lived war and has not included any plan to deal with the needs of the women affected by the conflict. This research aims to answer the following questions: a) What do the internally displaced Kurdish women request from the state for peace and reconciliation? b) How do they see intergroup relations as part of the peacebuilding in Turkey? c) How do women who were part of the official peace process (aka “wise women”) define the conflict and its resolution? Is there congruence between the Kurdish IDP’ needs/wants and wise women’s descriptions? This research tries to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a fieldwork that took place between January and July 2015 with 42 women IDPs in Diyarbakır, Mersin and Istanbul, and 6 wise women. In doing so, it pays a specific attention to the role of gender in peace processes.