{"id":27592,"date":"2023-07-31T08:28:23","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T06:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=27592"},"modified":"2023-07-31T14:02:29","modified_gmt":"2023-07-31T12:02:29","slug":"can-the-kurdish-womens-movement-transform-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/can-the-kurdish-womens-movement-transform-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the Kurdish Women\u2019s Movement Transform the Middle East?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Matthew Broomfield has reported from Kurdish-led North and East Syria (Rojava) and turns a critical eye to Dilar Dirik’s study on the Kurdish Women’s Movement.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Kurdish Women\u2019s Movement: History, Theory, Practice<\/em> by Dilar Dirik
\nPluto Press<\/a> 2022
\nISBN 9780745341941<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Matthew Broomfield<\/h4>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re all familiar with the orientalized, fetishized image of the Kurdish warrior woman doing battle against ISIS. Part Amazon, part Angelina Jolie<\/a>, she\u2019s all too easily sanitized, Westernized, and plucked out of her context in the militant, women-led Kurdish liberation movement. In The Kurdish Women\u2019s Movement: History, Theory, Practice<\/em>,\u00a0 Kurdish academic Dilar Dirik<\/a> aims to deepen and complicate this image, placing that movement in the context of decades of checkered, often-overlooked \u201cHistory,\u201d a unique historic and sociological \u201cTheory,\u201d and a \u201cPractice\u201d claiming to touch the lives of millions of women across the Middle East.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"
The Kurdish Women’s Movement<\/em> <\/a>is published by Pluto.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Writing from a position of admitted personal and political sympathy for the movement spearheaded by jailed Kurdish political leader Abdullah \u00d6calan, and his Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK), Dirik critiques what she calls the standard practice of counterpointing \u201csuperficial engagement with \u00d6calan\u2019s writings with snapshot-like ethnographic impressions or news articles about the movement\u2019s practice.\u201d Rather, the Oxford University Fellow\u2019s work seeks to take the movement seriously on its own terms, bridging the gap between overly enthusiastic accounts ascribing the Kurds a super-human proclivity for revolution, and reductive, normative analyses written from a purely academic perspective.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

As such, it\u2019s worth assessing the extent to which the movement\u2019s claim to offer a systemic alternative to authoritarian nation-states and patriarchal, tribal or nuclear social organization stands up in its largest proving-ground to date \u2014 the Kurdish-led polity in North and East Syria (NES), built around the Kurdish heartland known as Rojava<\/a>, where a civil administration has spent the past decade attempting to implement the ideals of the women\u2019s movement. Dirik also addresses the Kurdish movement\u2019s reach throughout Kurdish-populated Turkey, and to a lesser extent Iraq.<\/p>\n

While Kurdistan is a stateless nation that covers a swath of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, there is no full chapter dedicated to the women\u2019s movement in Iran, but the movement\u2019s ideas are also present among that country\u2019s Kurdish minority, as evidenced by the recent uprisings following the death of Kurdish Iranian Jina (Mahsa) Amini, as a result of which saw the Kurdish movement\u2019s slogan \u201cJin, Jiyan, Azad\u00ee\u201d (\u201cWomen, Life, Freedom\u201d) reverberate around the world.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s in NES that the optimistic, transformative vision of a \u201cparadigmatic struggle against capitalist modernity\u201d promoted by Dirik is put to the severest test \u2014 as I myself witnessed in the course of three years living in and reporting from the impoverished, embattled, and politically compromised region.<\/p>\n

As Dirik emphasizes, the Kurdish movement didn\u2019t appear from nothing with the establishment of de facto autonomy in Rojava following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, and that region\u2019s rapid rise to fame in the course of the war against ISIS. Rather, the PKK entered the political stage as a clandestine Marxist-Leninist guerrilla battling for an independent, socialist Kurdish state \u2014 a guerrilla characterized by the unusually wide ranging and increasingly active participation of women cadres. A growing recognition of the need for women-led political organization was precipitated by a marked change in \u00d6calan\u2019s political analysis, particularly following his 1999 capture by the Turkish security forces, prompting a reassessment of the PKK\u2019s strategy.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Kurdish Female Fighters outside of Kobani in Rojava (courtesy rudaw.com).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In her quest to take the intellectual contributions of the Kurdish movement and its leader seriously, Dirik sometimes downplays the impact of circumstance and realpolitik on the movement\u2019s unexpected evolution. \u00d6calan\u2019s move toward a system of federal, decentralized, dual-power organization was at least partly driven by the admitted impossibility of establishing a Kurdish state outright, and admitting this fact does nothing to diminish the significance of the movement\u2019s subsequent achievements in that direction.<\/p>\n

Similarly, it\u2019s all but impossible to reconcile Dirik\u2019s characterization of \u00d6calan as a benevolent repository of knowledge, particularly sympathetic to women\u2019s struggles, waking up early to bestow flowers on female militants on International Women\u2019s Day, with the image presented by, say, A<\/a>liza Marcus<\/a> in her own critical history of the Kurdish movement (largely based on the accounts of disillusioned ex-party members), wherein \u00d6calan is represented as self-aggrandizing and calculating. Likely the truth lies somewhere in between.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In any case, it\u2019s more interesting to recognize, as Dirik does, the emancipatory ideal \u00d6calan represents to millions of Kurdish women, given his clear and consistent representation of women as the \u201cfirst colony\u201d who must be liberated before the remainder of society can follow suit. Kurdish women are always at the forefront of any protest in Kurdistan demanding \u00d6calan\u2019s release, and while their devotion to a male figurehead may seem contradictory to Western feminist eyes, it cannot be casually written off.<\/p>\n

\"Zehra
Zehra Do\u011fan, “Kurdistan 2,” 2020 (courtesy of the artist\/Prometeogallery Ida Pisani).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the abstract, the sociological \u2018women\u2019s science\u2019 known as \u201cJineoloj\u00ee\u201d or \u201cWomen-ology\u201d appears vague and faintly New Age in its critique of male hierarchy. But this is a science in the same highly politicized sense that Marxism-Leninism presents itself as a \u201cscience\u201d \u2014 an epistemic claim to place a repressed group at the center of social organization. By framing the 21st<\/sup> century as the century of the \u201cwomen\u2019s revolution,\u201d the Kurdish movement tells women they are the fulcrum of history and social organization, just as Marxists once told industrial workers they held the keys to history, or Arab nationalists sought to harness the mass power of their own repressed peoples.<\/p>\n

To this end, the intellectual contribution of the Kurdish women\u2019s movement should rather be assessed on the strength of its ability to \u201ccommunicate intellectual ideas and debates to oppressed and dispossessed movements.\u201d It\u2019s easy to recognize the politicized nature of \u00d6calan\u2019s theories on history, but his \u201cscience\u201d was crafted to put fire in Kurdish bellies, not pass peer review. This much, the women\u2019s movement has certainly achieved.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s appropriate, therefore, that Dirik devotes ten times as many pages to \u201cPractice\u201d as \u201cTheory.\u201d The Kurdish women\u2019s movement has achieved prior successes in organizing women in Kurdish neighborhoods, rural areas and refugee camps throughout Kurdish homelands currently forming part of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. But it\u2019s in NES that the women\u2019s movement has played a leading role in defeating ISIS and expanding a system of nominally decentralized, municipal governance now encompassing millions of residents, the majority of whom are Arabs, including many communities which both suffered under and sympathized with ISIS. As such, there\u2019s an ambiguity to this region\u2019s status as the site of the mass \u201cpractical implementation\u201d of the lofty ideals of the women\u2019s movement \u2014 a process bringing with it both the great challenges and great opportunities.<\/p>\n

The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) follows a political philosophy known as \u201cdemocratic confederalism,\u201d based on three principles from \u00d6calan\u2019s thought: direct democracy, ecology, and women\u2019s autonomy. While all three inter-relate, it\u2019s readily apparent that the women\u2019s \u201cpillar\u201d is the firmest. A continued reliance on the revenues from black-market oil sales has prevented any serious green transition, while the devolution of political decision-making authority<\/a> remains partial. Local communities have a say over service provision and participate actively in restorative justice mechanisms, but in the context of ongoing attacks by Turkey, ISIS insurgency, and rampant poverty driven by war and the region\u2019s isolation from the outside world, military and diplomatic strategy is necessarily directed by a primarily Kurdish cadre.<\/p>\n

\"kurdish
Kurdish women fighters in Rojava (courtesy rudaw.com).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The \u201cwomen\u2019s revolution<\/a>,\u201d though, is readily apparent. As any visitor to the region will observe, women are indeed everywhere, holding community meetings, attending education programs, and of course playing a prominent military role. Even in the regions recently liberated from ISIS, the \u201cWomen\u2019s Houses\u201d providing bloodless resolution to social conflicts through female-led mediation are among the first projects to take root, even in the face of regular bombings by ISIS \u2014 achieving more prominence and success than the village-level communes intended to function as the building blocks of the direct democratic system.<\/p>\n

On the social level, women of course continue to face confinement to the home, early marriage, honor killings, and all the other trappings of regional patriarchy. Many men with a position in AANES political structures are willing to pay lip service to women\u2019s autonomy, while privately pushing their daughters to marry off at the appropriate time. But it\u2019s precisely the fact that women continue to face such hardship that so many of them have seized the \u201crevolution\u201d with both hands. Alongside the total inversion in the status of Kurdish identity, it is the flourishing of women-led political organization, social outreach and cultural activity which gives the slow transformation in NES the flavor of revolution.<\/p>\n

Dirik\u2019s account of these achievements is smart, and avoids clich\u00e9s. For example, the region is known for its \u201cco-chair\u201d system<\/a> whereby each public office is filled by one man and one woman. As she aptly notes, critical claims this system is merely \u201csymbolic\u201d misses the point \u2014 symbols themselves have power, and the system forces men to listen to women\u2019s perspectives in what she calls an \u201canti-authoritarian pedagogical method for internal democratization.\u201d<\/p>\n

In highly conservative Muslim communities, such steps are themselves revolutionary. Even if a relative minority of women have taken up the challenge of promoting women\u2019s education and political self-determination in these communities, this does not delegitimize these women\u2019s achievements, as some observers suggest when they draw a false binary between active participants in the revolution and \u201cordinary people\u201d represented as more suspicious of women\u2019s autonomy. After all, these willing participants were born and grew up in the same ordinary communities.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

More broadly, Dirik argues that women\u2019s autonomy in the region will necessarily\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0look different to Western feminism. In his own account of the Rojava revolution<\/a>, Thomas Schmidinger draws a similar distinction, arguing the \u201cautonomy\u201d the region takes as its political goal is a \u201ccollective\u201d rather than \u201cindividual\u201d autonomy. The aim was never to replace conservative, tribal norms with the individual freedom to become (say) a sexually promiscuous boss, \u00a0but by granting women the power to address women\u2019s issues among themselves as an autonomous unit, and speak with a powerful, collective voice in issues that concern them.<\/p>\n

As a result, the revolutionary process regularly turns up decisions, positions and compromises that are unsettling to the Western gaze. For example, under the burden of being vilified as suspicious \u201chouses of divorce,\u201d women working in the \u201cwomen\u2019s houses\u201d<\/u> are more likely than their Western counterparts might be to advise married women facing abuse to return to the home. But leaving home in the Middle East comes with an even higher cost<\/a> than it does in other parts of the world, while on the other hand social pressure and shame can be brought to bear more effectively on men, making community intervention a genuine alternative. Many women are able to flee home, and the region has seen hundreds of divorces after the process was legalized in 2012: but sometimes a community-led solution is more appropriate.<\/p>\n

This is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, of course, and Dirik is not immune from valorizing aspects of the revolution deserving of more critical scrutiny. If she claims the \u201cmovement encourages solidarity-based communal forms of organizing childcare, production and so on,\u201d it\u2019s hard to see how this marks a revolutionary break from pre-existing modes of communal childcare, as women continue to perform almost all childcare roles with little formal support from the AANES.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

To take another example, when describing the region\u2019s unavoidable establishment of an internal security force (the Asayish) to deal with the serious threat posed by ISIS sleeper cells and Turkish and Syrian regime-sponsored attacks, the author is ready to take at face value the claim by a female Asayish member to have \u201covercom[e] the authoritarian personality created by the [Syrian] regime,\u201d creating a new and more progressive institution. Certainly, the Asayish are in no way comparable to the brutal Syrian security forces, but claims this internal security unit is fundamentally different to a police force overstate the case. Commendably, the Asayish deploy locals to their own areas, reducing intra-community tension, but nonetheless their presence feels rather different in restive majority-Arab regions than it does in the Kurdish heartlands. Those who resent their presence are often ISIS sympathizers, if not active supporters: regardless, the unavoidable Asayish presence in these regions clearly feels and functions like a police force. Rather than downplaying the compromises into which the revolution has been forced, sympathetic accounts of the Rojava revolution can and must acknowledge the extreme pressures the region is under.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s therefore interesting to see where the women\u2019s movement has chosen to push for reform or revolution, and where it has compromised. Thus it is, for example, that polygamy is outright banned in Kurdish regions, but still tolerated \u2014 though disapproved of \u2014 in Arab regions more recently liberated from ISIS. In one incident<\/a> in 2020, women were banned from working in caf\u00e9s in the former ISIS capital Raqqa after hours, as was the public consumption of alcohol, prompting puzzled inquiries from some Western journalists. But when I spoke to women\u2019s activists in the city, they explained these measures specifically targeted caf\u00e9s serving as a front for prostitution, as part of broader efforts to tackle the exploitation of impoverished war refugees, with the local Women\u2019s Office working to find alternative forms of employment. This might not be the solution some Western feminists would hope for, but in the Syrian context, it was a valid and thoughtful move intended to protect women.<\/p>\n

Dirik warns that the \u201cspace between a rock and hard place can open rooms for lines of thinking that rely on external state backing to temporarily protect gains, usually at great cost.\u201d This much is true in NES, with the region forced into uneasy alliances and relationships with the USA, Russia and the central Syrian authorities. But operating in this troubled space also pushes the Kurdish movement into productive compromises, forcing it to understand and navigate tensions between its clear commitment to women\u2019s liberation on the one hand and community self-determination on the other.<\/p>\n

Often, women\u2019s liberation has been prioritized, even at the risk of provoking male powerbrokers. On the one hand, Dirik argues, \u201cliberal, pragmatist, centralist approaches\u201d are coded as male, with the women\u2019s movement pushing for more revolutionary, transformative approaches throughout the Kurdish movement\u2019s history. But equally, as the author writes with reference to Kurdish dual-power organization in Turkey, female political organizers are more closely embedded in civil society, and are therefore able to demonstrate that \u201cmany women favor an end to gender-based discrimination, child marriage, bride exchange, polygamy, and bride price.\u201d\u00a0 These aims, all steadily being implemented by the Kurdish movement in the face of stiff social opposition, are not extreme or implausible. Rather, the idea that \u201csociety would not accept change [is] a self-fulfilling prophecy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The challenge before the movement now is to refuse the assumption \u2014 anathema to the AANES\u2019 bold valorization of the \u201cbrotherhood of peoples,\u201d but commonly heard in private \u2014 that the restive Arab regions are too backward, parochial or Islamic to accept women-led social transformation.\u00a0 Although Kurdish men are also regularly taken to task for patriarchal norms, the Kurdish women\u2019s movement itself is not immune from the idealization of Kurdish womanhood. Dirik warns that Kurdish male revolutionaries draw binaries between \u2018revolutionary\/liberated\u201d women and \u201cclassical\/traditional\u201d women who remain confined to traditional social roles. But the women\u2019s movement itself also plays a role in maintaining this binary, sometimes defaulting to an ideal of emancipated Kurdish womanhood, revolutionary cadres expressing (understandable) frustration with deeply entrenched patriarchy in Arab regions.<\/p>\n

Rather, it\u2019s the bold and continuing struggle to implement the Kurdish movement\u2019s liberatory ideals in conservative, tribal regions which may push the movement on to achieve enduring success and stability beyond the Kurdish heartlands, as part of its ongoing transition from guerrilla force to quasi-state actor. If the movement genuinely wishes to offer a \u201cparadigmatic\u201d alternative to the Middle East, it must continue to reckon with the challenges of reaching these communities. It\u2019s women who have proven most responsive to their message, and as the AANES education program, with its focus on women\u2019s rights and autonomy, gradually reaches these regions, change will continue to spread.<\/p>\n

As such, Dirik argues that asking whether the \u201crevolution\u201d in Rojava is a success or failure, or even a revolution at all, misses the point. Rather, the partial, imperfect process of social transformation in the region is part of a wider historical movement that began before and will continue after. Her own work should be read in the same spirit: as a vital contribution to the dynamic, ongoing conversation around a movement deserving of both more serious attention, and more critical scrutiny from its sympathizers.<\/p>\n

In her introduction, Dirik writes that Kurds, women and movements (revolutionary, political) are all phenomena that have been oppressed throughout history. In its efforts to overcome repression, the Kurdish women\u2019s movement has certainly achieved revolutionary results for these interlinked classes. A number of key challenges facing the Kurdish women\u2019s movement, it could be argued, now lie in the opposite direction: in reaching Arab communities, changing the attitude of suspicious and conservative men, and successfully transitioning to quasi-state governance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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