The Kurdistan women’s revolution – A social history from below

Patriarchy is one of the most normalized power systems in the world. It is an organizing principle for domination and hierarchy that reaches from the deeply personal to the global. On any given day, each one of us is likely to walk past several survivors of some form of patriarchal terror, from psychological abuse to sexual violence and harassment. Due to this near universal manifestation of male domination, in particular its widely accepted role in structuring the most intimate relations in society, it often passes as the general will of all. This does not mean, however, that people do not resist. In fact, people have fought back for millennia, increasingly more collectively, often at great risk to their own lives. The countless instances in which people refused to accept violence and control over them may be impossible to account for, but they are a long and living legacy of freedom.

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Colonialism reorganized social relations in gendered ways. Patriarchy also broke class solidarity among the poor. Women were often able to see their own domination by their partners, families, or societies mirrored in other forms of systemic violence. No surprise then that early organized women’s struggles (with all their problems that have widely been critiqued) evolved in interaction with causes such as socialism, anarchism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and the abolition of slavery. Whether or not they defined themselves as feminists, throughout history women actively participated in struggles that claimed to fight for change and equality in their societies, and against war, militarism, and ecocide committed in the name of their nations. Resistance deepened and radicalized over decades especially from the twentieth century onward, as Third World revolutionaries, socialists, and Black feminists argued that no individual liberation is possible without liberation from colonialism, state terror, racism/ White supremacy, and capitalism. Decades before state armies began recruiting women as soldiers, women were already fighting in resistance movements. In different parts of Europe, women took part in anti-fascist resistance. In places like Algeria, Palestine, Nicaragua, South Africa, Philippines, Colombia, India, Sri Lanka (and more), women participated in guerrilla struggles against colonization, apartheid, and occupation and for sovereignty and national liberation.

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Considering that revolution is a term that is largely associated with masculine acts and aesthetics, what would a ‘women’s revolution’ look like? This question matters also in light of contemporary global trends. Parallel to the rising visibility of issues around gender equality, the emergence of new mass movements around the world in the social media-shaped 2010s – from anti-government revolts to youth-led climate justice movements, including mass women’s strikes and marches – animated new discussions about the term ‘revolution’ in the twenty-first century. In a time in which even small reforms or short-lived coalition-based protest movements are celebrated as radical, what are the prospects for sustainable social transformation in a time of war, feminicide, and climate catastrophe? What is the meaning of revolutionary politics in an age in which theories of change mushroom in offices of state power, in which activism becomes a skill that can be acquired in trainings sponsored by institutions with links to states?

Against liberal notions of change that are compatible with existing systems of power, system-critical social movements, especially those at the margins of the nation-state system view the state as a colonizing institution that does not protect but attack society. They often develop politics with alternative methods and mentalities to dismantle, rather than seize power. Feminist movements are at the forefront of thinking – concretely but also imaginatively – about revolution, not reform, by arguing that breaking the patriarchal solidarity that connects violence and domination from the households to world politics means thinking about the possibility and sustainability of meaningful social and political change, from personal relations to the organization of the world economy. 

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Studying the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, a popular, terror-labelled Middle Eastern movement, which proposes stateless democracy and women’s autonomy, offers an opportunity to analyze urgent contemporary questions about political possibility and revolution. This emphasis of the need to lead the anti-patriarchal struggle as also a fight against the state echoes the politics of many feminist movements around the world, who formulate rich and radical perspectives around autonomy in theory and practice. In such contexts, the realm of the political materially and spiritually extends to all spheres of life.

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At its heart, the Kurdistan freedom movement is a secular, socialist mass movement that attracts people from different regions, ethnicities, religions, and class backgrounds. The presence of youth, women, religious minorities, and the poor across the different sites is particularly noticeable. A large number of professional revolutionaries (cadres), civilian organizers, and casual sympathizers survived forced migration, state violence, and some sort of trauma. Often, entire families are mobilized, which makes this a highly intergenerational struggle. At its core, it is led by a decades-old, revolutionary party with devoted, militant cadres. It is one of the last remaining guerrilla movements claiming to fight against capitalism. It organizes, in a highly structured way, myriads of cultural, social, political, and military institutions to realize the ideas it articulates in volumes of regular publications. Although the movement has transformed itself ideologically and organizationally, many of its ways are characterized by a partisan mode of organizing familiar from twentieth century socialist and anti-colonial movements: the central role of leadership and ideology and an unapologetic attitude towards political violence (‘self-defence’), to name a few. The movement’s ideology and corresponding political practice offer the main ground for its claims to legitimacy. Instead of speaking in the abstract on behalf of ‘the people’, the movement is able to refer to thousands of grassroots self-organized revolutionary structures that it helped build over years and across territories to represent collective and organized political will. On one hand, its globally oriented political vision appeals to the new era of planetary justice struggles beyond nationalism or the nation-state; on the other hand, its focus on ideology and ground-up organizing among largely lower-class communities are very much in the fashion of old revolutionary movements.

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The Kurdish women’s liberation movement defines revolution not as a disruptive single ‘day in the calendar’, but as a long-term struggle to dismantle all forms of domination in society, to therefore enable liberated social relations. The revolution is framed as being about democratizing everyday relations of life, between groups inside society, between societies, and between human societies and nature. In the movement’s literature, forceful criticisms are directed towards the authoritarian character of historical socialist projects. Criticizing older socialist schools’ fascination with modernity and the state, the movement claims to lead ‘a paradigmatic struggle against capitalist modernity’, i.e. the ideological, cultural, and social project that dominates and colonizes contemporary human imagination. Instead of aspiring to establish new, power-centric regimes, revolutionary institutions and perspectives should create conditions to restore moral-political reflexes that society lost to state, capitalism, and patriarchy. Organization is key to this. Protest and resistance are seen as insufficient to break the systematic wars waged against women, peoples, and nature. Formless, erratic rebellion, as well as critique that is not backed by organizational capacity, are both seen as expressions of defeatism. Instead of becoming secondary ‘wings’ of the larger struggles, those who are the most oppressed must become the radicalizing force that pulls the rest along. Because the 5,000-year-old domination of women is seen as the oldest and most profound form of oppression, and intrinsically linked to the institutionalization of all other injustices in human society, the movement views women’s liberation not only as an end in itself, but also as a central method to society’s liberation as a whole. The active invigoration of women, their history, agency, politics, and interests, has been upheld as a revolutionary ideal especially following the movement’s paradigm shift in the early twenty-first century: the respectability of women ought not to rely on their role as mothers or fighters as may have been the case in earlier stages of the struggle. Rather, women, the original owners of economy and organizers of society, must be valued per se, by virtue of hosting within themselves the possibility to be the creators of ‘free life’. In other words, the internal colony’s own objectified internal colony must become the main subject of the revolution; they are the most radical revolutionaries within the revolution. Practically, women and all oppressed sections in society must organize autonomously in all spheres of life and break free from oppressive social expectations. The movement also claims to be a struggle for men’s liberation from the violent templates imposed on all of society under patriarchy. ‘Killing dominant masculinity’ is regarded as a strategic objective in the movement’s works, as manifested in its activities in education, culture, and media. Spread over a long period, and across different sites and spaces, the privileging of women’s liberation on the agenda also functions as a rehabilitating antidote to destigmatize men’s relationship to emotionality, empathy, and care. 

In this sense, the Kurdistan freedom movement claims to struggle against several layers of colonization. At stake is not merely Kurdistan’s liberation from specific states. Rather, life must be decolonized from power. When framed as a mobilizational identity, grounded and fluid – like life itself, womanhood can be a platform to struggle against structures of violence and domination. It can create spaces for the formation of more complex personhoods, diverse identities, and more liberationist relations. It can lead the path towards a world in which gender will no longer serve as an organizing principle for power and hierarchy. Seen in this way, ‘woman’ not only stands for the material ways in which ‘half of society’ has historically been usurped, degraded, humiliated, brutalized, burned, stoned, raped, marginalized, minoritized, and silenced, but, by virtue of being the ‘first colony’, also represents all other forms of domination and violence. Turning the ‘Housewifized’ object (to borrow from Maria Mies, 1986) into the primary subject of the revolution echoes the decades-old feminist slogan that ‘the personal is political’. This conception of revolution is simultaneously concerned with the micropolitics of everyday life as well as the large-scale systems and structures that organize world politics. 

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In a time in which words like ‘change’, ‘resistance’, and ‘revolution’ are used in the propaganda of states and fascist and reactionary groups and in advertising slogans, testimonies of liberationist anti-system resistance have enormous pedagogical value (…). This is not to romanticize the complex world of politics from below, but to acknowledge that it matters what words were spoken by whom on what soil, to say ‘this stance, this politics, this belief, too, has existed. These things, too, are said, believed, and done. There are countless, unnamed people, who do believe that another life is possible and they are willing to die for it.’ 

In this sense, counter-hegemonic histories are sources for internationalist horizons. Similar to critical threads within Black, indigenous or Palestine studies, knowledge production on freedom quests in Kurdistan can become an epistemic site for the critique of colonization, liberalism, and the nation-state system, and to develop theories of radical democracy, autonomy, and liberation beyond the immediate geography. Likewise, breaking with the Eurocentric construction of women’s resistance histories in terms of ‘feminist waves’ within the Euro-American realm, by centering, taking seriously, and engaging directly with theory and knowledge produced by revolutionary movements and validating anti-system feminisms in all their diversity of tactics is part of the effort of decolonizing the history of resistance against patriarchy.