The Kurds’ democratic resistance to ISIS demonstrates that anti-fascism cannot be separated from the wider struggle against capitalism, patriarchy and the state. By Dilar Dirik It was in the fall of 2014, only months after the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) made massive territorial gains inside Syria and Iraq, committing genocidal and feminicidal massacres, that a…
Category: Kurdistan
Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy
By Janet Biehl In February 1999, at the moment when Abdullah Öcalan was abducted in Kenya, Murray Bookchin was living with me in Burlington, Vermont. We watched Öcalan’s capture on the news reports. He sympathized with the plight of the Kurds—he said so whenever the subject came up—but he saw Öcalan as yet another Marxist-Leninist…
Feminism and the Kurdish Freedom Movement
By Dilar Dirik This article is an edited version of a presentation at the “Dissecting Capitalist Modernity–Building Democratic Confederalism” Conference at Hamburg University, April 3-5th, 2015. The fact that we are discussing the Kurdish freedom movement’s approaches, ideas, and re-conceptualizations of freedom today at this conference with people from so many diverse backgrounds is quite…
Kurdish Women’s Unknown History of Struggle
The Kurdish women’s history of struggle is not a recent phenomenon. The last generation of Kurdish women grew up recognizing women fighters as a natural element of Kurdish identity. But before that, in the late nineteenth century, there was Kara Fatma, a Kurdish woman who led a battalion of almost 700 men in the Ottoman…
Revolutionary Women: Zapatista and YPJ-STAR Embrace New Gender Politics
By Charlotte Maria Sáenz “…revolutionary struggles cannot achieve collective liberation for all people without addressing patriarchy, nor can women’s freedom be disentangled from racial, economic, and social justice.” “Zapatista women have participated at all levels of the movement to fight for justice and dignity for the indigenous people of Chiapas and, at the same time,…
Peacebuilding as Counter-Insurgency | Self-Determination vs Global ‘Counter-Terror’ Operations
CAMPACC: Peacebuilding as counter-insurgency by Dr Vicki Sentas The Kurdish movement is well acquainted with the effects of the global listing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation. In many ways the listing regime is an extension of Turkey’s counter-insurgency approach to the armed conflict. That is, listing is a form of…
Killing the Dominant Male
“History, in a sense, is the history of the dominant male who gained power with the rise of classed society” ~Abdullah Öcalan PKK, the Workers Party of Kurdistán: many people know their name, few really know what their struggle is about. Www.farc-epeace.org had the opportunity to speak with two representatives of the PKK’s women’s organization…
Why Jineology? Re-Constructing the Sciences Towards a Communal and Free Life
By Gönül Kaya Gönül Kaya is a journalist and representative of the Kurdish women’s movement. This article is the transcript of her speech at the Jineology Conference in March 2014 in Cologne, Germany. The Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan evaluates jineology as an important step in its ongoing intellectual, ideological-political self-defense and mobilization struggle of…
Stateless Democracy: How the Kurdish Women’s Movement Liberated Democracy from the State
By Dilar Dirik “Azadî”, freedom. A notion that has captured the collective imagination of the Kurdish people for a long time. “Free Kurdistan”, the seemingly unattainable ideal, has many shapes, depending on where one situates oneself in the broad spectrum of Kurdish politics. The increasing independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in South Kurdistan…
ISIS Seen Through the Eyes of PKK Guerrilla Forces
By Tanja Nijmeijer PKK, the Workers Party of Kurdistán: many people know their name, few really know what their struggle is about. http://www.farc-epeace.org had the opportunity to speak with two representatives of the PKK’s women’s organization – PAJK, Zelal Dersim and Asia Dicle, about the situation in the Middle-East, IS, the role of the United…
