The Rojava Revolution: Kurdish women’s reclaim of citizenship in a stateless context

Abstract: The Kurds have historically been subjected to structural forms of oppression such as being denied the right to land, their language, culture, political participation or even a passport and social security number. Within this process the Kurdish women’s marginalisation has been doubled as they have been subjected to patriarchal laws, restricting their rights. In the aftermath of the Arabic spring the Syrian government decided to withdraw their forces from the Kurdish region Rojava and instead of turning it into an independent state, the Kurds decided to create a stateless democracy through autonomous cantons. Inspired by the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s idea of Democratic Confederalism, Rojava now uses a system of stateless democracy with the help of hundreds of councils that exist in the different communes and villages. The Kurdish women’s movement has created autonomous structures with women’s academies, houses, tribunals, cooperatives, security forces and military units. In this study I conducted semi-structured interviews with seven female activists from the autonomous women’s movement in Rojava. My research question was: How does the Kurdish women’s movement make sense of their reclaim of citizenship? I firstly analysed my informants’ statements as chronological narratives of their changing citizen-status, beginning when they still were colonised by Syria and ending with their practice of stateless democracy. I discovered that the informants had constructed two identities that represented the Kurdish women’s transformation from disempowered non-citizens to empowered citizens: ‘The housewife’ and ‘The female combatant’ who are each other’s contrasts. Secondly, I analysed the women’s practices of citizenship through their use of autonomous women’s structures as action spaces. These action spaces made it possible for the women to mobilise their reclaim of citizenship. By using Kabeer’s theory of citizenship as a bridge that enables empowerment to turn into gender justice, I found that the women’s movement in Rojava were attempting to change gender roles and structures, making their reclaim of citizenship feminist. The thesis contributes to understanding how marginalised people experience citizenship and shows that citizenship is a social construction and thereby something that can be both taken from you as well as reclaimed.