Framing Kurdish Female Fighters : A qualitative content analysis of media representations of female fighters of Kobane in Arabic, Kurdish and Russian Media

Abstract: With the uprising of the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011, a myriad of news articles covering Syrian people' protests were published in the international media. However, it was after the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Syria and accordingly, Rojava region ​– the ​Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, de facto Autonomous Region ​– in 2014, that the region became the attention center of the international media. A considerable number of academic articles have analyzed the representations of the Kurdish female fighters in the Western media in different angles, such as the framing of the female fighters, their motivations, their roles in the war etc. There may exist a limited number of academic papers analyzing the Kurdish female fighters from the non-Western media perspective which might present a different picture from that of Western media analysis. Applying framing theory in combination with a qualitative content analysis approach, this study is intended to explore the Kurdish female fighters’ framing in Arabic, Kurdish and Russian media, namely Al-Jazeera, ANF and RT, respectively. Moreover, orientalism theory, feminist theory on militarization and war, and war and peace journalism theory are implied to investigate the framing of the kurdish female fighters in the three media.