Rethinking Transnationalism through Kurdish Women's Activist Struggle

Nisa Goksel, Arizona State University

This paper focuses on the transnational mobilization of Kurdish activist women and their struggle for solidarity-making across borders, particularly by examining the challenges of transnational organizing. Drawing on interviews with and ethnographic observations of Kurdish activist women at conferences and campaigns in Europe and the Middle East, I explore the following questions: What does it mean for Kurdish women, as members of a stateless community, to strive to be part of transnational feminist and human rights networks? What alternative modes of solidarity-making do these activist women develop to be part of those networks? In answering these questions, I first suggest that statelessness produces a de-facto transnational existence for Kurds in the Middle East and Europe. On the one hand, Kurdish women in Turkey are “forced” to forge transnational alliances because they have been marginalized within Turkish national politics through various mechanisms of persecution, prosecution, and violence. On the other hand, they remain at the margins of transnational feminist and human rights networks, as they have political connections with a revolutionary organization, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), that commits violent acts. Ultimately, by examining the complexities of transnational mobilizing, my analysis provides a lens to understand the gendered dimensions of statelessness and it offers an alternative transnational framework that enables us to reflect on the limits of rights-based political struggles and the emergence of alternative forms of governance by stateless people and refugees in the face of state-led violence.

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 Presented in Session 134. International Perspectives on Women's Movements