Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569

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Women's Studies International Forum

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / w s i f

A gendered analysis of violence, justice and citizenship: Kurdish women

facing war and displacement in Turkey
Deniz Gökalp ⁎
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Syracuse University

s y n o p s i s

SynopsisThis article examines the impact of armed conflict on Kurdish women in southeastern
Turkey. I conceptualize women's agency in relation to their political consciousness and
capability to seek justice in legal, political, socio-economic, and cultural terms. I argue that
Kurdish women's agency stems from several phenomena: their experiences with the war,
displacement, and the city; their politicization as a result of their peculiar relationship with the
Turkish state, based on mutual suspicion and fear; and their propinquity with the Kurdish
ethno-nationalist political organization through ethnic propaganda and mobilization. I further
point out the complications involved in women's resocialization and politicization in
ethnicized terms, questioning the possibility for turning an ethnically-assertive and exclusive
form of women's agency into an emancipatory, inclusive, democratic force.
© 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction
The 1980s mark a significant turning point in world
history in the face of rapid ethnic polarization in the former
socialist states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, with
strong implications in adjacent geographies and around the
world. The end of the Cold War accompanied the emergence
of identity politics worldwide, with ethnic and religious
polarization invading the political domain particularly in East
Europe and Central Asia, but also in Latin America and Africa.
Class-based polarization was rapidly replaced by ethnic and
religious politicization in the wake of capitalist transforma-
tions in socialist states like Yugoslavia and Soviet Union or
developmentalist states like Turkey, which prominent scho-
lars claimed to be subtly supported by the global expansion of
neo-liberalism and U.S.-led proxy wars around the world (e.g.
Mamdani, 2005; Tilly, 2002).
The persistence of ethnic, religious, and sectarian conflicts
around the world, organized and justified by “identity”
claims, has increased civilians' involvement and experiences
⁎ 346 Eggers Hall, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Syracuse
University, Syracuse, NY 13244.
E-mail address: dgokalp@syr.edu.
with conflict. By the end of the Cold War, groups of actors
referred to in the literature as boundary keepers, ethnic
brokers, and cultural entrepreneurs “who supply its [ethnic
conflict] doctrine; and . . . exploit ethnic solidarities”
(Seligmann, 2003: 135) instigated internal wars in former
socialist states, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, with
strong implications in adjacent geographies and around the
world. Ethnic entrepreneurs have been quite successful in the
creation of new “collective memories” by re-imagining ethnic
identities or creating new “enemy-others” to settle histori-
cally contingent accounts, advance ethno-nationalist claims,
and plead the new social problems—despite the fact that
these problems originate largely in political economies rather
than ethnic differences (Volkan, 1997; see also Murer, 2002;
Tainter, 2003).
In the 1980s, the separatist ethno-nationalist Partîya
Karkêren-i Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK)
took its position in southeastern Turkey as well as in
neighboring countries and Europe as one of those ethnic
actors. Although various Kurdish uprisings had occurred
before, the PKK insurgency marks a new phase in Turkey's
“Kurdish question.” Beginning in the 1980s, Kurdish mobili-
zation around the originally communist organization gained a
distinct ethno-national tone, resorting to violence within the

0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2010.09.005
562 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
propitious global and regional circumstances occurring by the
end of the Cold War. The armed conflict between the PKK and
Turkish security forces lasted until 1999, claiming the lives of
more than 40,000 Kurdish and Turkish civilians in the region.
After the ceasefire declared by the PKK in 1999, hostilities
largely ceased until June 2004 when clashes resumed
between the Turkish army and the Kurdish insurgents. The
“low intensity war” hit the local peasant population in conflict
areas in southeastern Turkey especially hard, internally
displacing between 1.2 and 4 million Turkish Kurds.
The Turkish Kurds displaced in the 1990s were mainly
poor peasants with weak ties to both the Turkish state and
the established Kurdish tribal entities in the southeast, who
themselves did have strong alliances with the central Turkish
state. In that respect, displacement was selective; it was not
necessarily ethnicity, but rather political affiliation with the
central state (or lack thereof) that dictated who would be
displaced, whether directly by the Turkish army or indirectly
by the chaos of the armed conflict. Social and political
standing of the peasant communities determined whether
they would be displaced, while displacement itself turned
into a process of socialization and politicization for the
displaced in ethnicized terms. Masses of the displaced Kurds
tended to sympathize with the ethno-nationalist PKK and
developed antagonism against the Turkish state as well as the
state's Kurdish supporters who remained in their places of
origins and took over some of the property left behind by the
displaced. The displaced Kurds' immediate destinations were
the city centers in the southeast, but a significant proportion
eventually scattered around the country and across Europe in
search of safety, housing, and jobs.
This study is concerned with displaced Kurdish women in
the southeastern city centers who have been squeezed in
between the two decade-long convulsions of war and the city.
Women in the new wars of the contemporary era—where
internal conflicts can no longer be envisaged independent from
the contingencies of neo-liberal globalization—run a high risk of
being the victims of power dynamics and structural changes
beyond their control. Of the many faces of war, displacement
proves to be a further debilitating force in the lives of women in
conflicts. Coping with new environments reinforces traditional
roles and ethnic belonging; these coping behaviors often
reinforce women's subordination to the hegemony of discourses
and practices written and dominated by men. The embedded
issues of power relations, differentials, and social, economic, and
political subordination continue to operate at the level of family,
community, and nation. Moreover, how these issues operate
depends on women's class, ethnic, and other structural
identities. Yet, women may be able to use the war circum-
stances as catalysts in enhancing social agency, political
consciousness, and community organizing to advance their
rights and socio-political spaces (e.g. Cockburn, 1998; Giles &
Hyndman, 2004a,b; Jacobson, 2006; Kaldor, 1999; Koraj, 2006;
Moser & Clark, 2001; Rajasingham-Senanayake, 2004; Thapar-
Bjorket, Morgan & Yuval-Davis, 2006).
This article examines the impact of the armed conflict on
Kurdish women in southeastern Turkey in terms of their
gaining a particular form of social and political consciousness
that I call agency. It considers how some Kurdish women
react within contested spaces and develop discursive ways of
seeking justice at different levels (familial, urban and
national). I conceptualize women's agency in relation to
their political consciousness and capability (or lack thereof)
to seek justice in legal, political, socio-economic, and cultural
terms. Certain forms of agency, owing to the specificities of
war and displacement as social and political learning
processes, may develop within these contexts that equip
women with social and political assertiveness aiming at
visibility, voice, and justice.
I argue that a rights-based consciousness has developed
among the Kurdish women in southeastern Turkey since the
start of the armed conflict. This particular development, I
contend, stems from several phenomena: women's experi-
ences with the war, displacement, and the city; their
politicization as a result of their peculiar relationship with
the Turkish state, based on mutual suspicion and fear; and
their propinquity with the Kurdish ethno-nationalist political
organization through PKK-dominated ethnic propaganda and
mobilization. I address in this article the complications
involved in women's resocialization and politicization in
ethnicized terms, questioning the possibility for turning an
ethnically assertive and exclusive form of women's agency
into an emancipatory, inclusive, democratic force. Mine is an
engagement with the notion of justice, rather than “Kurdish
identity,” as a basis upon which solidarities and alliances can
be established across women's particular ethnic, class, and
other structural identities.
I concentrate on three overarching and intertwined trans-
formations that have shaped and set limits to Kurdish women's
agency as the conflict unfolded since the 1990s: (a) the
opening-up of social and political maneuvering spaces for
women in the region of violence and displacement, allowing
them public visibility and political voice in discourse on poverty,
unemployment, and social insecurity; (b) the increasing
salience of Kurdish ethno-nationalism and its contentious
implications for citizenship consolidation, civic consciousness,
and demand-making in southeastern Turkey; and (c) the
decline of the social state and the simultaneous penetration of
neo-liberal, policy, and implications for the socio-economic
well-being of vulnerable social groups, social equity and the
possibility of redistributive justice in the region.
The conceptual arguments in this article are supported by
my fieldwork undertaken in 2004 in several cities in
southeastern Turkey. Over 35 interviews were conducted
with representatives of women's organizations and NGOs,
which included representatives from the local municipalities
who were engaged in activities for women, a group of Peace
Mothers (Kurdish guerilla mothers), and a number of
displaced Kurdish women. A gendered socio-political analysis
of the armed conflict is developed throughout the article
based on my ethnographic research, in-depth interview data,
and in-depth qualitative analysis of the socio-political
trajectory of the Kurdish Question in Turkey since the 1980s.
Women, justice and identity politics
Previous research has revealed that women still tend to
remain powerless in face of conflict-driven changes that bring
physical, social, economic, and political vulnerabilities to both
them and their male counterparts. They may, however,
become actors to shape their individual and communal
destinies, challenging the structural constraints placed upon
 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
them by violence. The ultimate feminist endeavor in research
is to “explore the possibilities for changing power imbalances”
under which women maneuver to survive and to affirm their
interests, demands, and expectations (Giles & Hyndman,
2004a,b: 4). Hence, a gendered approach to the aftermath of
the armed conflict and displacement entails juxtaposing those
processes by which women assert themselves in their quest
for social space, justice, rights, and inclusion, and the
structural dynamics that render women marginalized, ex-
cluded, or subjugated.
Self assertion and marginalization usually overlap, making
the impact of violent conflicts on women and the structural
forces in which they operate more complex than indicated by
the juxtaposition above. Displacement is a further compli-
cating factor within the socio-spatial and spatial–political
changes that occur during wars. This makes civilian territories
spaces of political contention, where any victim is likely to be
a dissident and any daily civilian activity is likely to have a
salient social, political, and militant implication.
My conceptual understanding of women's agency and
justice draws on the works of Elizabeth Jelin (2005) and
Nancy Fraser. Jelin (2005) provides valuable insights into the
mechanisms by which new democratic political systems deal
with repressed people's demand for “truth” and “justice” in
Latin America in the1990s, disentangling human rights
movements into their various strands. On the one hand, she
examines how human rights movements perceive past
violence from a point of view that privileges the contempo-
rary claims of “life, truth and justice.” On the other hand, she
takes into consideration the impact of neo-liberal policies on
society including increases in impoverishment, inequality,
social exclusion, and social polarization. Justice claims with
regard to past accounts with a violent state are, hence,
rearticulated in presence of new experiences with inequality,
social exclusion, poverty, and social polarization, the ravages
of neo-liberal policies.
Jelin (2005) theorized that rights rhetoric facilitated
democratic articulation between the state and society in
Latin America by consolidating the culture of citizenship since
the 1980s. In contrast, ethnicized rights rhetoric used by the
pro-Kurdish actors has contributed to increased alienation
between the Turkish state and politicized Kurdish citizens in
Turkey, including pro-Kurdish women's groups and the local
constituencies they represent. Jelin contends that political
violence entails negotiation between the state and society in
terms of rights (violated, curtailed, or both) and justice. In the
Turkish case, however, ethno-nationalist demands were
perceived as separatist and therefore non-negotiable by the
state—in many instances negotiation led to tension in
stalemate.
It is the claim for recognition that impels the particular
antagonistic ethnic component associated with the group of
women I examine in this article. I relate such recognition claims
to the notion of justice developed by Nancy Fraser (2001, 2003,
and 2005)). Fraser's concept of justice does not reject the identity
(gender as well as ethnic) aspect of recognition struggles, but
relates the quest for rights and representation to justice, rather
than remaining on the plane of recognition. In this respect, Fraser
(2005) treats identity claims (gender as well as ethnic) as justice
claims, changing the locus of dialogue from identity to “status” by
which Fraser means “parity of participation in social life.” The
563
systemic problem of “identity” politics, according to Fraser, is that
it carries the risk of depoliticizing and obscuring structural
problems and inequalities within those social groups claiming
“recognition.” Fraser further addresses “the problem of reifica-
tion” entrenched in identity-based politics: “Struggles for
recognition] tend, rather, to encourage separatism and group
enclaves, chauvinism and intolerance, patriarchalism, and
authoritarianism. I shall call this the problem of reification”
(2003: 91–2). Fraser's work indeed illuminates the importance
of a civic understanding of rights claims; this complements
Kaldor's (1999) point that civic solidarities and inter-group
connections instead of ethnic politics are crucial to promote
peace, cohesion, and social equity in ethno-politically challenged
conflict geographies (also see Koraj, 2006; and Hadjipavlou &
Cockburn, 2006).
Drawing the boundaries of women's agency in
southeastern Turkey
A representative of a regional women's NGO in the
Southeastern province of Diyarbakir stated:
[Displaced Kurdish women] have found [in the cities]
leverage points in order to breakdown the traditional
gender relations imposed upon them for years. Not only
becoming a part of the city and all the spaces of the city,
but also the difficulties, hardship, violence and suppres-
sion faced, have weakened the men and empowered the
women in their relationship with the men . . . The notion
of ‘honor’ which imprisoned Kurdish women for centuries
has been redefined . . . Women have entered into a clash
with the social and cultural heterogeneity they see in the
city and through the media; these processes have forced
Kurdish women to search for new meanings in their lives
and to develop new visions.(Personal interview with the
director of the ASVWR [Association for Vulnerable
Women's Rights—a pseudonym for privacy and security
purposes], summer 2004)
As the radical social, economic, and political changes hit
women hardest due to their structural subordination, women
developed different identities (including political ones), orient-
ed themselves toward different hopes and expectations than
men, and struggled for different rights and a different notion of
justice. Agency is an important element of analysis to
understand the implications of the conflict and its aftermath
for individuals. It not only refers to what women “do,” but also
who they are (Merteens, 2001; Sen, 1989). In this respect,
women's agency consists in their ability to speak and decide for
themselves, to distance themselves from the previous patriar-
chal structures of family and kinship, and to deal with the
traumas of the conflict and displacement. It is also their capacity
to search for justice, to speak in the name of their lost husbands
and sons, to develop survival strategies for their families, and to
articulate their willingness to be active agents of change for
themselves and also for the “Kurdish struggle.” Furthermore,
they attempt to do all this without falling into the trap of ethno-
nationalist discourses written by men who use women and
their bodies pragmatically to advance their own interests.
Stressing women's agency runs the risk of overlooking the
social, economic, cultural, and political context in which that
564 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
agency is supposed to operate and the disempowerment that
conflict and political violence can bring about. For women,
the city is an alien setting that imposes a new definition of
“private” and “public”—a dramatic challenge to reorganize
their lives based on the new “ways of doing things.”
Throughout this radical experience, young women especially
looked for spaces to breathe and maintain their dignity.
Women in the new private and public domains have to find
ways to assert themselves not only as actors of change, but
also as actors of resistance and struggle within the changing
social, economic, and cultural context in which previous
patriarchal regimes are both redefined and reproduced.
The agency of women is not necessarily political activism,
but rather women's ability to evaluate the past under present
circumstances and to assess the situation back in the village in
terms of the city and of the contemporary political situation,
and their capability (though limited) to make demands in
regard to their social and political, human, and women's
rights. Thus, agency cannot be defined simply as something
that is “liberating or emancipating,” but rather should be
conceptualized in terms of the “politics of survival” as a
process of re-socialization, politicization, and social mobili-
zation to struggle for social space, justice, and rights, as well
as to make ends meet on a daily basis.
From displacement to politicization and mobilization
As traditional social relations and networks are broken
down by the dynamics of conflict and displacement, the
structures of governance and justice change considerably;
gendered power relations are redefined as new forms of
patriarchy and of systems of subjugating women emerge in
conflict zones. Conflict and displacement have generated
competing social and political processes for Kurdish women,
creating new forms of repression, but at the same time
creating a certain amount of bargaining power within the
changing dynamics at home and in communities. The burden
of decision-making regarding new familial and residential
arrangements, as well as the burden of dealing with social
and economic hardship, has fallen to the lot of numbers of
women. The survival strategies they have developed tend to
broaden women's horizons and define their experiences and
identities as well as hopes, expectations, and perspectives on
future. Nida, a displaced woman, said:
There is no way to settle back in the village . . . .
Everybody knows that the war is not over. I cannot risk
the lives of my children. If nothing improves, this time, I
will try to go to Europe and seek refuge with my children.
I don't want to raise them in war. I want them not to live
like us. I want them to get education, to live like respected
people, not like us.(Personal interview, summer 2004)
When asked if her husband agreed with her, Nida's
replied: “He can join us if he wants, I really do not care
about him that much. My children are my primary concern
and I won't let my husband stand in my way.” Indeed, as
women gain access to pro-Kurdish civil society organizations
and observe the conflict-related experiences of others, they
have been exposed to information and gained understanding
about the international opportunities, including asylum in
European countries. However, this information is often
misleading, making their understanding naive, especially in
regard to the complications of international systems. The
ambiguous result is that the availability of international
protection mechanisms has artificially empowered the Kurds
in Turkey by letting them see one possible route to a better
life. At the same time, however, these people become
entangled in the multiple and complex impediments of the
international system (particularly the international refugee
system), which tends to promote further their “victim”
identity, helpless to change the oppressing circumstances
surrounding them.
The impact of the armed conflict on family formations
among the Kurds has also been substantial. The conflict has
produced many female-headed households as the result of the
recruitment of PKK recruitment and death or “disappearance” at
the hands of the Turkish security forces. Socio-economic
vulnerabilities, poverty, and unemployment are coupled with
the frequency of families missing male family members, female-
headed households, high numbers of street children, and high
rates of prostitution in Diyarbakir (D. Gökalp, personal inter-
views with key informants and the displaced families, 2004; see
also TMMOB [Chamber of Turkish Engineers & Architects
Association], 1998). Although cultural traditions encourage
Kurdish families to accommodate the women who lose their
husbands and their children within the extended household,
forced migration, the splintering of extended families, and
drastic impoverishment have distorted family structures,
loosened up family ties, and provided legitimate “excuses” for
close relatives to abandon widowed women.
In certain cases, it is the widowed women who prefer to
live apart from their relatives and set up their own house-
holds with their children. The disruption caused by conflict
and displacement has provided some women with the ability
to challenge traditional family arrangements and make
decisions for themselves and for their children. By losing
the “head” of the family, some women have been encouraged
or even required to take on new roles and to engage in
income generation activities, with sometimes coterminous
impacts of empowering and burdening. Melek gave me an
interesting account telling her breaking up from the relatives
to set up her separate household after the displacement:
My husband got murdered [persecutor unknown] in
Diyarbakir shortly after we were driven away from our
village. His parents and brothers were also in Diyarbakir
and we were staying together. They wanted me and my
children to continue to stay with them. I knew that
nothing would be the same for me in that house. I did not
have my husband anymore. . . . They would want to
control me and my children. . . I was scared that they
would force my children to quit their school to work on
the street. I left their house. I rented an apartment by
myself. Now I go to clean others' houses, my children
work on the street. They have to. But they work in shifts
and they go to school too. I spend the money they earn for
their own expenses, not for those of the relatives.
(Personal interview, summer 2004)
Upon losing their husbands and sons to the war, many
Kurdish women have taken control of the space opened by the
 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
absence of men not only in the household, but also in the
communal and public arena. Politicization has become a quest
for justice and a settling of accounts with the Turkish state for
having uprooted Kurds, violated their human and citizenship
rights, and employed torture, disappearances, and extra-
judicial killings. They have come to recognize the existence of
power dynamics in a variety of social spaces ranging from home
and communities to the local and national level. Not all conflict-
affected Kurdish women have turned into political activists, but
they have been politicized to some extent. This is a form of
political awareness that makes the Kurdish women realize that
their social, economic, political, and gender-related vulnerabil-
ities are actually their strengths—that is, tools with which they
can demand justice.
Encounters with organized pro-Kurdish actors in the city
equip the women with social connections and up-to-date
political and legal information, as well as grant them the
ability to be involved with those organizations they see as
relevant to their needs. These organized actors also reinforce
women's perceptions of their position in society not only as
women, but also as Kurds—as civilians “victimized” and a
people “impoverished” by the Turkish state and security
forces. Kurdish “identity” is quite evident in women's
association of a particular form of victimization that encom-
passes their social, economic, and political insecurity with
their identity as Kurds. Women can be very vocal in
articulating their problems and demands in line with the
general political rhetoric of the Kurdish movement and its
demands for ethnicized “rights” and “democracy.”
The right to speak Kurdish and the right to receive
education in Kurdish as well as more radical demands, such
as the right to have an independent “Kurdistan,” are often
discursively added to the end of women's statements about
expectations for the future. Their demands even surpass the
current demands of the PKK and its political representative in
the Turkish Parliament, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society
Party (DTP), as these organized pro-Kurdish actors have
changed their ultimate demand from independence to a
“Democratic Federation of Turkey” where Kurds would have
an ambiguously defined form of federal government. Ahvelat
is one of many displaced Kurdish women who believe that
justice could be done and rights be recuperated only under an
independent Kurdish state. She stated: “Unless we are given
our rights, our situation will not improve and the conflict will
not end. Our right is independence, this is what we deserve”
(personal interview, summer 2004).
Paradoxically, the peculiar victim psychology has the
power to liberate women by relating their life conditions to
the state through rights discourses. Jelin provides the
following explanation for the implications of the victim
status under circumstances of state repression: “Based on
their position as victims, they can look to repair and correct,
demanding that the state assume and recognize responsibil-
ity for its past wrongdoings” (2005: 197).
Leyla, a 42-year-old woman, gave the following account as
her husband sat next to her listening quietly:
The soldiers burned down the village, everything we had.
They burned down our lives together with our trust in the
state. We don't want the state to help us. We want what
we deserve and what we lost due to the state activities.
565
We don't want help, we want our rights.(Personal inter-
view, summer 2004)
Social, economic, and gender-related vulnerabilities in-
deed legitimize women's demands for justice and rights,
justify their search for non-conventional ways of doing things
and, to a certain extent, insulate them from violence in the
form of police/gendarme detention and surveillance. Zeren, a
displaced woman whose husband was killed extra-judicially,
stated:
Shortly after we came to Diyarbakir, my husband was
taken away [by the JITEM–a special unofficial counter-
terrorism team used by the Turkish security forces in
southeastern Turkey during the emergency rule period]. .
. .I was the only one in the family trying to find out what
happened to him. Everybody else was scared and told me
that nothing could be done for him. I started going to the
JITEM base every day. I went to them every single day to
ask them about my husband's whereabouts. I was not
scared . . . I took my children with me, what could they do
to a woman with little children? . . . One day, they
confessed to me that my husband had been executed and
asked me not to go there anymore.(Personal interview,
summer 2004)
After learning about her husband's killing, Zeren, 30 years
old, mother of three and with no formal education, said that
she “started to search for someone who could help me seek
my rights.” She continued:
I went to consult with IHD [Human Rights Foundation] in
regard to my husband's murder. They helped me to take
my case to the ECHR [European Court for Human Rights].
It is going to finalize very soon . . . I am a member of
Migrants' Association and Human Rights Organization
(HRO). I follow their activities. I do not want any money
in exchange for my husband's life. . . . I want justice be
done.(Personal interview, summer 2004)
The average Kurdish woman's encounter with organized
Kurdish groups, local and national civil society organizations,
and international discourses of rights (human, cultural, and
women's) has been distinct from that of her male counterpart's.
Local and national women NGOs, organized human rights
groups, migrants' associations, bar associations, and pro-
Kurdish municipalities have all designed specific projects and
programs aimed at helping women cope with the social,
economic, psychological, and legal problems arising in the
aftermath of displacement. Women involved with these
organizations, even as close bystanders, voice their demand
for “justice” as compensation for their losses and for the
problems caused by the Turkish state in “the past”—including
killings, disappearances, torture, displacement, et cetera—with
the goal of reconstructing their lives in a different environment.
Yet, beyond demanding justice, they also reevaluate their
current situation in the light of their rights—cultural, social,
political, and human—as well as employing the “democracy”
rhetoric to which they have been exposed during the course of
their experiences with the conflict.
Sultan and Zuhal, two displaced Kurdish women who
have been involved in the pro-Kurdish movement after
566 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
displacement, stated their demands for democracy and more
in their own ways. Sultan, who was involved in Peace
Mothers initiative, stated:
People talk about the European Union all the time, about
democracy and human rights it will bring to us. . . . They
say that we should go back to our villages. In order for me
to go back to the village, I need democracy and human
rights in my village. If democracy is coming in my village,
then I will consider going back to the village.(Personal
interview, fall 2004)
Zuhal, involved in political activism after her husbanded
was arrested, stated:
DEHAP [pro-Kurdish municipality, currently DTP] works
very well. They care about us. The municipality goes to
the people; they conduct public forums for us to
participate. Participation is what we need. But there are
a lot of things to do, we need shelters for women and
elderly, we need programs targeting youth to struggle
against drugs, we need programs to save Kurdish girls
and women from prostitution and we need investment in
the region.(personal interview, fall 2004)
Any analysis of women's quest for social spaces, justice,
and rights should not lose sight of the international and
national contexts that interact with the very local terrain in
which women maneuver. In fact, Kurdish women's demands
and expectations are strongly engaged with the state and
articulated through internationalized rights discourses, such
as human and cultural rights. Whether they search for justice
and want to settle accounts for past wrongdoings committed
by the state and security forces during the conflict, or search
instead for jobs, access to education, and health services for
themselves and their children, women as social actors
articulate with the state as the focal point for demand-
making.
Uneasy marriage of ethno-nationalism and feminism:
victims, activists, and partisans
The PKK discourse drew heavily upon women in the
Kurdish struggle and “nationalist movement,” emphasizing
the importance of women's role. The PKK did so for two
pragmatic purposes: to attack and challenge the Kurdish
tribal system where the notion of “honor” is defined through
women's “purity,” and to use women as militants to help
populate its guerilla ranks and disseminate its ideology.
Grassroots mobilization in this respect pivoted around the
promise of an independent Kurdistan that would liberate the
impoverished Kurdish rural masses, especially Kurdish
women, from their oppression of the Kurdish tribal system
as well as their marginalization by the Turkish state.
Many young Kurdish women have joined the PKK in
Turkey and neighboring countries, as well as in the European
Diaspora where the PKK extracted financial and political
support. In fact, the emergence of the PKK has had important,
but contradictory, implications for women: on the one hand,
it has raised “female consciousness” in southeastern Turkey,
and on the other hand, it has exploited women and their
bodies—as PKK protagonist, guerilla fighter, suicide bomber,
or self-immolator—for political ends. The late 1990s wit-
nessed a sharp increase in the number of suicide attacks and
self-immolation protests committed by young, and very often
female, PKK militants in Turkey and Europe, suggesting that
the weakening guerilla forces were opting for a new and more
desperate strategy to compensate for their loss of rural areas
(e.g. Bozarslan, 2004: 24). After ending the ceasefire in 2004,
the PKK used the female militia one more time in its attempt
to stage terrorist attacks in urban centers in Turkey. It is
indeed ironic that many Kurdish women have been victim-
ized by the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish
security forces, while many young Kurdish women in search
of a social status and liberation from tribal oppression have
joined the guerillas, becoming “terrorists,” “heroines,” vic-
tims, and victimizers all at once.
The emergence of Kurdish feminist discourses since the
late 1980s has, hence, been associated with the PKK
ideologies and the representation of women in the PKK-
sponsored “Kurdish nationalist struggle.” A representative of
a regional Women's NGO pointed out the PKK sympathy
among the circles of Kurdish feminists:
We benefit a lot from the ideas and writings of Öcalan
[the head of the PKK] in order to develop an ideological
basis for our current and future activities. It is he who first
of all questioned the oppression of women in our
[Kurdish] society.(personal interview with the director
of the ASVWR, summer 2004)
Unsurprisingly, partisan politics and affiliation with the
ethno-nationalist circles have characterized the agendas of
various regional female/feminist groups. Kurdish women's
grassroots initiatives such as Peace Mothers (Kurdish guerilla
mothers) and Democratic Free Women Initiative (Demokra-
tik Özgür Kadin Haraketi) have developed in close affiliation
with the women's branches of the pro-Kurdish political party
(DEHAP/DTP). Those pro-PKK initiatives failed to garner
sympathy from either the Turkish media or public due to
the contradiction between their ostensibly peace-seeking
agenda and their fervent support of PKK violence. For
example, Meryem, a displaced woman in her fifties, affiliated
with the Peace Mothers, stated in a manner contrasting
ironically with her stance as a peace mother: “I think with
such an attitude of the state, the war will never end. My son
got killed in the fighting; now I am more than ready to send
his daughter to the mountain to fight for peace!” (personal
interview, fall 2004).
Pro-PKK politics have dominated these grassroots women
initiatives, in which almost “mystical” nationalist sentiments are
intermingled with women's suffering and subjugation in the
region, resulting in the promotion of ambiguous agendas with
no concrete social, economic, and political basis. The Kurdish
women's movement was especially trapped between two fronts
in the bifurcated political environment during the years of
armed conflict. Polarization between “state-friendly” civic forces
and those with civic and political agendas inclined towards the
PKK ideology was ineluctable in the face of radical politicization.
In a parallel vein, Kurdish female/feminist consciousness has
failed to transcend ethnic, ideological, and class divisions. As
Moser and Clark point out “[t]his challenges assumptions that
women's gender identity, as a unifying force, transcends all
 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
other identities . . . while women's agency can be supportive, it
can also be divisive for the women's movement” (2001: 9).
Ethno-nationalist tendencies among the Kurdish female activists
and radical politicization among the grassroots initiatives risk
the legitimacy of many pro-Kurdish women's groups and
organizations as democratic civic actors.
There is, nonetheless, an exceptional example. A small
group of Kurdish feminists worked diligently in the 1990s to
distance their movement from the PKK-sponsored emanci-
pation discourses written by men (i.e. the head of the
organization, Abdullah Öcalan). This unique commitment
enabled them to communicate their message across various
feminist groups in Turkey. Their organization, KA-MER
(Women's Center), was founded with funding from Istan-
bul-based Turkish feminist circles in 1997. The pioneer of this
feminist initiative was an elementary school teacher who had
become committed to the issue of Kurdish women's oppres-
sion through her and her husband's experiences with
violence in the 1980s and 1990s (Gambetti, 2005). Rather
than framing Kurdish women's problems in ethnic or
nationalist terms, KA-MER changed the focus to Kurdish
women's social, cultural, and political status in Kurdish
society, providing a solid critique for Kurdish cultural
practices and their embeddedness in male-dominated
power, politics, and institutions in Turkey. Gambetti noted:
The [Turkish] state eyed her suspiciously for having been
an activist. . . . officially stigmatized as being pro-PKK. The
Kurdish movement, on the other hand, criticized her for
introducing a division within the movement between
men and women. Women's rights came after human
rights and the Kurdish movement considered itself as
having other priorities.(2005: 63)
There remained only a limited political space available for
independent women's mobilization, such as the one initiated
by KA-MER, which established alliances with Turkish and
certain Kurdish feminist circles in the 1990s. KA-MER used
the alliances to attract attention to the occurrence of honor-
killings and suicide among young migrant Kurdish women, in
tandem with the decline of political tension in the region in
the late 1990s. Yet, more politicized Kurdish feminist circles
accused KA-MER of being a “pragmatist, elite organization,”
aloof from Kurdish reality and struggle (personal interview
with a pro-Kurdish female activist, summer 2004).
Between the state antagonism toward “suspicious” Kurds
and the increasing salience of ethno-nationalist and chau-
vinist tendencies in the Kurdish movement, the opportunity
for a coherent, prudent, representative and legitimate pro-
Kurdish mobilization in Turkey has been almost completely
inhibited. In a parallel vein, Kurdish feminist organizing has
experienced fragmentation and disorientation as the priori-
ties of pro-Kurdish politics overshadowed women's demands
and interests. It has also faced the impediment that any
negotiation with the state is filtered through entrenched
radical ethnic politics.
Kurdish women in the snare of neo-liberal ravages
Since the 1980s, neo-liberal restructuring has gone hand-
in-hand with ethnic and religious polarization, reducing the
567
already inadequate forms of state-provided welfare provi-
sions in Turkey and across the developing world. Economic
reform programs embarked on under the authorization of the
IMF have forfeited long-term development initiatives for
short-term economic benefits and rent-seeking politics.
Economic liberalization has not only created economic crisis,
chronic inflation, and economic instability, but has also
reduced accountability and transparency in the public sector,
undermining civic consciousness and organizing (Demir,
2005). Increasing socio-economic gaps between social clas-
ses, distributional injustice, and growing poverty and unem-
ployment, together with political corruption entrenched in
the rapid economic transformation in 1980s, have resulted in
declining state legitimacy. In the eyes of citizens, the
“corrupt” state abandoned them and insulated the political
decision-making mechanisms further from society. As con-
ceptualized by Buğra and Keyder, “corruption rather than
populism [became] the more appropriate term to describe the
economic dimension of state-society relations” (2006: 212).
The war in southeast Turkey has further worsened the
situation by channeling state resources toward military
expenditures and introducing new decision-making dynam-
ics—between the state bureaucracy, business interests, and
the military—that are insulated from society (Demir, 2005;
Öniş, 2000; see also Cam, 2005).
The arrest of the leader of the PKK in 1999, the lifting of
regional emergency rule, and the democratization reforms
undertaken by the central government created temporary
hopes for depoliticization and the ending of the conflict. The
pro-Islamist government, a fervent supporter of neo-liberal-
ism and IMF, adopted a new direction toward a distorted form
of the “universal social rights” approach since 2002. As part of
this, the central government has initiated policy initiatives to
address issues of poverty and “street children” (e.g. Buğra &
Keyder, 2003, 2006). It was in this environment that the
central government reevaluated the displacement issue as a
“social risk” to be addressed through social policy, socio-
economic development and reconstruction in southeast
Turkey (Aker, Celik, Kurban, Unalan & Yukseker, 2006). In a
symptom-therapy manner, the general aim appears to make
the local population (especially women) more able to deal
with the problems of structural poverty and unemployment
and to mitigate the social, economic, and domestic burden
carried by the poor. No concrete policy initiative has been
undertaken specifically to address neither poverty and
unemployment nor the migrant women's gender specific
problems.
Indeed, my research among the migrant communities in
the southeastern city of Diyarbakir has convinced me that
identity-based politicization and local antagonism toward the
Turkish state is mainly an outgrowth of a “politics of survival.”
Displaced Kurdish women have developed a politics of
survival to make sense of their experiences with violence
and find hope for the future. Socio-economic stability entails
political security; in turn, political security guarantees socio-
economic well-being, if not today, definitely tomorrow, when
the “rights of the Kurds are recognized”—as perceived and
stated by the majority of my interviewees. The politics of
survival serves as a heuristic for the many displaced women
who are positioning themselves within the structural changes
that have overwhelmed them. Sometimes they assert
568 D. Gökalp / Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 561–569
themselves as victims, sometimes as citizens, but most often
as committed supporters of a discursively existent “Kurdish
cause” and of fighters of the ongoing “Kurdish struggle.”
I do not mean to reduce socio-economic insecurities and
political insecurities into each other; they do not necessarily
overlap. However, my research suggests that during the
course of the forced migrations of the Turkish Kurds, different
forms of insecurities have mutually reinforced each other in
southeastern Turkey. This in turn contributed to the radical-
ization of the Kurdish identity and the increasing popularity
of the PKK in the region among the local people and
grassroots initiatives. Political violence together with the
social, economic, and political transformation in southeastern
Turkey during the course of the armed conflict have deeply
affected the lives of the Kurdish masses who tend to articulate
their experiences in terms of their Kurdish identity and
perceive the violence of the pro-Kurdish actors as legitimate,
moral, just, and appropriate acts of retribution. In the same
vein, displaced Kurdish women tend to perceive socio-
economic problems such as inequality, poverty, and unem-
ployment as identity-related problems: “we have been made
to suffer, because we are Kurds”; “Turkish state doesn't want
Kurds to eat, to have jobs, or to be wealthy”; “if my children
are hungry today, it is because that the Turkish state wants
Kurdish kids to be weak and ill.”
This local, ethnicized rhetoric of the politics of unemploy-
ment, social exclusion, and poverty is also promoted by the
organized Kurdish groups such as the pro-Kurdish local
municipalities and has further antagonized the conflict-
affected Kurdish citizens of Turkey against the central state.
Therefore, past, present, and future demands for justice exist
in a dialectical relationship to each other. As theorized by
Jelin, the demand to settle past accounts with a violent state
are mediated by redefined demands “in face of the new
realities of inequality, social exclusion, and social polariza-
tion” (2005: 192). The Turkish case proves the utmost
difficulty of incorporating an ethnic component into justice
demands when the state system does not recognize ethnic
differences among citizens.
Conclusion
Women's subjugation, as well as liberation and emanci-
pation, is heavily embedded within the power relations that
interplay at the familial, communal, national, and global
levels. Radical and even traumatic transformations in social
relations and general politicization in society might in fact
open spaces of opportunity, voice, and dignity for women.
Some women are able to exploit newly emerging power
dynamics at home and in their community, as well as in the
national arena. In this new era, where neo-liberal policies
encourage and deepen ethnic polarizations, democratic
spaces can emerge so long as women are empowered to
make demands and to participate in decision-making
processes. Furthermore, these spaces will emerge insofar as
women can establish alliances with each other across social
group identities, such as class, ethnicity, and political
orientation. I would like to conclude by noting that as Fraser
(2003, 2005) contends, elevating the notion of justice over
that of recognition is crucial to creating real modalities for
justice-seeking. Civic consciousness rather than ethnic poli-
tics might have helped establish much needed allegiances
between the organized Turkish and Kurdish women's groups
in Turkey, and in turn mitigated the radicalization and
violence in southeastern Turkey.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mounira Maya Charrad for making
this special issue possible and for her helpful suggestions. My
thanks also go to anonymous reviewers who provided
valuable comments.
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