Introduction

1In the 16^th century, the Kurds, the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East (with a population of over forty million), were divided between the Iranian and the Ottoman empire. After the First World War, they were spread between four countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey). Due to strong political and cultural pressure and economic hardship under the rule of often nationalist and centralist regimes, Kurdistan in the late 1970s experienced episodes of urban violence and guerrilla warfare in various regions, notably in Turkey. The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), both an armed organization and a broader popular movement, was born in 1978 in this context, in response to the violence of the Turkish state, whose policy was to deny the very existence of Kurds, dubbed “Mountain Turks” (Brenneman 2016).

3Since taking up arms in 1984, the decolonial Kurdistan liberation movement has dominated the Kurdish political space along with relatively autonomous sister organizations in other regions, such as Rojava in Syria. It has also successfully created a deterritorialized and popular transnational community in Europe, despite being considered a terrorist organization by the European Union since 2001, and by the United States since 1997. The PKK has millions of sympathizers engaged not only in the armed struggle but also in political parties and social organizations.

5The article first discusses the difficulty of analyzing the production of knowledge in a context marked by repression and war. This explains in part why this knowledge is disseminated in publications that are often scattered and anonymous, and in discourses that can sometimes take on a moralistic tone. The article then explores the stance Jineolojî has taken against the Turkish state as a colonizing state, and against feminism and academia as spaces that produce social hierarchies. This second part shows how Jineolojî is presented as a feminine science that aims to challenge the monopolization of women’s narratives in countries of the South by dominant institutions and discourses in countries of the North, and seeks to democratize knowledge by making it accessible to marginalized and insurgent populations. We also explore the place of Jineolojî in the global landscape of socially legitimate knowledge. Our analysis suggests that due to the colonial and imperial domination of marginalized knowledge considered too politic, this knowledge is excluded as illegitimate. This situation highlights a global and colonial division of labor in the production and circulation of knowledge, that perpetuates academic neo-colonialism (Alatas 2003: 606). According to this analysis, the Global South is expected to produce political material and thus generates data perceived as “unscientific and insufficiently valid” (Gururani 2002: 354), rather than institutionally acceptable theories (Meghji 2021). Building on these aspects, we examine the distinction, interaction and potential co-construction between “academic scientific knowledge” and “extra-academic activist knowledge,” along with the claims of (il)legitimacy strongly associated with them. Knowledge is defined here as a tool for understanding emancipatory ideas and praxis. Finally, the article focuses on the geographical and intellectual mobility of the women who contribute to Jineolojî, which provides an additional perspective by shedding light on their career paths and their impact on global knowledge.

6Given the complex nature of our topic, the inquiry took on many different forms and used different feminist qualitative methods. As described by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (2014), these methods include ethical considerations, research design, data collection and analysis, but also feminist approaches that enrich the understanding of social phenomena. Data for this article were mainly collected as part of a sociology doctoral thesis on revolutionary activism and the production of female knowledge within the PKK (Rostampour 2022). The inquiry was carried out in the field with women fighters in mountain camps as well as activists living in the towns. In-depth interviews were conducted with seventy-two Kurdish women, including forty-six fighters and twenty-seven activists. An additional seventeen informal, unrecorded interviews were held with women close to the movement. The writings of these fighters and activists were also analyzed, along with different textual and visual sources about Jineolojî in Kurdish, English, Persian, and French (PKK declarations, programs and brochures of activist and armed organizations, internal leaflets, articles in local and foreign magazines, press releases, television programs, periodicals, written training programs, etc.). All the documents written by fighters and activists, and the textual and visual sources, are extra-academic and are disseminated almost exclusively in activist spaces.

1. Conditions for producing Jineolojî

8While scientific literature often tends to adopt an approach marked by a certain methodological nationalism and gives priority to international and global dynamics of knowledge, Lucia Direnberger and Yvette Onibon Doubogan (2022) insist on the importance of addressing gender, knowledge and race inequalities in a contextualized way. Local conditions of knowledge production thus influence the nature of the knowledge produced. In other words, the global economy of the production and circulation of women’s knowledge and activism needs to be assessed not in an abstract or categorical way, but by considering the specific historical and political context of their local construction.

Martial and popular trajectory of a marginalized knowledge

10Many previous initiatives within the PKK had created fertile ground for the emergence of Jineolojî, such as the creation of organizations (the Women’s Army in 1995 and the Women’s Party), and the development of political theories and projects (“Killing the Dominant Man,” “The Break,” “The New Man,” “Women’s Liberation,” “Free Life,” “The Social Contract,” “Women’s Confederalism,” etc.). Jineolojî draws from a diversity of elements, including Kurdish mythology, the history of Kurdish and international women’s struggles, and situated forms of knowledge: mothers’ stories, memoirs and testimonies, narratives and biographies, diaries, poems, folk tales, and oral sources from women, which all contribute to write “herstory” (2018). It revives situated and oral knowledge, perceived as anti-positivist and based on a decolonial, non-elitist methodology. This encourages the participation of a wide range of individuals in the production of knowledge, with the aim of transforming the community into a space where multiple memories are shared and of challenging the narrative monopoly of events and their participants.

11This practical and theoretical approach is nurtured by an ongoing dialogue between the PKK’s charismatic leader Öcalan and female civilian activists, female political prisoners and, above all, female fighters, the main defenders of Jineolojî. The political and armed experience of Kurdish women is thus both the foundation for and the result of the development of Jineolojî. This decolonial paradigm is nourished by the activism of women fighters, who often come from economically disadvantaged groups and are relatively young, and who also run the Jineolojî workshops and training programs in the Kurdish mountains and towns.

13By these means, women do not simply passively receive an ideological education, they actively engage with this ideology and adapt it to their local realities. Sarah, a leader activist in the field of ideology, explains: “The idea is that all women should be able to contribute to the debate around Jineolojî and that they should strive to get together and re-examine the issue to keep Jineolojî from going off in a direction that does not correspond to local situations.” In this interactive process, a “sender” like Öcalan disseminates the discourse of Jineolojî, while “receivers” construct their subjectivity by applying the ideology in light of their own experience. Öcalan’s top-down ideological dissemination and the local adaptations of Jineolojî by its female activists may seem contradictory, but they highlight the dual nature of this ideology. While Öcalan provides the structure, Jineolojî remains flexible and keeps changing. Women do not merely absorb the ideology; they actively adapt it to their social and cultural reality. This participatory process, deeply rooted in the oral culture of knowledge circulation, reworks “top-down” ideas in a “bottom-up” way. By being actively involved in the production of knowledge, women gain a sense of belonging and confidence.

14Also, Jineolojî’s account of women’s oppression can be compared with collective narratives that spread rapidly and gain in popularity on the strength of oral culture and the cohesion of Kurdish communities. This transition from simple knowledge to collective awareness shows the capacity of their narratives to evolve and adapt to the social context. The narratives are constantly transformed to reflect women’s lived realities. This dynamic process illustrates the complex interplay between a guiding ideology and its local application, but it also has limitations.

15Despite the growing popularity of Jineolojî, several obstacles slow down the production of gender knowledge in Kurdistan. The conflict with the Turkish state has reduced the budgets for addressing this issue and made it less a priority. The racist and nationalist policies of the Turkish state have led to a severe repression of social movements, especially women’s movements, and their political organizations have been banned. Women activists are often criminalized and imprisoned, which prevents them from becoming engaged and being trained in gender politics. In addition, the women contributing to Jineolojî mostly come from low-income and rural households, and have limited access to formal education and research in other languages, including English. These limitations undermine their ability to develop and disseminate their knowledge, reduce the possibilities for dialogue with other researchers and academics, and are compounded by the lack of shared spaces.

An imperative decolonial science born of war

16For PKK fighters and supporters, Jineolojî is not only a critical reflection on social transformation, but above all an essential political weapon. This perception is shaped by the context of armed conflict, which restricts the possibility of independent critique when it contradicts the Party’s objectives, thereby undermining the goal of “producing truth as the desire to know and to make the truth known” (Bourdieu, 1980). Thus, Jineolojî is described as an “imperative feminine science” in a “state of emergency,” with strong political foundations, but socially weakened by the constraints imposed by war.

17As the number of individuals involved in the production of Jineolojî increases, and their scope of action extends beyond the war zones, social and gender aspects gain in importance, including issues relating to sexuality as body politics and transgender identities, also due to the key role played by the Kurdish diaspora. Like many liberation movements (Gayer, 2019), the PKK uses the image of a “lost glory” to transform the frustration of Kurdish women into a national and feminist cause. To emphasize the value of women in Kurdish society, Jineolojî regularly alludes to the “matriarchal” ideal of antiquity, presented as the golden age of the Kurdish nation, free from the presence of the nation-state. This perspective serves as a basis to question capitalist modernity, the structure of the nation-state, the linear reading of orthodox Marxism and of colonial feminism. It challenges the idea that progress must necessarily follow specific steps that include the nation-state and capitalism, while criticizing colonial approaches that ignore local realities, belief systems, and forms of cultural resistance. Proposing an inverted vision of masculine and statist modernity, Jineolojî draws on the feminine utopia of the prehistoric matriarchal era of the Mesopotamian civilization, where the woman-goddess was the central figure. Within this perspective, women, rather than workers, are the first oppressed class, the first colony, the first nation and the main protagonists of a socialist revolution. Inspired by the ideas of Jakob Bachofen sometimes interpreted along essentialist lines, Jineolojî values “feminine” qualities such as motherhood to counter the oppressive rationality of the Turkish capitalist state.

18The Kurdish movement’s claims are weakened by the absence of reliable anthropological research on matriarchies in Kurdistan’s history. Maria Grazia Masetti-Rouault points out that the presence of female deities does not necessarily reflect the elevated status of women in ancient Near Eastern society (Masetti-Rouault 2009: 138). The Kurdish movement does not clarify the social construction of gender nor the mechanisms of male control over work and sexuality. The details of so-called Kurdish matriarchy remain unclear. This ambiguity is due to the lack of precise definitions and to the fact that the Kurdish ideologue and leader is neither an anthropologist nor a historian. When Öcalan, in one of his letters, asked that his writings be corrected by academics, the Party refused (Jongerden 2019). Therefore, a pragmatic theorization is urgently needed to address the current challenges of a liberation movement that, while empowering, also has its flaws.

19In the current context of war, Jineolojî emphasizes political commitment and devalues materialist analyses of gender relations. By encouraging a reconsideration of women’s traditional roles from the perspective of armed struggle, it tends to minimize concern for the material conditions that influence these roles. For example, by presenting women as guardians of nature, Jineolojî adopts a holistic and spiritual approach that promotes ethical values but could overlook the impact of globalization and the power structures that exacerbate underlying gender inequalities.

20While promoting women’s political commitment, Jineolojî often remains limited in its analysis, focusing mainly on issues of democracy and mobilization. This one-dimentional approach leads to fragmented generalizations and inconsistencies caused by the absence of multidimensional data and analyses. Social and sexual aspects, such as the sexual division of labor, theories of social reproduction, gendered body analysis and queer studies are often neglected. Instead, a political interpretation of gender dominates, framed and controlled by the movement’s leadership. This perspective overlooks the social heterogeneity of Kurdish women and their varied interests, which are closely linked to the “matrix of domination” (Collins 2022: 299). Their image is often simplified and reduced to resilient women who are a strength in service of peace, without consideration for the complexity of their experiences and the dynamics of domination that impact them.

21This tendency is also reflected in Jineolojî, which treats gender and ethnicity as “ahistorical constants” affecting all Kurdish women in similar ways, and thus underestimates the multiple relations of domination and exploitation beyond ethnicity, including sexual oppression and specific exploitation. Further studies are needed on how Jineolojî, in its current configurations, can better unify these diversities in the Kurdish space and elsewhere. Its internal limitations are closely linked to its interactions with the outside world, as explained in the next section.

2. Challenges and difficulties when analyzing knowledge within revolutionary movements

22Along with many postcolonial and decolonial intellectuals (Quijano 2008, Mignolo 2011), members of the Kurdish movement challenge the evolutionary, Eurocentric conception of history, according to which the Global South is “in the waiting room” (Chakrabarty 2000: 78) before making a full transition to capitalism, which is the goal of modernism. To criticize this vision, Jineolojî insists on situated methods and the experience of women activists who produce their own knowledge. Kurdish women are encouraged to express themselves outside the academic language of gender studies.

24The Kurdish movement incorporates myths in its discourse, based on the idea that the female mind is subjugated by the authority of urban male reasoning –a notion also embraced by Jineolojî. This has led to a moralizing and derationalizing feminization and a return to nature that glorifies the Kurds’ archaic, rural way of life as resistance to the capitalist modernity imposed by the colonizing state. In its attempt to “derationalize” the world, Jineolojî introduces a global cosmic vision of human nature that emphasizes mythical, spiritual, metaphysical and ethical structures. It prefers to use non-scientific and symbolic approaches to understand and explain reality, and marginalizes materialist analyses of gender in contemporary Kurdish socio-economic history. For example, Jineolojî sometimes refers to mythological or religious figures from ancestral narratives to promote traditional female roles and practices, rather than examining them through contemporary feminist theoretical frameworks or empirical data. It often addresses women’s issues with moral advice and arbitrary decisions based on the leader’s personal experience rather than contextualized historical analysis. This can be observed in speeches or writings that glorify the role of the mother as guardian of cultural and moral traditions, or of women as bearers of peace, while ignoring materialistic analyses of these topics. Even the participation of women in the revolution is, for Jineolojî, first and foremost a moral recommendation rather than a material necessity.

25In this context, the PKK’s theoretical writings on the reorganization of gender relations reflect a dualistic, heterosexist vision of the 19^th-century family that ignores contemporary feminist critiques. The “Kurdish woman” is described as universal, detached from any social condition, and eternal, as if her vision of the world had not evolved. Differences among Kurdish women are suppressed in favor of a decolonial struggle against the common enemy, and this can lead to a tendency to homogenize women’s experiences and perspectives within the movement, sometimes to the point of a certain essentialization. In attempting to transcend feminism, Jineolojî ignores the epistemological differences between different feminist approaches and reduces feminism to a simple reaction against patriarchy, influenced by liberalism, and it overlooks its emancipatory and decolonial dimensions. The whole range of global feminist production is reduced to liberal and nationalist feminist ideas developed in Turkey, which are opposed, and this prevents the Kurdish movement from adopting recent critical feminist theories.

26It must also be observed, that in an authoritarian context strongly marked by oppression by the Turkish state, activist knowledge that challenges the colonial institutional power is perceived as a threat by the dominant police and racial order. This makes it even more difficult for this “subaltern knowledge” (Spivak 2004) and any other suspicious or despised knowledge, to be accepted into the global framework in which legitimate knowledge circulates. Furthermore, the authors of Jineolojî are developing their paradigms in a context in which the Kurdish language, in which they express themselves, has been banned for years and is not widespread, and this in the middle of an armed conflict. In addition, the nationalism of the ruling ethnic group has contributed to make Kurdish women’s political knowledge invisible, and has considered it irrelevant to feminist theory and historiography in their own country, despite the strong participation of Kurdish women in social movements since the 1980s (Mojab 2001, Çağlayan 2019). Their stateless status has increased their marginalization, making them even more illegitimate.

27War has also created major obstacles to communication, due to travel restrictions in conflict zones and strict control of information by government authorities. This situation makes it difficult to coordinate intellectual efforts and disseminate knowledge between members of the movement and others. These challenges need to be overcome not only to improve the production and dissemination of ideas and knowledge, but also to establish a credible epistemological framework in the ever-changing context of conflict.

3. Deconstructing the spaces producing social and racial hierarchies

Factors contributing to the emergence of Jineolojî: entanglement and divergence between the Turkish feminist movement and the Kurdish women’s movement

28The liberal project to modernize the Turkish state caused a division between Turkish and Kurdish women by introducing a racist vision of modernity and using women for political ends. In this project, the stigmatized Kurdish woman was often depicted as primitive, backward, sexualized and dangerous, while the idealized Turkish woman was presented as civilized, educated, honest, and a model wife and mother (Diner and Toktaş 2007, Sezgin and A. Wall 2005). This essentialist vision reduced Kurdish women to a homogeneous category of victims of male violence, associated with an intrinsically patriarchal culture (Alkan 2018). In the 1990s, under the influence of this hegemonic nationalist discourse, the leading figures of feminism in Turkey, mostly educated, white, liberal and living in large cities, were urging Kurdish women to renounce their ethnic identity in favor of a shared gender identity (Diner and Toktaş 2010: 43; Kandiyoti 1987: 322). These dominant figures were not content with simply being part of the feminist movement on a national scale, they wanted to lead it, as bell hooks (1986: 134) points out in a similar context. The feminist movement in Turkey often perpetuated patterns established by the state and neglected the specific realities of ethnic minority groups. It tended to ignore the role of socio-economic inequalities in the construction of gender identity, focusing on the general category of “women in Turkey.” It often overlooked the fact that the progress achieved for women under the Kemalist modernization project did not benefit rural and Kurdish women equally due to language and educational barriers but also discriminatory policies. In this context, the ethnocentrism of Turkey’s dominant feminists, combined with their nationalism, contributed to encourage orientalist and colonialist representations. It ignored the differences between women and the inequalities Kurdish women had faced and continued to face. This attitude fostered the emergence of a feminism specific to the Kurds, called Jineolojî, promoted by the PKK and woven into its discourse.

29Kurdish activists sharply criticize Turkey’s dominant feminists, often academics, for their blindness to all forms of state violence. They emphasize the unique nature of their activism, marked by the brutality of state oppression and racist violence that stiffles their efforts to express themselves and organize the resistance against patriarchy. After enduring the horrors of war, genocide, sexual violence, the destruction of their communities, mass displacement, attempts at ethnocide, capitalist interference, linguicidal policies, imprisonment and forced exile, Kurdish women have concluded that the nation-state and its institutions are incapable of guaranteeing their full equality. Moreover, Turkish feminists often fail to recognize the activism of Kurdish women as genuine feminist endeavors (Metin 2006, Taşdemir 2007). For example, Necla Arat, a prominent feminist academic who defends the Kemalist ideology, filed a lawsuit against another feminist, Eren Keskin, because Keskin had accused the security forces of raping women in the war-torn southeast. For Arat, Keskin was a traitor who supported Kurdish terrorists against the interests of the Turkish state (Diner and Toktaş 2010: 50). The activists we met also criticized the view of war and pacifism –tinged by colonialism– held by Turkish and Western academics. They also denounced the complicit silence of mainstream feminists regarding systematic feminicide perpetrated by the state.

30However, since the 2000s, an increasingly close collaboration has developed between the feminist-queer movement in Turkey and the Kurdish women’s movement, although this process was disrupted in 2015 following Turkey’s military invasion of the Kurdish region and the outbreak of civil war. Turkish feminists have begun to include the unique struggles of Kurdish women in their analyses and demands, while Kurdish women have expanded their network by making alliances with other feminist groups, including LGBTQ+ ones. This cooperation has led to the joint organization of campaigns for peace, against conservative and misogynistic state policies, and against violence towards women. National practices and initiatives have emerged because of this synergy and have strengthened the impact of feminist actions both nationally and internationally.

31In this historical context, Jineolojî stands out as a resource for “negotiating differences” (hooks 2014). It is the means for Kurdish women –suffering “discrimination within discrimination” (Kirkness 1987: 413)– to connect their gender identity with their class and ethnic identity, and thereby resist dominant national and international narratives. Faced with the absence of a class-based decolonial feminism, Kurdish women have found in the struggle for national liberation under the PKK, a means of filling this identity void. They have then succeeded in building the Kurdish women’s movement, distinct from the feminist movement in Turkey, both in its theoretical foundations and in its concrete actions. Within this context, it is essential to explore how Jineolojî deals with the question of scientificity and redefines the issues of feminism and liberation to fit the realities and needs of Kurdish women.

Jineolojî and the question of scientificity: Conflict between militant and academic knowledge

32The global knowledge economy, dominated by concepts and methods developed in the North (Federici 2002, Peace and Alice 2018), usually by academics (Pallavi and Connell 2018), tends to control and monopolize the accepted knowledge about women, creating a situation that philosopher María Lugones (2007) describes as “gender coloniality.” Even if the hegemony of academic knowledge in global cities does not erase all other knowledge, its consequence is to marginalize not only women’s interests in the global South and the local knowledge from which they spring, but also the individuals who promote it and their distinct claims. The arguments raised by African thinkers regarding intellectually discredited indigenous knowledge (Hoppers 2002) illustrate this pattern. The global division of intellectual labor, based on a system of unequal exchange and appropriation, has emerged in a hegemonic context of feminist knowledge production in the era of neoliberal globalization, where hierarchies have been reinforced by market logic and privatization (Connell 2017: 6). Despite major transformations in favor of the academic autonomy of knowledge from the periphery and the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge within institutions (by bringing the South in the North), this knowledge often remains marginal, invisible, and is sometimes even excluded.

33This global hierarchical structure can also be seen in the emergence and marginalization of Jineolojî. With the persistence of inequalities between the South(s) and the North(s), asymmetries between indigenous and academic knowledge have also been reinforced. This framework, both racist and colonial, in the international division of knowledge production, is compounded by a further division between academic scientific knowledge and activist political knowledge, which was decisive in delegitimizing Jineolojî. According to the qualification criteria of this “scientific imperialism” (Dupré 1994), feminist productions by women in the South, considered “too political,” are refused legitimacy and scientific validation. Thus, when “producing militant knowledge,” the risk is to be discredited by certain academics who question the scientificity or interest of this approach. Activist knowledge is accused of being blind to the nuances and complexities of social realities, and for lacking the “neutrality” that is considered necessary for any science (Bourdieu 1980). The association between gender, feminism and social movements also acts as a scientific disqualification (Direnberger and Onibon Doubogan 2022), particularly in the case of individuals engaged in armed struggle. We therefore observe that the requirement to provide evidence is much more frequently expected from militant sciences operating outside the academic sphere.

34In this context, the question of Jineolojî’s scientificity or non-scientificity is constantly being raised. Another objection is the difficulty of establishing revolutionary activism as a useful analytical category in which to examine the production of women’s knowledge. This contributes to discredit Kurdish activists working on Jineolojî.

35Thus, because this indocile Kurdish paradigm is a highly politicized activist doctrine, strongly attached to social movements, that circulates predominantly among female activists, it runs the risk of being excluded, rather than integrated, into the circulation of global knowledge based on the international hierarchies mentioned above. Its theories are therefore often overlooked because of their radical nature (Graeber 2020). While Jineolojî, as a fledgling critical science, is locally legitimate because of its political, class-based and revolutionary aspects, these same characteristics make it a globally delegitimized theory. This reflects the complex nature of the dynamics between local and global perspectives, and shows how local realities can be perceived as lacking credibility (Escobar 2016).

36The scientificity of insurgent knowledge is also often judged more rigorously than knowledge described as neutral and scientific because insurgent knowledge does not serve power and seeks to delegitimize the dominant elites. The woman in charge of the Jineolojî training program at the Women’s Academy in Diyarbakir puts it this way:

There’s a lot of work, a lot of awareness-raising, but it’s not clear who it’s for. This is an important question for us (Jineolojî): who is this knowledge supposed to serve? Who is it for? What can this knowledge be used for? They should serve society, not the elite or the state.

37The distinction Raewyn Connell (2020: 39) makes between political and academic knowledge may provide some clarification in this respect: while political knowledge adopts an active, explicitly biased form, concerned with what can be done and what must be experienced, academic knowledge most often takes the form of a description and is concerned with what is or has been. Thus, the science of Jineolojî which advocates social change by targeting various sources of power without concession or hesitation (which academic knowledge does not do, in the name of neutrality and scientificity) is experiencing delegitimization along with reinforced repression, legal in Turkey.

38Faced with this marginalization, Kurdish activists have adopted legitimizing strategies. They question in return the legitimacy of feminist academic scientific knowledge that has never been challenged before, accusing it of reproducing certain relationships of domination and of depending on repressive and patriarchal powers such as the state, colonialism and capitalism. Many of the women interviewed express an opposition between “activists” and “academics” to legitimize and lend credibility to their martial production. In some cases, this leads to fierce criticism of academics and intellectuals by Kurdish activists, which contributes to increase the distance between the political and academic spheres, limiting collaboration between the two and reinforcing the inequalities at the foundation of their field of knowledge.

39Moreover, this discourse fails to consider that academic feminists often also define themselves as activists. Although in the minority, some academics are also critical of the hierarchical production and circulation of knowledge within academic institutions, and between the knowledge of the dominated and that of the dominant. Even though these theories regarding the South(s) sometimes face the same accusations as Turkish feminists of being too elitist and institutionalized, they provide real material possibilities for the emergence and evolution of critical, decolonial and anti-capitalist knowledge. Some of these ideas have even inspired Jineolojî and have sometimes reached an international scale, rejecting “mainstream feminism” or “white or imperialist feminism.” In this context, Kurdish indigenism appears as a non-elitist approach that reflects the voices of Kurdish women, offers an alternative to dominant hierarchical structures, and promotes a more inclusive understanding of feminist struggles.

Kurdish indigenism as a non-elitist approach: Challenging institutional hierarchies

40By opposing the state, universal feminism, and elitist universities, Jineolojî denounces the spaces where social hierarchies are produced. It is committed to breaking down various colonial and orientalist representations and the homogenous and victimizing vision of Kurdish women and, more generally, of women in Muslim worlds. Claiming its roots in the social sciences, the Kurdish paradigm is in line with the strands of feminism rooted in the Near East that draw their strength from “the politicization of women within anticolonial and national liberation movements” (Jacoby 1999: 513). For Jineolojî, what makes Middle Eastern feminism unique is its activist nature in contrast to feminist movements in the West presented as weakened by the neoliberal global context. According to this perspective, in a region marked by multiple political crises, social or national liberation movements represent the main means by which women can express their subjectivity and their engagement in the public and political sphere. Participation in the decolonial and anti-imperialist struggle, according to Jineolojî, has in turn induced transformations in gender relations in the region, including in Kurdistan. This perspective finds an echo in the Palestinian context, as emphasized by Faraj (2010), who shows that the social changes brought about by liberation struggles against the colonizer and apartheid can sometimes serve as a legitimizing framework for the claims of individual women in situations of conflict.

41Jineolojî also distinguishes itself from feminist studies by defining itself as a specificly feminine science that analyzes women and is thus committed to developing what scholars have called “feminine historiography” (Harding 1987), as opposed to “feminist historiography” (Offen 1988, Thébaud 2007). This approach is part of a more general critique of Eurocentric narratives of hegemonic feminist knowledge but also of thoughts and practices perceived by the interviewees as “elitist” often described as “highly theoretical” and “disconnected from the realities of ordinary women.” This perception was particularly strong in the words of a female fighter interviewed in 2017 in the mountain camps of Kurdistan:

Where I grew up, there’s a kind of repulsion towards feminism, that is, the closer you are to feminism, the harder it is for ordinary women to approach you, so they push you away… There were a few people in our Kurdish town who called themselves feminists. But their way of thinking and behaving is very similar to that of men. She says “I’m a feminist, I’m free, you’re an oppressed woman.” Well, how can this be the answer to the wounds of women in our society? Besides, how does she want to change men that way?

42This critique by the interviewees strongly points out the inability of feminists, both in the West and in Turkey, to connect with women from the marginalized rural classes. According to the interviewees, the theories and practices of mainstream feminists in Turkey mainly reflect the experience of those who belong to the privileged class and who are often white or Turkish. They claim that these feminists use a language that is often inaccessible to most poorly-educated or even illiterate women, who nevertheless make up the majority of PKK activists and fighters. In contrast, Jineolojî appears more inclusive and closer to the people, appealing to a wide range of women in society, especially the less privileged. It is an indigenous knowledge, culturally pluralist, politically revolutionary and for the working classes. Rounahi, a PKK activist in Diyarbakir, sums it up this way:

Feminists work on society, but we work with people in society, that’s the important difference between Jineolojî and feminism […] unlike feminism, for us the researcher and the researched are not separate, and the latter is not the victim about whom the former is supposed to do the research.

43Jineolojî challenges institutionalized academic paradigms by highlighting hierarchies and granting value to the know-how of economically challenged rural women. This approach values the expertise of women in their daily lives, linked to their livelihoods, their bodies, and their environment. By including knowledge drawn from popular experience, Jineolojî extends to the female population marginalized by dominant discourses. Kurdish female guerrilla fighters play a central role in this transformation, going from village to village to recruit and educate women about their rights and political potential. By these means, Jineolojî seeks to reverse a discriminatory rhetoric, whether in the racist state discourse or in certain feminist currents, that often portrays Kurdish women as decivilized. In this vision, the Kurdish woman, often described as primitive, backward, sexualized, seductive and dangerous, is frequently contrasted with the Turkish woman. This representation reduces Kurdish women to a homogeneous category of victims of male violence and associates them with a culture of polygamy, early marriage and honor killings (Alkan 2018).

44Jineolojî therefore embodies a decolonial approach to gender that aims to rehabilitate the knowledge and experience of marginalized women, while engaging them in the struggle for Kurdish autonomy and gender equality. This rhetoric has influenced the social and political motivations of Kurdish women and has often driven them towards Kurdish-controlled academies rather than Turkish-controlled universities.

45In the same vein, by creating People’s Academies and promoting situated and oral knowledge, Jineolojî aims to democratize knowledge beyond academic institutions. As its promoters say: “It will restore what it draws from society as knowledge, rather than isolating it in academia or placing it at the service of governments.” Another activist points out:

Jineolojî doesn’t just decentralize knowledge; it seeks to use it as a tool for social transformation, neighborhood by neighborhood, including among the less educated, such as rural women in Rojava or the mothers of martyrs, those who have paid a heavy price in this war imposed by Erdogan. These women’s experiences are precious; they hold ancestral knowledge that has been preserved for generations. The knowledge we value is deeply rooted in the history and land of Kurdistan, and that’s why institutional logics, often disconnected from the people’s daily realities, may fail to offer the necessary attention.

46The aim of Jineolojî is to bring about mental and social change, and forge a “New (Kurdish) Man.” It claims that every home, association or territory in the mountain areas can become an educational space. It is a popular alternative to the traditional school system controlled by the colonial state, in a context where, as in Algeria during the colonial era (Bourdieu 1961), institutions are perceived as being complicit with colonial power.

Conclusion

49In the context of the PKK, ethnicity has been politicized to transform what is considered Kurdish culture into a weapon against all forms of domination, including gender. The PKK’s discourse and praxis have not only legitimized the Kurdish voice, but also amplified the voice of women, bringing about significant changes. Because Kurdish female activists belong to the minority, their experience of racism distinguishes them from mainstream feminists and their contributions. They often equate Turkish nationalist feminists with intellectuals and consider them no less guilty than racist academics.

50After joining the army, the women realized that without a unique female discourse, they ran the risk of being marginalized, both within the country’s feminist movement and in the Kurdish liberation struggle. This awareness led to the development of Jineolojî, a feminine and decolonial science, theorized by the PKK and embodied by the guerrilla movement, aimed at transforming patriarchal culture and the state.

51However, as an activist knowledge about gender, Jineolojî faces several obstacles, notably marginalization in the global field of knowledge due to the hierarchical and colonial separation between activist and academic knowledge. To gain ligitimacy, Jineolojî is developing strategies based on local cultures and decolonial ideas, while criticizing the academic and political division of labor that favors elites to the detriment of the oppressed. Other obstacles include political repression, lack of educational resources and limited interaction between activists and academics, which has hampered its development. This study highlights the dynamics of knowledge co-production and circulation between the academic and political field and offers a decentered perspective on gender issues by analyzing the contradictions within the Kurdish movement and thus enriching gender studies and the sociology of knowledge.

52It must be noted that the accuracy and epistemological coherence of local activist knowledge might be compromised by its dissemination and popularization in the context of war, unlike academic theories which benefit from established stability and traceability. In other words, the urgency of the situation drives Kurdish women towards a pragmatic approach and limits their ability to provide a solid theoretical basis for a new gender paradigm, based on a materialist analysis of social and historical reality in Kurdistan. This means that the Kurdish armed struggle cannot escape the contradictions that run through the societies it is fighting; it is only one tool among others for combatting them.