A talk titled The Kurdish Women’s Movement: On Revolution, Militarism and Body Politics will be held on Tuesday 4 June at the LSE Research Centres Meeting Suite, Pankhurst House. The presentation will be delivered by Isabel Käser, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) Centre for Gender Studies. 

Women have been at the forefront of many of the political and military struggles in the Kurdish Middle East, most visibly so since the outbreak of the ‘Rojava Revolution’ in 2012.

In fact, since the foundation of the PKK in 1978, they have played an integral role in the ideological and political development of the liberation movement as a whole; as guerrillas, activists, politicians, mothers and prisoners.

Isabel Käser, of the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies, will trace the complex history of the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, discuss how women’s autonomous organisational structures have emerged and how they operate today between the mountains and the cities of the four different parts of Kurdistan.

Her talk analyses the emancipatory power this movement holds but also unpacks some of the tensions that emerge from the interplay between militarism, the party’s body politics and the movement’s revolutionary quest for a more democratic Middle East.