Negotiating what it means to be “free”: gender equality and governance in North and East Syria

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss the radical gender equality reforms in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava, and how they have affected women’s lives since the implementation of the Women’s Law in 2014. Based on 40 in-depth interviews, eight group interviews, and participant observation, this ethnographic study illustrates how the ideal of the “free” woman permeates society in North and East Syria, prescribing desired forms of behavior and appearance. Drawing on the literature on gender and nationalism in postcolonial processes of state building, my study provides an analysis of the AANES’ gender discourse that considers the real-life governing effects of the reforms. Building from the Foucauldian premise that modern power engenders disciplinary practices, I examine how awareness-raising efforts and education seminars establish new forms of control in the public sphere. I contend that the reforms operate as governing tools and, as such, shape women’s subjectivities. Engendering both discipline and resistance, they result in the emergence of new subjectivities that are not entirely determined by either ideology or by patriarchal structures.

Introduction

From the moment of its inception amid the Syrian civil war, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), commonly referred to as “the self-administration” or simply North and East Syria (NES) when talking about the geographical area, introduced reforms aimed at including women in politics and achieving a more (gender-)equitable society. In 2014, the self-administration issued what is commonly known as the “Women’s Law,” under which female genital mutilation, polygamy, and child marriage were abolished, and additional laws were introduced to guarantee gender equality in inheritance and education. Moreover, special all-female committees have been established at all levels of the federal system, including so-called “women’s houses” at the communal level, to manage issues of domestic violence, marriage law, and family disputes involving women. Every institution within the self-administration also has a women’s committee overseeing issues concerning workplace disputes involving women. These committees lend support and possess veto power over policies that are considered unfair to women. Finally, a system of co-presidency has been introduced, according to which every office must have both a female and male chair. Beyond anchoring women’s legal rights in the constitution and introducing committees and a 50 percent women’s quota in all institutions aimed at guaranteeing women’s equal voice and representation, further efforts have been undertaken to raise awareness of women’s rights and democratic confederalism (DC). These consist of compulsory education seminars called perwerde (meaning “education” in Kurmanji) in which participants are taught about DC, the main pillars of which are democratic self-governance, ethnic inclusiveness, social ecology, and gender equality. DC is both a theory and a model of radical democracy developed by the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan,¹ and implemented by the self-administration.

In this article, I focus on the self-administration’s gender equality reforms, which are conceptualized through the lens of jineology (the science of women) and built around Öcalan’s (2013, 52) dictum that “without gender equality, no demand for freedom and equality can be meaningful.” Öcalan (2013, 56) advocates the idea that the liberation of society is only attainable through women’s liberation and emphasizes the need for a “movement for woman’s freedom, equality and democracy.” The explicitly nationalist tone of his earlier writings, in which he proclaimed that “[w]omen’s liberation is Kurdistan’s liberation” (Öcalan 1999 in Çağlayan 2012, 11), thus gave way to a call for the “Democratic Nation” in which “woman’s freedom is of great importance too, as liberated woman constitutes liberated society” (Öcalan 2013, 57). In this discourse, the nation-state model and the oppressive masculinist mentality are represented as the problem at hand, to which jineology poses a radical alternative that is neither hegemonic nor statist (Günaydin 2021).

Using empirical material from five months of fieldwork in NES, I show how different women negotiate the AANES’ gender equality policies and what “freedom” means to them. I tie the discursive shift in Öcalan’s writings to wider feminist debates on gender and nationalism in postcolonial processes of state building to trace how DC’s articulation and practice of women’s rights influence women’s conduct. I aim to understand how society in NES is managed by the self-administration and what the repercussions of this normative framing of gender equality are for different groups of people.

Foregrounding women’s rights amid ongoing conflict

In 2012, the Kurdish-led Democratic Union Party (PYD) seized control of northeast Syria after President Bashar al-Assad withdrew his troops from the region at the beginning of the civil war. In 2014, the PYD ratified the Charter of the Social Contract and declared the Kurdish-dominated areas autonomous from the Syrian government. Rather than calling for outright independence from the Syrian state, the self-administration endorses a council democracy modeled after DC theory.

The Charter of the Social Contract serves as the de facto constitution in the three regions under the control of the Kurdish-led and United States (US)-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF): Afrin, Euphrates, and Jazira. In 2016, the SDF’s political wing, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), updated the Charter to include a reference to all ethnic groups living in northern Syria, addressing their cultural, political, and linguistic rights. Two years later, in March 2018, Turkey captured the city of Afrin and consolidated its control over the entire district. In September of the same year, the SDC proclaimed the establishment of a federal government under the new name the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, replacing the Kurdish name Rojava, now encompassing the regions of Euphrates, Afrin (under Turkish occupation), and Jazira as well as the local civil councils in the Arab-majority areas of Raqqa, Manbij, Tabqa, and Deir Ezzor. The AANES can be considered a revolutionary state/administration² dominated by the PYD and its support organization the Movement for a Democratic Society (TEV-DEM) (Allinson 2022, 235; Leezenberg 2016).

The self-administration’s efforts toward advancing women’s rights have been lauded internationally by many journalists, activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and political actors. They have stressed time and again the extraordinariness of a political project in the Middle East that seeks to establish gender equality, echoing depictions of the female fighters combating Islamic State (IS) and often employing an orientalist gaze (see Günaydin 2023; Şimşek and Jongerden 2021; Tank 2017). Actors on the ground, however, have painted a different picture. Opposition parties as well as local civil society activists and some international pundits have accused the Kurdish-led self-administration of corruption and human rights abuses, authoritarianism, and gagging dissidents (Abrahams et al. 2014; Khalaf 2016; Singh and Stroul 2019). Furthermore, some have said that gender equality and women’s rights are being used as a pretext to lure women into the military and assert Kurdish dominance (Selo 2018; personal conversations 2021).

In the next section, I outline the analytical framework of this study, drawing on postcolonial feminist perspectives on the idea of freedom and the secularization of women in processes of state building as well as the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. Looking at the institutional change in NES through this lens helps us to understand how DC gender discourse developed and how its articulation of women’s interests shapes behavior, both enabling and restricting women’s room for maneuver. After briefly describing my methodology, I present and discuss empirical data from my fieldwork to illustrate how women’s lives have changed since the introduction of the gender equality reforms. Through my analysis of interviews with women from both inside and outside the self-administration’s institutions, I show how gender equality is problematized and how institutions and practices, such as awareness raising and education seminars, operate as governing technologies by ascribing different qualities, roles, and opportunities for agency to the categories of the “liberated” versus the “unliberated” woman. I then illustrate how actors negotiate this framework, contributing to the formation of new subjectivities. By exploring how power relations are (re)produced by current ways of representing and acting on gender equality in the AANES, I contribute to the literature on feminism and the state a bottom-up rather than top-down analysis that moves from the local and particular to the more general to capture the manifold forms and workings of power.

Analyzing gender equality as a mobilizing force in postcolonial settings

Many revolutionary projects and national liberation movements in the modern Middle East have used the idea of the freedom and secularization of women as a core mobilizing force. In the Kurdish Freedom Movement,³ ideas about women’s rights and practices in the name of liberation came to prominence in the early 1990s and particularly after Öcalan’s arrest in 1999. The nationalist tone of his earlier writings, in which he advocated for the liberation of the Kurds, started to give way to a new framework with women’s liberation at its center (Öcalan 2011, 2013).

Those who have worked on the issue of gender and nationalism in the Kurdish Freedom Movement have shown how the discursive shift tying women’s liberation to national liberation made women the subjects of the struggle for a new Kurdish society, which prioritized their liberation over the party’s previous Marxist framework (Al-Ali and Tas 2021; Çağlayan 2012; Grojean 2014; Käser 2021). Elaborating on the imbrication of national fictions and gender relations in the ideology of the movement, Handan Çağlayan (2012, 18) shows how the mythical source of Ishtar the Goddess served the construction of Kurdishness as a political identity, in which the mythological golden age of the Kurds was constructed as a matrilineal rural society in the Neolithic period. Women’s freedom and equal participation thereby became signifiers of the liberated counter-society envisaged by DC discourse, which retains the discussion of the marks of “essential” cultural difference, emphasizing values of “belonging to a ‘pure’ culture, rising from the depths of a shared social past” (Kandiyoti 1997, cited in Çağlayan 2012, 2).

In its romanticization of the past and advocacy to recuperate women’s lost freedom, DC discourse mirrors other revolutionary or nationalist projects before it, such as those in Turkey, Iran, India, and Egypt, in which the redefinition and reconstruction of gender relations were likewise posited as a necessary precondition for overcoming traditional patriarchal structures that impede women from participating as equals in society (Al-Ali 2000; Badran 1995; Jayawardena 1986; Kandiyoti 1998; Yuval-Davis 1997). Thus, despite its declared goal of avoiding the trap of nationalism and pursuing a non-nation-state solution (Öcalan 2011, 8), DC ideology fits the mold of a project of national liberation in two ways: (1) narratives of identity and gender play a constitutive role in the construction of its nationalist fiction, and (2) it presents itself as a modernizing force that can transform traditional relations in favor of new identities, while at the same time conjuring an image of an idealized past in which matriarchy existed and society was more equal. DC discourse thus attempts to bridge the contradiction between universalist credentials of modernity and cultural difference (Chatterjee 1993; Hatem 1998; Jayawardena 1986) by portraying the past as a place where women were more equal to men than in current times. Consequently, the modern demand for a more gender-equitable society does not clash with the traditional imagined ethnic identity.

The existing literature on the so-called “Rojava Revolution” has mostly praised the gender equality reforms as a “liberatory politics tailored to the[ir] local context” (Shahvisi 2021, 1016; see also Burç 2020; Dirik 2018, 2022) and a radical solution to the conflicts in the Middle East (Günaydin 2021; Herausgeber_innenkollektiv 2020). Jineology, which emerged from the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, is presented as a theory and practice that rejects not only patriarchy but also multiple intersecting forms of hegemony, including the nation-state and capitalism (Günaydin 2023; Jineolojî Committee Europe 2021; Piccardi and Barca 2022). An expressly scientific concept, jineology aims at rewriting knowledge from the point of view of women to fill the gaps that the current positivist social sciences cannot. Advocates of jineology criticize Western feminism, which they associate with capitalism and statism, for not having done enough to liberate women and being complicit in the masculinist state system (Al-Ali and Käser 2022; Öcalan 2013; Shahvisi 2021).

Building on the extant feminist literature on gender and political processes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in general, and the Kurdish movement in particular, my study provides an analysis of the AANES’ gender discourse that considers the real-life governing effects of the reforms. I contend that advancing women’s rights is represented as a project of development that involves a transformation from a patriarchal and authoritarian present to a morally superior “democratic modernity” (Öcalan 2011, 25). Despite its decolonial claim, the discourse thus reproduces representations of modern versus unmodern societies, which allows the Kurdish movement to distance itself from the colonizer while at the same time exercising sovereignty over those that it considers backward in the name of progress (Chatterjee 1993). This is not to say that the reforms are purely strategic and have not improved women’s situation. However, considering that traditional emancipatory theories can and have been blind to their own dominating and oppressive tendencies, I aver that the AANES’ gender equality project creates and reproduces forms of domination and marginalization. Exploring the effects of these reforms through the concept of governmentality, I now discuss how these representations operate and who is harmed by the subject positions that they produce.

Gender equality as practice of freedom

In a Foucauldian understanding of the state, in which power is viewed as dispersed and governing and not merely something attached to state institutions, what makes state power effective, according to Nazanin Shahrokni (2021, 43), is “its ability to produce spaces, ideas, concepts and categories, and to reward and enable desired subjects.” People are governed through the production of subjectivities and identities that permeate society, essentially consisting of ideas about appropriate behavior and expected qualities, capacities, and attributes (Bacchi 2009; Olivius 2016; Prügl 2011). Michel Foucault’s (1991) conceptualization of governmentality entails deliberately deploying the power inherent in knowledge to govern people’s conduct, such as first articulating certain problems and then offering proposals, strategies, and technologies to solve those problems. In my analysis, I use Carol Bacchi’s concept of “subjectification effects” to flesh out how subjects are constituted within the AANES’ “problem representations” of gender equality as a means to liberate society and examine the “lived effects” – that is, the “material impact of problem representations on bodies and lives” (Bacchi 2009, 34, 40). I find Bacchi’s problem representation approach useful for feminist analyses beyond the context of liberal democracies insofar as it transcends the focus on practices of government and highlights the real-life, bodily effects of subjectivity.

From what I have observed during my time in the field, DC discourse offers two subject positions: the free and the oppressed woman. This binary distinction, not dissimilar to liberal feminists’ contrast between oppressed Third World women and liberated Western women (Al-Ali 2000; Mahmood 2001; Mohanty 1988), divides women into those who have become “aware” through embracing the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s ideology and those who remain “oppressed” and thus in need of liberation.

Isabel Käser has illustrated how the image of the free woman is constructed in the Kurdish Freedom Movement, introducing the concept of “militant femininities,” which provides a blueprint for the free woman who is a “progressive but disciplined, policed, and essentialized marker of the aspired ‘non-state nation’” (Käser 2021, 128). I contend that in contrasting the free with the unfree woman, the self-administration employs “dividing practices” (Foucault 1982, 208), according to which it rewards behavior in line with the new norms and practices that it seeks to establish. To understand how the AANES, a revolutionary state with horizontalist ideas of social transformation (Allinson 2022), enforces such desired behavior, I build on Shahrokni’s argument that gendered bodies are not exclusively regulated in the form of domination and prohibition, but also through the creation of alternative spaces and (cultural) products to establish desired practices (Shahrokni 2021, 41–43). I thus maintain that in fostering the active consent of those over whom it rules by the means of education and awareness-raising seminars, the AANES regulates gendered bodies using the idea of freedom. Consequently, the newly established institutions and practices also create avenues for the exclusion and oppression of those who do not conform to the expected behavior.

This article provides empirical data from a rather exceptional context in which women are being elevated to the upper echelons of institutional power through formal structures and legislation. Building on the postcolonial feminist literature on the use of women’s liberation in revolutions and nation-building processes in the MENA region, I explore how the ideal of the “free woman” becomes normalized in NES and what new forms of control are introduced in the name of liberating women. By illustrating how the women to whom I talked negotiate their own terms of freedom, contesting or circumventing both the prevailing patriarchal customs and traditions and the normative DC framework, I underline the active role that women play in their self-constitution, hoping to avoid essentialist notions of gender as well as an orientalist account of subjectivity.

Methodology and materials

What prompted me, a female Swiss doctoral student interested in gender and democracy, to travel to Syria was the desire to find out more about what had changed for women since the start of the revolution and what we can learn from their experiences. Inspired by feminist standpoint theory’s goal of conducting research that is “useful to women, and approaching research as emancipation” (Tickner 2005, cited in Prügl 2020, 306), I conducted 40 in-depth ethnographic interviews, eight group interviews, and participant observation between January and June 2021. The interviews with Kurdish interlocutors were conducted in Kurdish (Kurmanji) with the help of a translator and with Arabic speakers in Arabic by me. Often, interview partners would switch to Arabic when they noticed that I was failing to grasp what they were saying through translation.⁴ Each interview lasted between one and two hours.

While qualitative interviews are rarely representative of an entire society, my interview partners brought up different perspectives, often contradicting the image painted by the self-administration. To get a nuanced picture of the normalization of (new) gendered forms of behavior, I chose interview partners from different ethnic (Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian), religious (Muslim, Christian, and Êzidi), and educational backgrounds, age groups, and legal statuses (single, married, divorced, and widowed). Interviews were conducted in the Arab-majority city of Raqqa, the ethnically mixed cities of Hasakeh and Qamishli, and the Kurdish-majority town of Amûde. The three cities were chosen because they are the three largest and, in the latter cases, most diverse cities in NES and have been integrated into the AANES at different points in time.⁵

My access to the region differed from that of most activists, journalists, and other researchers who seem to have worked closely with the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the self-administration (see for instance Dirik 2018; Flach, Ayboğa, and Knapp 2015; Piccardi and Barca 2022). My entry point, by contrast, was through a local NGO in Amûde, which gave me access to different respondents and allowed me to engage with dissenting voices, so-called “outsiders from within” (Hill Collins 1986), in addition to self-administration officials and supporters of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. I have anonymized all interview partners’ names except for those women who explicitly consented for their full names to be used. To my knowledge, only a few of the scholars who work on this topic have stayed in NES as long as I have (such as Tejel 2017). I thus contend that my unique access allowed me to ask critical questions about popular support for the AANES – or the lack thereof. My examination of the spaces in which actors contribute to, resist, or circumvent the new normative framework provides an analysis of the self-administration’s gender politics that is relevant to those who are affected by it.

Findings

The interviews, which focused on how the interlocutors’ daily lives had changed since the establishment of the self-administration, revealed that the new laws and the self-administration’s pursuit of gender equality have considerably changed women’s lives for the better, especially concerning mobility, visibility, and inclusion in the political sphere. However, interview partners also alluded to new rules replacing old ones, thus creating a new kind of control over society in general and women in particular.

Examining these rules as “prescriptive texts” (Foucault 1986, cited in Bacchi 2009, 34), I flesh out what attitudes are encouraged and what behaviors are represented as unwanted or problematic. Highlighting the level of control concerned with details such as gestures, clothes, or makeup, I illustrate the disciplining mechanisms and subjectification effects that emerge from the governing discourse that represents gender equality as a development project. I argue that in prescribing the meaning of freedom, the measures taken to ensure gender equality constitute subjectivities into opposing groups of liberated versus oppressed women, thus shaping how differently positioned women can speak and act, both enabling and constraining their agency (Bacchi 2009, 40–42).

Education seminars as a technology of governance and the self

Whenever I asked interlocutors what determines whether a woman is able to make her own decisions, the response was that it depends on whether she has a strong personality. Women were often described to me as “withdrawn into their shells” (Lina Barakat, January 27, 2021) and in subjugated positions vis-à-vis men. In his writings, Öcalan depicts women as enslaved to patriarchy and the “oldest colonised people who have never become a nation” (Öcalan 2013, 35), thus painting a picture of a traditional, oppressive society in need of reform. The new woman, however, is a goddess who “claims her own identity” (Öcalan 1999, cited in Çağlayan 2020, 86) and is ideally the antithesis of the patriarchal “Other” (see Çağlayan 2020; Käser 2021). What is asked of women, then, is to transform their weak personalities. In the AANES, this is not an abstract endeavor; perwerde, lasting from one day up to six months or even a year, are dedicated to becoming free (by embracing DC ideology). In both single-sex and mixed groups, participants not only learn about DC but also how to organize their lives and time more productively and in accordance with the new norms. The seminars are compulsory for anyone, women and men, wanting to work for the self-administration, and failure to attend can result in termination.

During a visit to the Syrian Women’s Council in Raqqa, its director, a young woman from one of the few Kurdish families in an otherwise largely Arab city, shared her experience of perwerde: “When I first started working in the self-administration, I had no idea about it [the political project of DC], so I needed a course, which changed my personality” (Nuria, April 28, 2021). There, she learned how to participate in discussions and organize her daily tasks and duties, and about women’s histories and the history of the Middle East. In addition to lessons in the Kurdish language, the economy according to Öcalan, politics, and diplomacy, participants also learn about communal living. They live together in training facilities, away from their families, for the duration of the course. Men and women share household chores, such as cooking, cleaning, and tending to the garden. Nuria explained that the course culminates in a session in which participants criticize their own personalities, as well as those of others, to become self-aware and free.⁶

However, going away to a closed training course during which men and women live together is not an option for everyone. As one representative of the PYD-affiliated umbrella institution of women’s movements Kongra Star in Amûde put it,

[t]he problem is that they [Arabs] do not join the training. For example, in the villages, people usually do not participate in the training, and even if they join and see something beautiful in training, … when they [women] go to apply it at home, their husbands do not let them. (Kongra Star representative, April 12, 2021)

The founders of a feminist organization in Raqqa took issue with the fact that not attending these training courses is a fireable offense. To these young women, being away from their families for a month without a phone was not about freedom, and being fired for not attending was even less so. One of them, Saida, said that she would attend training if she could return to sleep at home (Saida, April 27, 2021).

In teaching participants not only ideology but also self-discipline through the repetition of bodily practices, such as cleaning and cooking, these training courses shape participants’ subjectivities. Therefore, I hold that education seminars can be considered both technologies of government and the self, insofar as they govern participants’ conduct (Prügl 2011), as well as teach them how to become free – a status whose meaning is demarcated by DC discourse. Throughout perwerde, participants thus become subjects through subjection to the new normative framework (Käser 2021, 100; see also Bacchi 2009; Foucault 1982; Mahmood 2001), which suggests that what sets the new woman apart is that she has become free through embracing the Kurdish liberation ideology. Accordingly, other women are marked as not yet aware and in need of liberation.

The appearance and behavior expected of the free woman

Enforcing freedom through dress

After a while in the field, I started to understand what those around me meant when they said that you can immediately tell if someone is Apoçi, a term that refers to the followers of “Apo Öcalan” (“Uncle Öcalan”). There is something about their demeanor that tells you that they are “with them” – another euphemism for those who support the self-administration. It involves the way in which they dress, how they carry themselves, and the fact that they mention “the leader” within the first couple of minutes of a conversation. As Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) points out, women’s clothing and behaviors are ascribed critical significance in drawing the cultural boundaries of the ethnic-national community. This is true for Apoçis, who I learned to recognize by their style. Whereas other middle-aged women often wear the long traditional housedresses called gallabi (Kurmanji) or gallabia (Arabic) and cover their hair with a scarf, Apoçis of the same age usually wear trousers, a long-sleeved shirt or jacket, no makeup, and their long hair tied back in a braid or ponytail. However, the accessory that most typically identifies them, both women and men, is a colorful scarf with flowers and small beads on the fringes, popularized, according to Esin Düzel (2020, 189), as “guerrilla fashion.”

Women’s appearances came up time and again in conversations with interview partners and friends, and often a direct link was made between women’s freedom and the clothes that they wear. Kurdish people in particular seemed to equate not wearing a veil with adhering to a more modern rather than a more traditional, religiously minded worldview. Nowhere did the topic of veiling seem more salient than in the city of Raqqa. There, women had been forced to wear a full body veil (burqa in Arabic), including a face veil (niqab in Arabic), during the rule of IS that lasted from January 2014 until October 2017, when the city was liberated by the SDF. When I visited the city in 2021, most women in the streets still wore a burqa, and many also wore a niqab or a khimar, a veil covering the head, neck, and shoulders. It was therefore no surprise when the women at a local feminist organization brought up clothing in our discussion about women’s rights.

These young Arab women from Raqqa and its surrounding communities recounted that under IS they were told what to wear and how to behave like respectable women. Now, said Saida, the Kurdish self-administration imposes on them new expected standards of femininity that are linked to the idea of freedom:

Their understanding of freedom is, if you are free, you should wear sportive [casual] clothing, you should not wear a cover over your head, you should smoke, you should stay away from the cafeteria, etc. For me, being free means being free in my thinking, free to study or make my own decision based on what I think is right. It is never up to you to define my freedom. (Saida, April 27, 2021)

She criticized the fact that women are not allowed to wear a niqab within the institutions of the self-administration, adding that, for her, veiling is a matter of personal belief and that it has been her own decision to wear a headscarf (hijab in Arabic). Once again, those in charge are telling women how to dress and behave. In her view, the choice to veil (or not) should be left to each woman. Her colleague Amira did not agree, since wearing the veil is not something that she has chosen for herself. She said that it has been forced on her by patriarchal customs and traditions, and were it not for her family and surrounding community, she would take it off immediately. Another of the women, Siham, was wearing skinny jeans and a sweater. She reported how she circumvents society’s rules by taking off the veil and her abaya, a traditional piece of Islamic clothing, as soon as she enters the office. She explained that her family would worry if she did not wear a hijab outside, but that she prefers less Islamic attire.

As embodied selves, these women are situated in the world in relation to a variety of social practices that shape not only their understanding of their bodies but also the materiality of them (Mahmood 2001, 210–212; McLaren 2002, 15). Both “old”⁷ patriarchal norms and practices and new ones introduced by the self-administration exert disciplinary effects on their bodies and, as such, shape their subjectivities. The interview excerpts show that by no means all women are forced to either veil or adhere to the new “sportive” style. Many of the female judges at the Justice Council in Qamishli and those working at the parliament in Amûde wear makeup and “elegant” clothes, and some of them also wear headscarves. However, once they go outside, their choice of clothing and demeanor are observed and commented on. Women are often pressured into compliance through persuasion, gossip, or direct harassment. This illustrates that power does not only operate through the imposition of rules and laws by the state; on the contrary, families, society, and the state all act as guardians of customs and tradition, demonstrating that power is constantly produced among and between persons as well as institutions and groups of people.

Increased mobility: staying out late

Fawziya, an Arab woman from the women’s administration in Raqqa, similarly viewed freedom as a matter of a woman’s right to self-determination. However, when the self-administration took power after defeating IS, she said, Raqqans thought that the gender equality reforms were about granting women the right to wear revealing clothes or stay out late to do “immoral things.” Understanding freedom in the “wrong” way, they had to be taught its “true” meaning, as Fawziya suggested:

We explained what freedom of women is, that she has an opinion, and that I am responsible for my own decisions … to choose my own life, and my father does not decide for me who to marry, or being able to go out without my brother. Freedom of opinion is what we want, women’s freedom is what we call for, not immoral things. (Fawziya, April 21, 2021)

Fawziya’s rather Marxian view of false consciousness implies that there is a “true” definition of freedom, to which the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s teachings are the key. True to DC discourse, Fawziya invalidates a trope well known in the Middle East that equates women’s liberation with the idea of women having to stay out late, by themselves, to qualify as “free” (see Al-Ali 2000).

Somewhat contrary to the stance of Fawziya, Arya Malla, the co-president of the Legislative Council, stated that she can now return at midnight from a meeting and with a male driver, something that was previously impossible (Arya Malla, April 3, 2021). Therefore, a lived effect of the changing discourse is that this behavior is becoming more acceptable, both in the eyes of the women themselves and of the surrounding community. According to Arya, the separate women’s structures and specific perwerde for women – practices that emerged out of DC’s problem representation of gender (in)equality – have been crucial for women’s success in overcoming the obstacles posed by customs and traditions, such as their boundedness to the domestic sphere. In discussions with other women, they learn to resist traditional gender norms and develop strategies to convince society that their work is of equal value to that of men. Together, Arya said, “we achieved huge change and with time the surrounding community came to see women’s work as normal and even necessary” (Arya Malla, April 3, 2021).

Rojda, who was in her last year of university studying agricultural engineering when the civil war broke out, started working for the municipality shortly after graduation. For this, she had to first undertake a training course during which she learned about women’s histories and rights. The knowledge that she acquired hugely affected her and changed her life: “[A]ll of my friends got married, they did not change much. But I can go out and go to Kurdistan⁸ for a month on my own, … that has changed for me, coming back and staying out late” (Rojda, March 28, 2021). Thus, both Rojda and Arya view going out and returning late as part and parcel of their newfound freedom. For them, their work opens up an alternative trajectory to that of the “stereotypical view of women” (Rojda, March 28, 2021), which demands that women stay home with the children. Women’s liberation is thus closely linked with their mobility, such as the freedom to “stay out late.”

Emerging subjectivities: “why am I not like a man?”

Another material effect that I observed relates to marriage practices. Interlocutors expressed the belief that getting married curtails women’s freedom and their ability to choose to work, and repeatedly lauded me for saying that I did not want to get married despite being in a relationship. They told me that, as a woman, it is better not to enter into a serious commitment because once you do, the space to do something for yourself dwindles. Rojda said: “At home, they tell you you need to marry this guy, and such was the design for my life” (Rojda, March 28, 2021). However, after hearing about women’s history and female leaders in perwerde, she thought to herself: “Why am I not like a man?”

The discourse teaches women that they should not rely on men and instead do something for themselves. This seems to bear fruit, since more than half of the women whom I met in the institutions of the self-administration were single, whereas in the rest of the society many women above the age of 25 are married with children. In a meeting of the all-female council of judges in Jazira, I found that most participants were single, having learned to look for a wedding band as a definite sign. What both married and single women have in common, however, is that they have to convince their families and the surrounding community of the validity of their work outside of the house. Once over the initial threshold, the obstacles do not stop there. The women described having to deal with male colleagues who make all of the decisions and speak over them in meetings. Rojda remembered that this caused some of the women at the municipality to quit, which, in turn, convinced her to work on women’s issues. Now, she said, men are still talking over women and wanting to make all of the decisions, but things are slowly getting better thanks to the work of the women’s offices.⁹

Though perhaps catalyzed by DC discourse, I believe that the changing situation of women in NES is the result of constant processes of struggle and resistance through which women carve out their place in society. The interviews indicate that there are agency and opportunities to be gained from the changing discourse. However, I found that the effects on women’s choices to stay single were mostly confined to the Kurdish-majority areas. The women whom I met working for the self-administration in Raqqa were all either currently married or had been at one point and were now divorced or widowed.

As Lila Abu-Lughod (1998, 261–264) points out, the categories of the new (wo)man and the new society in modernization projects are not only determined by new forms of power; they also create power and make sense of it, to which the different interpretations of what it means to be free are testimony. While the education seminars are intended to foster resistance against traditional gender norms, participants are not merely “docile” bodies dominated by outside forces (Käser 2021); on the contrary, they can also gain confidence and learn new skills and bodily practices that enable them to navigate other forms of domination.

Negotiating the meaning of freedom: analyzing women’s agency

Käser has shown how the PKK and the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement exert considerable control over their members, making their bodies “docile” by “disciplining the mind and body through education, which leads to the subject formation and subordination to the leadership and party hierarchy” (Käser 2021, 100). In NES, however, the context is different. Though popular opinion seems to be that PKK cadres are the ones pulling the strings in the background (see also Allinson 2022, 237), the self-administration is wary of appearing too close to the party. The actual degree of PKK influence aside, the self-administration is certainly not able to exert the same amount of control over its citizens as the PKK is over its activists.

In contrast with those who join an armed movement such as the PKK, the women whom I met are less bound to and bounded by DC ideology and party discipline. Instead, these civilian women are divided into the categories of liberated and unliberated by the official discourse and practices related to it, which objectify them as subjects whose positions are related to power differently. DC ideology, with jineology at the heart of its gender discourse, puts forth an image of the liberated woman who, in the context of NES, wears little to no makeup, is unveiled, understands freedom in the “right” and moral way, has a strong and decisive personality, and is well organized. The ideals set for the free woman in the AANES thus mirror the expectations for civilian activists in the PKK to “curb their sexuality, resist Capitalist Modernity and focus on building a communal life” (Käser 2021, 205). However, they are not entirely congruent with the expectations for militants who become subjects by joining the guerrilla movement (Käser 2021, 70).

Like all normative projects, the Rojava Revolution has therefore created avenues for agency and change. As in the case of militant femininities identified by Käser (2021, 10–12), the behaviors and attitudes expected of the free woman undermine certain patriarchal forms of control, such as women’s confinement to the domestic sphere or the need for them to get married and have children. However, new norms and practices prescribing moral behavior also emerge from this framework, benefiting some women at the expense of others and creating new constraints (Bacchi 2009, 44–46). Only a certain “understanding and exercising [of] freedom” (Rose 1999, 63) is compatible with DC discourse. For instance, women’s increased mobility is viewed as the “right” kind of freedom only when it is used in a meaningful way, such as working to change the prevailing masculinist mentality. If used to wear overtly religious or revealing clothes, or to stay out late to do “immoral things,” freedom is understood the “wrong” way. The gender equality discourse, therefore, provides a blueprint for how to behave properly and bring about social change.

Social norms and practices regarding women’s clothing and behaviors not only shape individual subjectivities but also contribute to “the self-constitution of communities as different and distinct from their counterparts” (Çağlayan 2012, 5). In DC theory, this distinction runs between the camps of the free and the oppressed woman. Interview partners’ interpretations of what it means to be free challenge this binary representation and illustrate the contradiction inherent in emphasizing women’s freedom while at the same time prescribing desired behaviors and appearances. Delinking the meaning from any rules about appearances, Saida viewed freedom as the autonomy to realize one’s own will, which, in Islamic feminist discourses, can also mean to submit to ideas of female modesty or piety (see Mahmood 2001, 207–209). Albeit a distinct improvement from the period of IS rule, when women had no freedom at all, the Arab women from Raqqa found that in imposing their meaning of freedom, the Kurdish rulers are also governing people’s behavior and establishing new forms of control in the public sphere, such as banning the niqab inside their institutions. The imposition of yet another set of expected standards of femininity is but the continuation of a longstanding tradition of controlling women and demarcating the cultural boundaries of the ethnic-national community by policing women’s bodies (Yuval-Davis 1997).

Based on these findings, I aver that despite its prioritization of (gender) equality, the dominant discourse denies those who hold onto religion and traditional values constitutive subject positions by representing them as oppressed and therefore unsuitable for participation. In that, I concur with Elisabeth Olivius’ (2016, 286) assessment that projects to achieve gender equality can reproduce cultural hierarchies and legitimize interventions to develop groups represented as backward or unfree. This was corroborated by the fact that most women who occupied higher positions within the self-administration shared an Apoçi “habitus”¹⁰ and emphasized the need for women to develop strong personalities and to overcome the patriarchal mentality to be(come) free. The fact that attending education seminars is a necessary condition for working for the self-administration excludes those women, mostly Arabs, who cannot or do not want to attend these training courses. In making particular subject positions and forms of agency available only to certain groups and individuals, these reforms thus create new exclusions.

Navigating “old” and new rules

However, the discourse about women’s rights and gender equality is by no means static. It is continuously constructed and reconstructed, exhibiting multiple surfaces and meanings, thus offering spaces and opportunities for women to contribute to the creation of new subjectivities. I have pointed out sites of resistance, where women on the ground negotiate the image of the free woman in practice, partially refusing it but perhaps more often bending it to their own agendas. For instance, not all of the women working for the self-administration wore Apoçi clothes; some were wearing makeup and “elegant” rather than “sportive” clothes. This indicates what Düzel (2020) terms “moral autonomy,” where those involved in reproducing the moral order also have some measure of autonomy with which to negotiate it – perhaps thanks to their strong personalities.

Most women whom I met navigate both “old” patriarchal rules and new norms simultaneously, as the example of Siham, who changes her clothes at the office, illustrates. Instead of simply rejecting tradition and embracing the new norms, or vice versa, the women carve out their places in society and institutions day by day, working their way around to new subjectivities that are not totally determined either by DC discourse or by the patriarchal image of women according to tradition. One example are the single women who work for the self-administration. While unmarried women certainly existed before 2012, I found that the option to stay single and pursue a career is becoming more acceptable in the eyes of society, not least thanks to the visibility of certain high-ranking female, single Apoçi leaders. These women prefer to stay single instead of being with someone who curtails their freedom to work, move around, and make decisions – and the new discourse allows them to do so. Nevertheless, they do not rule out the possibility of marriage altogether, if it happens on their terms. In that sense, they do not entirely conform to the militant femininity envisioned by the Kurdish Freedom Movement, whose internal rules demand that members abstain from sexual and romantic relations (see Al-Ali and Käser 2022; Çağlayan 2020; Käser 2021). This, again, implies that there is scope for women to negotiate prevailing norms and act in a morally autonomous way. While it could be argued that inciting women against marriage serves the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s goal of producing docile bodies in the fight against the patriarchal family, and external enemies for that matter, what I am interested in here are the effects rather than the intentions of discourse.

Conclusion

It is fair to say that the Syrian civil war and the ensuing establishment of the self-administration in NES have resulted in a major shift in terms of women’s representation and subjectivity. Despite facing obstacles, many women to whom I spoke feel like they now have more choices than before. Women have entered fields previously closed off to them, such as political parties, and they are starting to take office thanks to the co-presidency system. This is a considerable change in an environment in which women were traditionally relegated to the household sphere and to raising children. Whether these women, who are required to undertake ideological training courses to work for the self-administration, will effectively challenge existing power asymmetries within the ruling party or the institutions themselves remains to be investigated.

However, while the AANES’ gender equality reforms have contributed to the normalization of women participating in the public sphere and politics, I also found that DC’s normative project creates new marginalizations. In this article, I have shown that in NES the meaning of freedom and equality is deeply contested and that this contestation is played out on women’s bodies. I have used Bacchi’s (2009) problem representation approach to argue that gender (in)equality is represented as a project of development from which two different subject positions emerge: the free and the oppressed woman. However, the women whom I encountered were not entirely constrained by the subjectification effects of either patriarchal norms and practices, which dictate that women should get married and stay home with the children, or by the ideal of the free woman that demands that women present themselves in a certain way, abstain from romantic relationships, and dedicate their lives to the struggle. On the contrary, despite their different positionalities, the women whom I interviewed exhibit agency in their active negotiation of what being free means for them.

Engaging women and men not directly involved in the political project allowed me to observe the (un)intended and unacknowledged effects of the gender equality reforms on people whose allegiance to the Kurdish Freedom Movement varies greatly. The material effects of dividing the population into oppositional pairs, such as the oppressed versus the liberated, manifest themselves in the exclusion of those, mostly Arabs, who are portrayed as clinging to religion and the norms and practices that are related to Islam, and therefore backward and oppressive toward women. I am not, however, arguing that the self-administration’s political agenda to advance women’s rights and achieve a more gender-equitable society is merely a ruse to assert Kurdish dominance and conscript women into the military, as some critics have alleged. Instead, I have offered an analysis of the conceptualization of women’s rights that goes beyond binary explanations that portray the efforts as either radically emancipatory or merely instrumental.

Biography

Julia Wartmann graduated with a BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Arabic from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She then went on to receive her MSc in International Relations of the Middle East with Arabic from the University of Edinburgh, UK, during which she spent a trimester studying Arabic at Birzeit University, Palestine. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Basel, Switzerland, working on gender equality in North and East Syria. Her work is situated at the intersection of international relations and gender studies, and she is interested in issues of freedom, agency in oppressive contexts, and radical democracy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.