Introduction
by Şervîn Nûdem, Jineolojî Academy
The transformation of rage into struggle and of struggle into freedom has been an underlying feature of the last fifty years of liberation movements in Kurdistan. The first important step in the struggle was the development of rage against the status quo. That time was marked by a deathly silence. The bloody suppression of Kurdish uprisings in the 19th and early 20th centuries, several genocidal massacres, systematic deportations, and the division of the country and occupation by four nation-states designed by Western imperialism made it dangerous if not unthinkable to utter the very existence of the Kurds and Kurdistan.
This situation was challenged in the 1970s by a group of students who gathered in Ankara around Abdullah Öcalan, who later became the leader of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Together they mobilized as Kurdistan revolutionaries and eventually founded the party. Women like Sakine Cansız took part in this early insurrection against the denial and self-denial of the Kurdish people. This was entwined with dedication to achieve self-determination, freedom, and justice. In her autobiography, My Whole Life Was a Struggle, Cansız described this as a turning point in her personal life as well as for the existence of the Kurdish people:
A revolutionary life meant freedom, the free unfolding of one’s own will. It meant sharing with others and working socially. That was what attracted me. . . Even with all its peculiarities and even hardships, the way of life of a revolutionary was beautiful. My love for and commitment to revolution had been shaped by the simplicity and poverty of those who’d lived in the mud-brick house in our yard. 1
As the title of her autobiography indicates, the decision to become Kurdistan revolutionaries meant, especially for women, to struggle on many fronts simultaneously: to struggle with one’s whole life. Together with the rejection of patriarchal domination and the organization of self-defense against state violence, these struggles created deep changes in the lives of individuals and society. In Kurdish towns and villages in the beginning of the 1990s a new revolutionary culture developed. New relationships of hevaltî (friendship and comradeship) based on mutual respect, altruism, and collectivity emerged between revolutionaries. Embodying socialist values, these modes of relating attracted many people and inspired a regeneration of social relations in Kurdish society, including between women and men and between family members.
Despite harsh state oppression, there came a swell of community organizing alongside a revival of Kurdish culture, both based in communal traditions and freedom-loving values. With this came an emerging consciousness that there will be no national or social liberation without women’s liberation. This new reality of being and consciousness has been summarized as the “paradigm of a democratic, ecological society based on women’s liberation.” 2 Step by step, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement has conceptualized and implemented democratic autonomy and confederal structures of self-administration despite ongoing attacks by the four nation-states.
In the 21st century the slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” (“woman, life, freedom”) has become synonymous with these developments. It expresses women’s dedication to fighting against the patriarchal culture of rape and killing by turning rage into strength to build a free life. The driving force of the Rojava Revolution has been the interrelation between the struggle for the protection of existence itself and the work of striving to build a free life. 3 In 2011 the Kurdish people in Rojava and other ethnic groups striving for democratic change in Syria rose up as part of the larger People’s Spring in North Africa and the Middle East. With over four decades of communal organizing and struggle, women have played a leading role in developing and defending the contemporary revolution. While fighting against occupation, attacks, genocide, and feminicides committed by ISIS, al-Nusra, the Ba’ath regime, and the Turkish state, women have insisted on the construction of democratic autonomy in North and East Syria as an alternative to the state, capitalism, and patriarchy. Taking autonomous women’s organizing as foundational to the struggle, we see how women have been the driving force in building up grassroots democracy and challenging patriarchy in all areas of life.
Alongside these processes, women established Jineolojî as an alternative science of jin, jiyan, azadî (woman, life, freedom), a science of and for the women’s revolution. Works produced by members of the Jineolojî Academy in Rojava, North and East Syria have challenged the myths and dogmas of religion, patriarchal philosophies, and dominant scientific understandings. Through the Academy local research groups investigated women’s history through archaeological artifacts and their surroundings. Grandmothers were asked to share her-stories, traditional songs, and legends. The collection and interpretation of local oral history and women’s wisdom about natural health and herbal remedies became a foundation of women’s emergent self-awareness as well as of the development of local Jineolojî Research Centers and the Jineolojî Academy network. When Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Aramean, Turkmen, Caucasian, Êzidî, Muslim, and Christian women came together to share ancient knowledge and social customs, as well as suffering caused by colonial divide-and-rule policies and nationalist state policies, we realized how much we had in common. From this common ground we defined the specific needs and issues that each of us wanted to explore more deeply within our own communities.
Jineolojî Academy members formed gender-based and mixed-gender workshops in their neighborhoods to discuss and dismantle patriarchal gender roles. They created spaces to share experiences of pain as well as examples of resistance against patriarchal family codes that perceive women as men’s property and honor. By becoming aware of the roots and shapes of sexism women’s will and their prospects for challenging it have become stronger. In turn, men are encouraged to realize that patriarchal violence is harmful not just to women but also to their human integrity and it is equally their responsibility to change. Participants of Jineolojî workshops expressed that the topics and questions made them reconsider their approaches to their own lives, society, family, and partner relations. Education on Jineolojî in high-schools, popular academies, and Rojava University has become an important tool in the process of rebuilding life and relations beyond patriarchal patterns.
Jineolojî Research Centers’ projects, such as focus groups on women’s justice, communal economy, alternative education methods, and other specific social problems, have contributed to building up autonomous women’s structures in all fields of life. A confederal women’s system has emerged along with and as a part of the structures of democratic self-administration in Rojava. Since 2017 the women’s village Jinwar has been built up as a place where women and their children can live, work, and learn collectively. Women from different generations who came to live in the village report that for the first time they gained the opportunity to express their thoughts freely and make decisions about their own lives. These are just some examples of how Jineolojî touches and changes lives in Rojava.
Jineolojî develops through women’s wisdom and expertise in struggles for freedom, justice, and an ecological way of life in every part of the world. We aim to similarly share our knowledge and experiences with women seeking freedom everywhere. Colonialism, racism, class, and gender division have attempted to homogenize the diversity of knowledge, values, and identities connected to different geographies, native histories, and cultures. The transnational perspective of Jineolojî offers women tools to dismantle the dominant narratives in their specific contexts. It creates awareness about the mechanisms of power that strive to objectify and alienate us without getting stuck in the pain of our injuries, instead building consciousness about all the positive, strong, and beautiful sides of our existences and identities. Jineolojî’s journey of developing theoretical foundations and practices in society began within the freedom struggle in Kurdistan but is not restricted to it. It will evolve with the contributions and cooperation of freedom-loving people in every region of the world who decide to join this journey.
On this journey our friend Nagihan Akarsel has always been with us. With love, joy, and dedication she has inspired and advanced our collective search from our first discussions defining jin (woman) and Jineolojî (science of women and life), to elaborations of the theoretical and methodological framework, to the formation of networks and institutions of the Jineolojî Academy. When she was busy with the final preparations for the opening of the Kurdish Women’s Library, Archive, and Research Center in Sulaymaniyah, she was targeted by a sniper hired by the Turkish Intelligence Service, MIT. On October 4, 2022 eleven deadly bullets shot Nagihan. They killed her, but they could not kill her spirit or endeavors. We transform our rage and grief at the loss of loved ones into new forms of struggle. We walk their path, committed to actualizing their aims and dreams.
At the beginning of 2019 Nagihan wrote the article “The Virtuous Stance of Existence: Resistance.” She wrote it at a time and in various places that have become synonymous with people’s resistance for existence, places such as Kobanê, Manbij, Afrin, Shahba, Aleppo, and Shengal. She composed it for an issue of the Jineolojî: Quarterly Journal of Science and Theory called “Women’s Methods of Resistance” published in North Kurdistan in Turkish. 4 The article expresses important elements of a Kurdish woman’s journey from rage and resistance toward the liberation of women and life. As this journey has unique facets with inspiration for other transnational feminist struggles, we have translated for the first time a slightly shortened version of this essay into English. In the essay Nagihan gives personal insight into the Rojava Revolution during the years 2016-2018. Concluding that women’s methods of resistance are women’s methods of existence, she offers a paradigm to relate to life, nature, society, and ourselves as women.
Giving global examples of ecological, communal, and ethical resistance, Nagihan invites the readers of Jineolojî Journal, who live mainly in Northern Kurdistan and Turkey, to connect their local initiatives to Pachamama, a goddess who represents a broader perspective of saving Mother Earth. In this sense, the article is a call to connect anger and resistance against capitalist and colonial exploitation with self-determined reorganization of community life. Weaving and joining the diverse threads of women’s radical and ecological grassroots democratic initiatives can become the texture of a global tapestry of women’s democratic confederalism. But let us listen now to Nagihan in her own words.
The Virtuous Stance of Existence: Resistance
by Nagihan Akarsel
Translated by Şervîn Nûdem
I am writing this article from a geography where living is synonymous with resisting. Resistance is a word that embraces all the meanings of our geography. It is life itself. The virtuous stance of existence. It is the manifesto of the greatest freedom movement of our time that began with the words “resistance is life.” 5 It is the formula of a conscious organization that seeks, protects, and defends the truth by holding on to these words.
Writing what has been experienced is a difficult act. It is even more difficult to express the meaning of what has been experienced in the way that it deserves. This feeling can turn all attempts upside down because you are in a period of time when the heartbeats of those who embrace the meaning of resistance have begun to be counted. Those who have resisted all the pain of their geography by devoting their bodies, cell by cell, to life. Those most beautiful human beings of our time who revealed the meaning of resistance with their lives.
In this time, you will pass by historic places of resistance. You stop at a place where Mahmut, nursing his wounds, says that Kobanê smells like his grandmother’s kofi, like the sun. 6 In Manbij, you witness the resistance of a Turkmen mother who knows that the plans of the ruling powers will be foiled with women’s knowledge and wisdom. You embrace the hope of Shereen, who carries the wind of Afrin in a tear in her eye. You see how women recreating life in Shahba complement one another with their positive energy. Your eyes are drawn to the green of the vines that stand alive in front of a ruined house in the Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo. You admire the resistance of life despite everything. You listen to Hedar telling us how the mothers leaning on the line of women’s resistance in Shengal are heading to the mountains with their sacred ones in their arms.
Each of them tells us about different methods of resistance. They describe the philosophy of life as resistance in protecting their land, culture, and values, saying “resistance is life” in a geographic region that, in the 21st century, the ruling powers are attempting to rapidly occupy. In a geographic region where resistance is synonymous with life, this article is based on cultural codes that equate life with women. It aims to make a small contribution to universal definitions of resistance by decoding local resistance.
A Paradigmatic Concept: Resistance
Resistance is a concept that corresponds to a paradigmatic meaning. The Kurdish equivalent, berxwedan, means mobilizing all capabilities to withstand. In Persian and Arabic it is called mukavemet, which means strength. In all languages resistance includes meanings such as enduring, refusing, boycotting, and withstanding. Resistance is expressed as an opposing stance in all visual, poetic, and illustrative narratives. But what is endured? Or what is boycotted? To stand against what?
Here we encounter a series of answers: occupation, cold, hunger, injustice, pain, oppression, war, fear, colonialism, and genocide. These reveal a meaning. A mentality. A conscience. A paradigm. Here it becomes necessary to define the concept of a paradigm: a perspective, a theory, a world view.
During the Enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, the so-called Age of Reason began. This paradigm, actually dating back to the 1500s and known through works of men such as Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Wesley, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith, is now in decline. The fact that pioneers of the Age of Reason were men requires examination. Their positivist/rationalist paradigm has become the basis for capitalist modernity. They claim that reality is simple, that hierarchy is a universal principle, that the universe is mechanical, that the future and its direction are certain, and that change is quantitative and cumulative. They tried to prove that objectivity and the integrity of relationships based on causality were obligatory. Since Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687 the dominant scientific paradigm has been the Newtonian scientific paradigm. This holds true today. In this paradigm, the functioning of a machine is applied to the functioning of the universe. Therefore as a worldview it is also mechanical. Today almost all “post” approaches we know, from postmodernism to post-capitalist and post-structuralist, are based on this Newtonian paradigmatic transformation. 7
Since this paradigm does not define life, society, nature, and women and is power-oriented, Abdullah Öcalan states that science needs a paradigmatic revolution. He says that the knowledge structures that have influenced the forces of democratic modernity, such as socialist, social-democrat, anarchist, feminist, and national liberation movements, have produced results that deeply contradict their progressive intentions.
These outcomes would not have emerged so easily if there were not a chain of serious flaws and mistakes in their fundamental paradigm and structures. . . There is an urgent need for a new methodology, a profound theoretical approach, that can be used to examine human society. The existing sociological discourse hardly expresses any meaning beyond the legitimization of official modernity. Therefore, there is a need for a radical scientific revolution and a methodological egress. 8
He concludes that with democratic modernity, first and foremost, a revolution in mentality is fundamental. Further, he says that in national liberation and socialist struggles the aspect of action is generally at the forefront. In his book Beyond State, Power, and Violence Öcalan emphasizes that quantum physics should be considered to understand the knowledge structures underlying the necessary paradigm change. He points out the importance of understanding the quantum world and the world of the cosmos, which is based on free choices and expresses intuitiveness and freedom. The quantum world is expressed in the characteristics of living nature, intuitive method, and free flow. He infers that developments in quantum physics revealed the need for a new paradigm. 9 Here paradigm refers to the knowledge structures on which mentality and consciousness are based. These knowledge structures also describe the viewpoint of the respective system. This covers life as a whole from the individual to society, from Romani music to the chatter of people gathering for conversation, to Frida Kahlo’s paint strokes and the lines in her face resisting pain, to the breathing of a flower, to the history hidden in the texture of a stone. This paradigm is predicated on the accumulation of ethical and political societies in which life is synonymous with resistance.
This understanding lies at the basis of the philosophy of the Middle Eastern sages, from Zarathustra to Mani, from Hermes Trismegistus to Mansur al-Hallaj. Öcalan points out that this philosophy has been nourished by women-centered agricultural-village societies. He defines the human universe as second nature, which quantum physics describes as the microcosm. This explains that everything sought in the universe can be found in humans. This is why the principle “Know yourself!” makes so much sense. It perceives the universe as a living organism, not a crude mass of materials. The foundation of this understanding is animism, which has existed in natural societies connected to the agricultural-village revolution led by women who establish a natural connection with life. Knowing that everything is alive and sacred is a basic way to arrive at truth itself. All components of nature are one in unity.
It is important to read the resistance stories of humanity, whose meaning arose through socialization, from this perspective. There are a few methods that can be applied for this purpose anywhere in Kurdistan and across the world. These include relating to stories of resistance, stories that have been inverted by mythology, religion, philosophy, and science, as sources of a meaningful life; acquiring the skill of giving meaning to your existence in connection with the soil; creating the knowledge that things will become universal as one makes sense of the local; and relying on the strength of society while doing these things.
A Concept Identified with Oppression: Power
Generally, in examples of resistance there is a force that threatens existence. A stance is taken against that assaulting force in opposition to evil. Here we come across realities such as cruelty and injustice. These expressions describe a form of existence. Existence through power, domination, rape, war, destruction, displacement. . . It is also a way of existence embedded in capitalist modernity.
The knowledge structures on which capitalist modernity is founded also legitimize this way of existence, that is, a way of existence originating from modern science. This is because modern science came about with a great upheaval in which humans declared their domination over nature. However, in the beginning humans were trying to understand and to relate to nature as a whole. The reversal of this relationship by state civilization, and capitalist modernity as one of its representatives, turns nature into an object separate from humans, an object of information and knowledge acquisition reduced to numbers, measures, and a logical relationship. Power perpetuates itself, maintaining its rule over nature, society, and women, which it treats as objects. Power also has a paradigmatic counterpart. It is not a coincidence that when we talk about power, we generally think of state civilization and the mechanical, positivist, rational paradigm.
Attributing being and becoming uniquely to humans is an anthropocentric approach to life. Every living being that carries the dynamics of life and lives in the context of time and space has a process of becoming. Ignoring these processes and defining them only in relation to human beings is an expression of the origin of the phenomenon of power. When we consider the axis of political powers, we see that a state and its institutions have always existed together. This also requires the body to be compatible with political power and its economic aims. Those who do not comply with this reality are excluded. They continue their existence as nameless shadows. In addition to inculcating individuals with fear, power uses mythical and divine symbols to contribute to their enslavement. A character is created who feels worthless in the infinite universe, ready to feel guilty for every action.
Power ensures its status and its rule over nature, society, and women, which it treats as objects, by increasing the masses of bodies that are willing to do anything. By mechanizing the human body it generates fears within it. In a seminar at Rojava University Professor David Graeber explained this mechanism with two basic fears. First, the ruler creates people who feel bad in their spare time. Then, they create individuals who are constantly afraid of losing their job and therefore work constantly. 10 The result is communities that do not think but act on orders. In other words, they are mechanized objects. We can call it a lifestyle in which competition and greed replace solidarity and sharing. A human reality has emerged that is alienated from its own sources of existence.
Injury Becomes Identity
Life is actually an active organization that includes rich forms of resistance. It is a form of defense. Self-defense and legitimate defense are expressions of resistance. Passive resistance, active resistance, civil resistance, cultural resistance, moral resistance, ecological resistance, and many other resistance methods become a voice, an action, a stance, a lifestyle that rises from the place where you are wounded.
Gandhi based his resistance on Satyagraha, which translates to “holding firmly to truth,” a form of nonviolent political resistance. He proposed and implemented Satyagraha as a strategy to protest racist apartheid policies and colonialism in South Africa and India. Methods of this form of resistance include non-cooperation with the enemy and significant personal sacrifices, such as nonviolent civil disobedience, compromise, asceticism, hunger strikes, and months-long marches.
Instances of ecological resistance have recently increased. These include occupation and resistance movements responding to the recent global economic crisis, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indiginados Movement, the rebellion in Greece, the Gezi Park resistance in Istanbul, the Brazilian landless workers’ movement, the resistance of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon, the citizens’ assemblies of the Indigenous in Honduras, the Argentinian factory workers movement, education struggles in Chile, Patagonian Mapuche movements in southern Argentina and Chile, the ZAD occupation movement in France, Hambach Forest resistance in Germany, the resistance at Standing Rock in North and South Dakota, resistance in Artvin Cerattepe and the Alakır River Fellowship in Turkey, as well as the movement Keep Hasankeyf Alive in North Kurdistan. As areas of alternative life and resistance, these struggles have also become a source of inspiration for new resistances.
Where is a Woman Most Injured?
Looking at Mesopotamian history, we realized that women’s existence is one of the first sites of the institutionalization of power in our region. In this context it is an identity most injured by power. This is why the redefinition of women’s existence, which has become the object of power for dominant masculinity, is so important. Here arises the need to explore women’s nature. The importance of giving meaning to women’s own wisdom emerges. It is especially important to answer questions about the need for a science of women and life.
Power has most injured women in four scopes. First, it has turned women into a means of reproduction through oppression, rape, diminishment, and feminicides. The dominant system made women domestic slaves then turned them into absolute property by keeping them in this role. Second, women have been made objects of sexual desire and domination. Third, women have been turned into unpaid, disregarded laborers. Fourth, women have been commodified within capitalism. Women’s bodies, women’s labor, women’s consciousness, women’s spirit, and women’s soul have been massacred. Women’s identity has been wounded.
In this sense, the answers to the questions of how a woman determines her existence, what she wants to understand and make understandable, are important. When we consider the Kurdish words for life (jîn, jiyan) and woman (jin) from a complementary perspective it is necessary to adequately describe the core meaning that is identified. In this respect Jineolojî focuses on re-establishing the connection between women and a meaningful life in a good, beautiful, and just way.
Understanding a woman as a being is important. Quantum physics, which gives existence the potentiality to transform into new particles, states that this potentiality materializes when activated depending on the conditions and the observer. The theory of uncertainty develops from subatomic particles being both waves and particles, that they are waves or particles at the moment of observation. What is seen and thus possible is connected to the interaction between the observed and the observer. On this, Abdullah Öcalan writes:
First of all, comprehending women and determining their role in social life is essential for a right life. We do not make this statement in terms of women’s biological characteristics and social status. The concept of woman as being is important. To the extent that the woman is understood, it also becomes possible to understand the man. The nature of life is more related to women. The extreme exclusion of women from social life does not falsify this, on the contrary, it confirms it. The man is actually attacking life in the person of the woman with his tyrannical and destructive power. As the social ruler, man’s hostility and destructiveness to life is entwined with the social reality he lives in. 11
Women’s existence has been defined in relation to men within patriarchal male-centered paradigms. A woman is a non-man. This not only fails to express women, it also distorts them. Another definition understands women as the feminine sex based solely on their biological characteristics, like other females. Of course, there are biological factors, but the main point is to examine the social culture that is embodied by women and to consider women within social culture. If existence expresses itself holistically and this structure is integrated within someone’s nature, language, and culture, the lack of this integration shows that women have been purposefully prevented from revealing their own nature. This has been done by ideological attacks.
The articulation of women as beings will make it possible to get to know men as well. It will also realize the abolition of the boundary between emotional intelligence, attributed to women, and rational intelligence, attributed to men. By giving meaning to their own existence and returning to themselves women can regain their own values that have been lost, values from which they have been alienated.
A woman’s definition of her own existence necessitates knowledge. To know oneself means to develop consciousness. It is crucial to consider humans as a summary of the universe, to define them within their own historical terms, to understand them as sociological beings and expressions of cultures. Human beings who realize themselves in nature, the universe, and society are a force of existence that has attained the power of will and thought. Socialization refers to the act and time of self-creation. As women define themselves, they can define nature, the universe, and humanity. We need to understand women’s resistance and methods of existence within this framework.
Women’s Resistance or Methods of Existence
Methods of women’s resistance are also methods of women’s existence. Revealing methods of women’s resistance entails defining women’s existence.Revealing women’s resistance methods through Jineolojî is a contribution to revealing the meaning of existence. As Jineolojî is a science of women and life, it uses research methodology relating to women’s reality and the concept that “a science to be developed around women is the first step towards a true sociology.” 12
While trying to understand women’s hidden truth, it emerges that this truth exists through resistance. Writing this article from a place where living is identical with resisting also provides important clues. It is a region that has resisted central hegemonic power with its own strength and will. The people of this region resist in such a way so as not to abandon their existence, lands, and culture despite war, destruction, and displacement. It is very important as well as very difficult to explain that the meaning of resistance, which is a mode of existence in our region, is the very meaning of life itself. The resistance of “those who love life so much that they would die for it, and those who set out as their comrades” continues. 13
Jineolojî is in a state of formation and emergence, so its definition is important. We must emphasize that Jineolojî stands against the current positivist understanding of science. Jineolojî is a science that develops a woman-centered critique of the positivist conceptualization of science that has a diminished connection with life, society, and nature. Jineolojî aims to create an alternative. The nature of this science makes the search for solutions to the problem of existence and the development of alternatives vital and dynamic processes.
It is important to reveal the connection of semantics with history and sociology. This is an important method to connect with data that shows history continues to exist as a sociological entity and sociology as a historical reality from the perspective of Jineolojî. Reconsidering history and sociology from this perspective reveals that women’s methods of resistance are also the fundamental moments of women’s existence and life. These moments carry the codes of a sociality borne and protected by women up until today.
Examples of the Theoretical Foundations of Women’s Resistance
Women who fought against ISIS, the darkest force of the patriarchal system, in Kobanê.
Women who armed themselves with the knowledge of their land and made their mark in the resistance of the age against the second largest NATO army in Afrin.
Women in Shengal who have preserved the historical line of women’s resistance in the Êzidî community, including self-defense, with their cultural values which resemble a stem cell, including their power of resistance against rape, genocide, and feminicide.
These experiences are among the most important examples of women’s methods of existence in our time. The Kurdistan Women’s Freedom Movement, which has flourished from its own roots, realizing a second women’s revolution in the area of the first neolithic women’s revolution, also reveals this. It is decisive that women’s resistance first and foremost relies on and preserves its own roots, historical memory, and cultural vitality.
Women need to overcome the alienation they experience by collectively building a common will. Theory of separation, awareness of their own nature, developing the ability to love their fellow women, and fighting reactionary attitudes within and among themselves all assist with this. 14 This has also been a source of organizing the Women’s Freedom Movement in Kurdistan in different formations such as the women’s guerrilla, women’s party, and confederations.
To dismantle patriarchy, it is also important to focus on the transformation of men. The project to change and transform the man lends reality to the theory that the liberation of woman is the liberation of society. Women’s definitions and methods of struggle are decisive in this challenging path from the project of changing and transforming men to the theory of hevjiyana azad which aims at establishing a free way of living together. 15 It is important to analyze the relationship between men and women, generally seen as the most intimate relationship, on the basis of its universality and its particularity in social ties. This can be done by making the public personal and the personal public, understanding that the personal is political. This is also a method of establishing the foundation of sociological knowledge in a correct way.
It is vital to recognize the diverse, experience-based knowledge that women gain by seeking answers to the question of how to live. These experiences range from living in temples and monasteries to life in academies and communal spaces for raising consciousness, from kitchens and community halls to educational networks. One of the main tasks of Jineolojî, which bases its practices on experiential knowledge, is to identify these methods that comprise the dynamics of women’s existence. Moreover, aspects and methods used during knowledge production, such as analysis, empathy, feeling, dialogue, criticism and self-criticism, are further elements that need to be addressed.
Conclusion
It is not possible to describe in one article all the meanings of resistance that encompass the entire universe, from individual to society, from women to men, from living to inanimate beings. The aim here is to focus on the connection between life and resistance and to emphasize that in a region where the saying “resistance is life” is current women’s methods of resistance are women’s methods of existence.
It is an introduction to understanding the resistance that emanates from the democratic ecological paradigm based on women’s liberation. This paradigm recognizes women as the core of sociology beyond the confinement of gender and challenges power that is based on the mechanical paradigm. In this way it points out the importance of being aware that women’s resistance can only be accomplished by establishing a strong bond with nature, society, and life from which women have been largely alienated. There are vivid and dynamic examples of resistance in the times and spaces in which we live. Inspired by the beauty of those who are committed to freedom at the cost of their lives, we see it as our task to create concepts, theories, and institutions that explain this beauty to the world.
We are now in the age of building the system of democratic modernity that originates from the endeavors of all people who have resisted throughout history. It embraces their knowledge of resistance and offers an alternative perspective of life. Together with this, we have to build an even more profound philosophy, theory, and organization of resistance. These are the basic methods of existence according to the democratic, ecological paradigm based on women’s liberation. Thus we are entering the age where berxwedan jiyane, resistance is life, is actualized as serkeftin jiyane, victory is life.
ENDNOTES
- Sakine Cansız, Sara: My Whole Life Was a Struggle: The Memoirs of a Kurdish Revolutionary, trans. Janet Biehl (Pluto Press, 2018), 354.[↑]
- This paradigm was elaborated by Öcalan, first in his prison writings in 2004. See Abdullah Öcalan, Beyond State, Power, and Violence (Oakland: PM Press, 2022).[↑]
- “Rojava” is the Kurdish term for “West-Kurdistan,” which was put under occupation by the Syrian nation-state following imperialist demarcations after WWI.[↑]
- JINEOLOJÎ: Quarterly Journal of Science and Theory 12 (2019), 10-20.[↑]
- Initially a slogan of Kurdish political prisoners on hunger-strike resisting Turkish colonialism.[↑]
- Traditional Kurdish headdress.[↑]
- Hasan Şimşek, Yüzyılın Eşiğinde Paradigmalar Savaşı: Kaostaki Türkiye (Sistem Yayıncılık, 1997).[↑]
- Abdullah Öcalan, The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III (PM Press, 2020), 7, 21-22.[↑]
- Öcalan, Beyond State, Power, and Violence.[↑]
- David Graeber (lecture, Rojava University, Qamishlo, Syria, April 27, 2018).[↑]
- Abdullah Öcalan, Kürt Sorunu ve Demokratik Ulus Çözümü (Hawar Yayinlari, 2012).[↑]
- Öcalan, Kürt Sorunu ve Demokratik Ulus Çözümü.[↑]
- A reference to the words of Kemal Pir, a cofounder of the PKK, who stated during the hunger strike of Kurdish political prisoners in Diyarbakir prison in 1982, “We love life so much that we would die for it.”[↑]
- “Theory of separation” is a translation of the Turkish term “kopuş teorisi,” a concept introduced by Abdullah Öcalan that refers to a mental, emotional, and physical separation from patriarchal mentality and male dominance, and an important reference for the development of autonomous women’s organization. See Aram Kadin, Jineolojiye Giriş (Aram, 2015), 200-201.[↑]
- Concept introduced by Abdullah Öcalan in his prison writings, The Kurdish Question and the Democratic Nation Solution: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume V (New Compass Press, 2010), focusing on developing criteria for the liberation of all kinds of relations between genders, including social, economic, political, personal, and emotional, as the foundations for social liberation and overcoming any form of dominance.[↑]
