In Search of New Meanings for Security: Self-Defense in the Struggle for Freedom

I am sitting with Elvin, a longtime and prominent organizer in the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, in a building that houses offices and rooms in which movement organizing is constantly taking place. I ask Elvin to describe to me the Kurdish Women’s Movement’s theoretical and ideological perspective of self-defense. She tells me:

Self-defense means intellectual development, brightness, understanding first yourself, who you are and the reason why you are discriminated [against], and who’s your opponent. If you achieve the level of understanding that every attack against you is ideological, then self-defense means you create your own alternative ideology. Self-defense in the Kurdish Women’s Movement is the ideology of the liberation of women. Women have their own ideology, which means being anti-patriarchal, because patriarchy is the source of aggression, which can be implemented through the military, the army, the police, and so on. ¹

At this point in my research journey, I am familiar with self-defense as a central, defining concept in the movement’s praxis. It has been broadcast to the world in the form of now iconic images of women in the defense units in Rojava (West Kurdistan, within the borders of Syria) fighting against the so-called Islamic State (Daesh). I have encountered it in the writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the ideological leader of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and co-founder of the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers Party), imprisoned since 1999 by the Turkish state, whose thought permeates every aspect of the movement. It has been communicated to me in ways overt and subtle, at moments of movement mobilization, education, and rest. Elvin’s description of self-defense as brightness and knowing oneself speaks to the depth to which self-defense is embedded in every level of being for someone living this political orientation. Self-defense takes the form of physical anti-colonial resistance, building democratic structures in communities, as well as ideological and affective defense of autonomous political organizations.

Discussing security presents a number of problems. The nebulousness of the term is one, its application and use by different actors another. My argument relies on elaborating the differences between two oppositional conceptualizations of security: one that seeks security through limitations to freedom—of speech, movement, assembly, organization, and thought itself; and one that sees security as a holistic state of human dignity to be achieved through dedicated, revolutionary prefiguration/creation of greater collective freedoms. The former definition is the one evoked within both public political discourse and academic scholarship on security. The latter is theorized primarily by movements in struggle and in academic work attuned to these movements. These two conceptualizations, one intensely necropolitical, one life-generating, go to the very heart of the ontological question of what it means to be secure in a fundamentally insecure world.

I begin this paper by situating my work within security scholarship drawing from revolutionary movements. Next, I outline certain principles of engagement necessary for working with criminalized and marginalized freedom struggles. Then, I elaborate on the distinctions between the two oppositional conceptualizations of security. My approach to this question is not philosophical but practical, a disobedient engagement with dominant security discourses, guided by the experiences and theorizations of people and movements most intensely targeted by existing state-led security assemblages.

I focus on the Kurdish Women’s Movement’s theorization and practice of holistic self-defense built upon decades of committed armed struggle against colonialism and ideological and material anti-patriarchal organizing. I draw from ethnographic research with the Kurdish Women’s Movement to argue that genuine security can only be achieved through struggles for freedom and enacted through anti-patriarchal visions of collective self-defense. The movement’s capacity to survive decades of extreme and enduring state violence and to broaden its perspective from armed resistance to holistic social transformation makes it a particularly crucial interlocutor on questions of security. My aim is to center the “lived thought,” as Lara Montesinos Coleman terms it, of political movements engaged in struggle against the conjoined forces of militarism, colonialism, racism, capitalism and patriarchy. ² The purpose of this engagement is to further ongoing work within critical and feminist security studies and international relations (IR) and to engage with revolutionary movements as crucial interlocutors and theorists on state-led security logics and practices and their alternatives. Finally, with the hope of meaningfully engaging with ongoing struggle, I argue for the inclusion of self-defense as a central concept within feminist approaches to security in order to build greater support for transformative alternatives.

Self-Defense in the Kurdistan Freedom Movement

This paper draws on five years of qualitative research with the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, primarily the Kurdish Women’s Movement, using participant observation in Kurdish diaspora spaces, interviews with Kurdish movement organizers, and analysis of the movement’s literature. The focus of this research is the Kurdish movement’s perspective on the security state through the lens of criminalization and its impacts on the Kurdish diaspora in Europe as well as the security alternatives theorized and prefigured by the movement. ³ My research has involved participating in political education and meetings, carrying out interviews with organizers, and spending time at Kurdish community centers, primarily in the United Kingdom as well as in Belgium and Germany. Further, I have carried out creative group sessions in which participants examine aspects of state violence through collective mapping. This has helped mitigate issues of translation as most of this research has been carried out in English or with the help of an interpreter.

Feminist and anti-patriarchal movements have devoted significant, consistent attention to the patriarchal, racist, and capitalist logics of power within a militarist, state-centric system and the ways in which these actively and often deliberately endanger the lives and wellbeing of women and gender minorities, racialized people, and other marginalized groups. ⁴ Anti-colonial movements have theorized and practiced the collective self-defense necessitated by conditions of occupation and colonization. ⁵ The Kurdistan Freedom Movement’s perspective and practice draws upon and adds to these histories of knowledge development.

The Kurdistan Freedom Movement is one of the largest political movements in the world, and the autonomous Kurdish Women’s Movement is central to its praxis. ⁶ The movement’s anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-state political struggle involves organizing protests, carrying out community projects, engaging in self-defense and armed struggle, and participating in parliamentary processes across Kurdistan and in Europe. ⁷ These political projects are carried out with an aim of social transformation, working toward a revolutionary horizon of liberation through a practice of grassroots, stateless democracy. ⁸ The movement has its origins in the PKK, which began organizing in Bakûr (Northern Kurdistan, within the borders of the Turkish state) in the 1970s and took up armed struggle against the Turkish state in 1984. ⁹ From its origins as a Marxist-Leninist liberation struggle for an independent Kurdish state, the movement has broadened out into a mass social struggle theorizing and organizing for grassroots, non-state democracy and women’s liberation, arriving at this through processes of reflexive self-criticism. ¹⁰ For decades Kurdish people have been defined in popular discourse through their statelessness, thus framing their liberatory options between the poles of incorporation or statehood. The movement’s rejection of this label and shift towards anti-state organizing redefines the horizons of liberation.

The Kurdish Women’s Movement emphasizes the need for self-organization and autonomy, a divorce from patriarchal forms of revolutionary organizing and the co-optation of women’s struggles by statist and capitalist institutions. ¹¹ Recognizing that these perspectives have been developed primarily by Kurdish women on the run, in prison, or in conditions of war and written as collaborative political analyses rather than as individual testimonies, this effort, decades-long and collective, should itself be seen as a form of ideological self-defense. ¹² Kurdish women are redefining and reconfiguring the role and aims of struggle through their own lives. This is even more apparent when considering how the movement communicates and popularizes these perspectives on self-defense across Kurdish society through education, media, and artistic initiatives. ¹³

Security from Below

We live in a world of enclosures. Assemblages of state and corporate forces work together to brutally curtail the possibilities of free and dignified life. Our world is one of surveillance, border walls and limitations to movement, algorithmic monitoring, mass incarceration and confinement, among other forms of repression. Over centuries colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal violence has been directed at political movements resisting dominant power structures. This can be seen, for example, in the brutal suppression of revolts against slavery and colonization throughout the last centuries; in the turn toward mass incarceration and the growth of the criminalizing effects of the so-called “war on terror” in recent decades; and, most recently, in the ever-encroaching digital surveillance of political movements. ¹⁴ Many political movements and thinkers have theorized these assaults on movements as forms of warfare – attacks on a society’s capacity to resist the status quo and reorganize structures of power. ¹⁵

The ongoing decolonial turn across security and IR scholarship has led to increased engagement with the views of freedom movement participants and leaders on colonial, capitalist, and state powers. For example, John Narayan, Nivi Manchanda, and Chris Rossdale work with the theorizations of Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P. Newton, particularly his concept of “reactionary intercommunalism” as a descriptor for the mutually interdependent assemblage of imperialist, capitalist, and state forces. ¹⁶ Olivia Rutazibwa engages with the thought of Thomas Sankara, late revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, in her exploration of the possibilities for decolonial engagement within critical IR. ¹⁷ In a special issue of Globializations on Che Guevara’s legacy in world politics, Shannon Brincat and Michael Löwy argue for the need to engage with Guevara’s Marxist-humanist body of work. ¹⁸ While offering valuable counterdiscourse to IR and security studies, the majority of these works engage with the written and readily available works of major revolutionary figures, primarily men. Exceptions include Lara Montesinos Coleman and Orisanmi Burton who use an anthropological framework to engage ethnographically with marginalized and criminalized groups. Coleman works with interlocutors who are part of ongoing Indigenous and land rights struggles in Colombia. ¹⁹ Burton conducts interviews and archival research with people who organized and participated in the prison revolts led by the Black liberation movement in the 1970s in the United States. ²⁰ I seek to carry out a similar engagement with grassroots perspectives from Kurdish women, while recognizing the limitations – immanent and imposed – of engaging with political movements.

Criminalization and state repression play a major part in the lack of engagement with revolutionary movements as generators of social theory. This is further compounded by the underlying ideological assumptions and ontological perspectives that dominate academic scholarship. The apparent difficulty (or lack of interest ) in engaging with thought that has been or remains marginalized, criminalized, and cast outside of acceptable intellectual endeavors is apparent even within critical scholarship. ²¹ Mahvish Ahmad, writing about an underground Marxist-Leninist publication in 1970s Balochistan, argues that decolonial scholarship largely excludes movement theory, noting that “the erasure of movement texts will not be addressed via their additive integration into existing decolonial agendas.” ²² This erasure is epistemic violence: a delineation and demarcation that places some thought within reasoned (or reasonable) discourse and others without. This fortifies the colonial, Global North-centric, and racist perspectives that continue to dominate security studies and IR scholarship. ²³ The lack of engagement with these knowledges at their level and in their multiplicity contributes to an ongoing epistemicide carried out by the institutions that critical security scholarship challenges: the interdependent assemblage of academic, corporate, and state knowledge production working together to further the aims of statist security projects. ²⁴

Engaging with political movement perspectives on security is about more than transforming and destabilizing the ontological foundations of critical security discourse. People and movements experiencing the violence of war, colonization, and political repression are speaking from positions of lived knowledge and have much to communicate about the nature of the “warfare state.” ²⁵ Aziz Choudry calls this knowledge the “pedagogies of repression.” ²⁶ According to Choudry, state security practices teach two lessons to political movements. The first is the feeling of being monitored. This is an intended pedagogical effect of state security practices “that seeks to discipline and isolate those targeted, spread fear and deter others from dissenting or organising to challenge the status quo.” ²⁷ The second lesson is unintended: repression’s concomitant knowledge of resistance.

By engaging with movements and people’s experiences, scholars become more attuned to the actual modes of violence enacted by the warfare state and the responses by those in struggle. Elsa Dorlin, in a genealogical study of physical self-defense from the perspective of liberation struggles, describes these responses as “two antagonistic expressions of the defense of the ‘self'”:

On the one hand, there is the dominant juridical-political tradition of legitimate defense, linked to myriad practices of power with various modalities of brutality. On the other hand, there is the hidden history of a “martial ethics of self” that cuts across contemporary political movements and counter-conducts, testifying to a surprising continuity of defensive resistance that makes them strong. ²⁸

These two antagonistic modes of self-defense, per Dorlin, are engaged in constant oppositional interplay. Using examples such as Black liberation struggles in the United States, queer self-defense patrols in Californian cities, and Jewish self-defense structures organized against the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Dorlin demonstrates how practices of resistance through physical self-defense can be, and often are, absorbed into or attacked by the “dominant juridical-political tradition of legitimate defense.” She illustrates this with queer self-defense efforts transformed into projects of bourgeois, white supremacist gentrification, and Jewish self-defense organizations coalescing into the brutal Zionist state, which has enacted over half a century of apartheid and military occupation in Palestine. While some political projects are incorporated, others face attempted annihilation; such is the case of the Black liberation struggle, which faced violent suppression and state manufactured incarcerations, disappearances, and death. Dorlin shows how these co-constitutive processes, absorption and annihilation, enact a deliberate ideological hollowing out of movements in struggle, which in turn re-entrenches the powers of the state to target movements and enact violent repression. Through this process the state-led order establishes itself as the arbiter of the “demarcation between subjects who deserve to be defended and to defend themselves, and bodies forced to use defensive tactics.” ²⁹

For feminist and anti-patriarchal movements, these methods of annihilation and pacification are imperative to analysis and strategy. These movements formed in resistance to patriarchal violence and its collusion with colonial, racist, and capitalist power. They have challenged it in numerous ways and, through a practice of prefigurative politics, have created new forms of collective security. ³⁰ Along the way these movements have been targeted by the state with physical violence and pacification. ³¹ Silvia Federici uses the example of the incorporation of feminist movements into structures such as the United Nations and the World Bank to show that “‘feminism’ has become a handmaid to institutional politics.” ³² Meanwhile, through parallel processes, the institutional patriarchal violence of colonization, extractivism, and militarism has receded from view, eclipsed by a paradigm of violence that recognizes interpersonal violence perpetuated by men as the ultimate legible form of patriarchal brutality and, perversely, the state as the guarantor of women’s security. ³³ The warfare state’s offer of security is paradoxical when its priorities are to order and manage populations, which it does through incarceration, integration of women into schemes of neocolonial development, and war waged in the name of gender equality. These methods criminalize, impoverish, brutalize, and kill women, particularly those who are racialized and in the Global South. ³⁴ Challenging this discourse and practice of security requires reorienting toward security of a different kind, one created autonomously and democratically on principles of freedom.

A Defense of Life, as Natural as Breathing

To understand the self-defense practiced by members of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, it is crucial to outline the context of war and criminalization in which the movement operates. The movement is subjected to the brutal counterinsurgency warfare of the Turkish state, which maintains the second-largest armed forces within NATO. ³⁵ Throughout the Cold War these activities were carried out as part of a global anti-communist project coordinated by NATO. ³⁶ In recent decades, the Turkish state’s counterinsurgency methods and criminalization initiatives, honed over decades, have been integrated into the “war on terror,” with the state attempting to classify almost any expression of Kurdish cultural or political identity as terrorism and lobbying for Kurdish organizations to be included on international listings of terrorist organizations. ³⁷ The Turkish state has also proved to be particularly effective in carrying out cultural, environmental, and economic destruction across Kurdistan. Central aspects of this counterinsurgency include surveillance, assassinations, disappearances, imprisonment, torture, collective punishment, forced displacement, and the deployment of fascist and Turkish nationalist paramilitaries to operate as proxies of the state. ³⁸ This assault on Kurdish existence is the backdrop against which Kurdish people have developed practices of self-defense. As per Choudry’s “pedagogies of resistance,” self-defense contains an intimate understanding of the state’s extreme violence and which strategies of resistance will be most effective.

This ongoing experience of state violence, from policing, to military assaults, to the shadowy realm of counterinsurgency, has shaped the movement’s definition of self-defense, particularly in the autonomous women’s structures of the movement. ³⁹ Drawing a parallel to a rose with its thorns, movement leader Abdullah Öcalan writes, “[A]ll species of living organisms have defense systems of their own.” ⁴⁰ Dilar Dirik draws the metaphor further writing, “[B]ees, flowers, ecosystems… have their mechanisms of self-defense to protect and assert their identity and existence.” ⁴¹ In the practice of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, self-defense is not merely physical self-defense but a defense of the identity and culture of colonized peoples and self-organized communities everywhere. This makes self-defense a conscious, proactive, and offensive (rather than defensive) practice of resistance. ⁴² Dirik notes that self-defense ranges from women’s guerrilla forces to autonomous women’s co-operatives. ⁴³ Kongra Star, the movement’s umbrella structure for autonomous women’s organizing in Rojava, describes self-defense as central to the path to women’s liberation: “Self-defense is fundamental to our consciousness of freedom: this is not only armed self-defense, but social, mental, and emotional too.” ⁴⁴ Self-defense is characterized as a natural part of existence, a life-generating expansion of collective freedom, as opposed to the security/defense offered by the state. ⁴⁵ Contextualized within the historical and continued violence of the warfare state across Kurdistan and in the diaspora, this holistic approach to self-defense is central to the movement and its people’s capacity to survive.

Transformation of the Self and of Society

For the Kurdish Women’s Movement self-defense as a praxis is developed in conflict with patriarchy. The battle against patriarchal attitudes concerning women’s participation in political struggle has been foundational to autonomous women’s organizing and practices of self-defense. ⁴⁶ In the 1990s, during a period of intense warfare between the PKK and the Turkish state, women in the guerrilla forces began organizing in opposition to the patriarchal attitudes and violence in their own movement and the society surrounding them. This ongoing anti-patriarchal struggle led to the establishment of the Kurdish Women’s Movement as an autonomous part of the broader movement. Its demands, practices, and theorizations now form a central part of how the broader movement is organized. ⁴⁷

The Kurdish Women’s Movement emphasizes the need for transformative processes on an individual and societal level. ⁴⁸ The capacity for women to defend themselves from patriarchal violence is just as crucial as the defense of Kurdish life against colonization. Nazan Üstündağ writes,

For Öcalan, any society needs to fulfill the functions of nourishment, reproduction, and self-defense in order to survive. However, during the formation of capitalist modernity, state, capitalist classes, and men confiscated the means of nourishment (i.e., production), reproduction (i.e., care), and defense (i.e., violence) from society, the poor, and women. ⁴⁹

As a guiding ideology, this anti-patriarchal view led the movement to advocate for all people (regardless of gender) to become free of patriarchal, fascist, and authoritarian tendencies in a process called “killing the dominant man.” It has become essential part of creating a new approach to security as a democratic, life-giving practice. ⁵⁰ Per Öcalan, “It is about killing power, about killing one-sided domination and inequality, about killing intolerance. It is even about killing fascism, dictatorship, despotism.” ⁵¹ As many movement organizers explained to me, this is a process of political education and (self-)criticism through which attitudes and behaviors conditioned by a patriarchal system are consistently challenged. Crucially, participation in this process is an expectation of each person in the movement, regardless of gender. The process of “knowing and becoming oneself,” as Elvin articulated in the opening of this paper, is seen as a defensive measure against the dominating and domineering modalities of the state-led project. This perspective enables the dual transformation of self and of society. Self-defense is a form of consciousness, the practice of which increases the capacity to self-organize and establish autonomy on a societal level. This autonomy, in turn, facilitates and necessitates further individual and collective transformation. ⁵²

Opposing the System: Two Definitions of Security

As one organizer with the Kurdish Women’s Movement told me, “The patriarchal state system took the essential need for self-defense from us and created militarist institutions to take over the role of defense, making it impossible for us to define for ourselves what security means. We want to show that we can create security by ourselves.” ⁵³ What might seem a benign (or, to some, benevolent) act is in fact an imposition of dependency on the state for security against its own violence in exchange for obedience. In other words, the state would like to trade security for unfreedom. ⁵⁴ The Kurdish Women’s Movement’s looks toward freedom as genuine security: freedom from states, patriarchy, and the forces of colonial and racial capitalism within society and among individuals. As explained by one of the interlocutors in my research, 

Our defense of the people, the capacity of the guerrilla to protect the people, has been paramount. More than just physical defense, the mountains of Kurdistan became the place to get connected to a free way of life. But we also knew that everywhere in the world, not just in the mountains, we have to become one with the struggle and be prepared for any opportunity. Collectively and in ourselves, in our personalities, we can be ready to seize moments of freedom. ⁵⁵

The linking of defense and freedom as two inextricable ontologies of being illuminates the belief that self-defense is as natural as breathing and political struggle requires a commitment to total transformation. As another organizer said, “Freedom is paramount. It is the most important principle of our movement. Our work is a quest for free life.” ⁵⁶

The contours of these practices are found in intertwined defensive and creative revolutionary actions. ⁵⁷ This work takes many forms. Using opportunities presented through geopolitical shifts or created in resistance, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement has built spaces and practices of autonomy ranging from neighborhood communes that meet to deliberate and agree on practical matters within communities, to conflict-resolution processes that decrease society’s reliance on the police and judicial system. ⁵⁸ The seizing of freedom must necessarily span from practices of political education to the restructuring of social relations, a dialectical process of transformation and preparation, creating and prefiguring a free life through a holistic defense of the self and society.

New Horizons of Security and Freedom

Security is a central concern for many feminist and anti-patriarchal movements. Here, self-defense is a question of physical defense against patriarchal violence in all its forms, and the transformation of society and the horizons of struggle. The Kurdish Women’s Movement invites us to consider self-defense as a core of revolutionary praxis. It is not just a tool in the struggle to reach revolutionary horizons but a holistic ontology of being, predicated on the defense of freedom and life itself. This perspective organically reaches towards abolitionist and anti-militarist feminisms. It embodies an anti-colonial commitment, and it crucially maintains focus on the possibilities of life beyond and unbeholden to existing structures of security. It rejects the very basis of the state’s monopoly on violence and social order. Challenging the necropolitical status quo of security, one that protects the state at the cost of human life and dignity, requires a concerted effort to redirect anti-patriarchal praxis away from policy-oriented strategies that lead to the institutional capture of movements into sanctioned bodies, and toward a revolutionary and holistic practice of self-defense for life. 

Looking toward the movements whose legacies, epistemologies, methods, and labor nourish ongoing struggle – those whose efforts form the fertile ground of resistance on which we stand – brings forth new horizons and practices of struggle. Engaging with an ecology of knowledge, standing against epistemicide, and drawing from the deep knowledges of movements in struggle: these acts are themselves oppositional to the regimes of truth maintained by the warfare state. Further, these processes hold as immanent a recognition that the state of normalcy maintained by dominant security logics is a state of perpetual warfare. Racial capitalism, occupation and colonialism, and a continued war on women are the hallmarks of the security assemblage. The challenge, as the Kurdish Women’s Movement continues to demonstrate, is to find a third way. Not the dominant pathway of liberal feminism easily co-opted into security projects, nor a submission to patriarchal cultures of heroic individual resistance, but something else: an insistence on broader horizons of freedom, on the collective defense of life itself.

Acknowledgments

I thank Dilar Dirik for her invaluable perspective on an earlier version of this paper, and the anonymous reviewer for constructive feedback. 

ENDNOTES

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