Kurdish Women's Transnational Resistance: Revolutionary Politics in Everyday Life

Reveals how Kurdish women mobilize political resistance within and beyond the boundaries of nation-state politics

In January 2013, the assassination of three Kurdish militant women in Paris brought global attention to a movement that had already been transforming politics for decades. Since the 1980s, Kurdish women have mobilized across Turkey, the Middle East, and Europe, confronting war, displacement, and repression to forge one of the most dynamic transnational women's movements of our time.

In Kurdish Women's Transnational Resistance, Nisa Göksel draws on years of multisite ethnography and archival research to illuminate the lives of ex-guerrillas, local activists, politicians, activist mothers, and migrant women who have carried the struggle across borders, advocating for the democratic and gendered transformation of Kurdistan and the wider Middle East. Moving beyond binary portrayals of women as either revolutionaries or terrorists, Göksel shows how they have created alternative political subjectivities, new political spaces, and novel gendered strategies at the precarious intersection of local and transnational politics.

The book reveals how politically active Kurdish women navigate the liminal terrain between violence and nonviolence, family and politics, war and democracy. It traces their efforts to transform intimate spheres of kinship alongside public arenas of activism, municipal governance, and transnational advocacy. With ethnographic richness and theoretical depth, Göksel offers urgent insights into the resilience of women's movements under authoritarianism, displacement, and war.