Imperialist powers have long co-opted feminism, using women’s rights as a justification for war, occupation, and genocide. Women’s rights are invoked as a veneer of legitimacy for violent interventions, while erasing the fact that the very patriarchal conditions used to rationalize these wars were in part created and sustained by colonial domination, capitalist exploitation, and the ecological destruction wrought by imperialism.
This imperialist appropriation has also produced a troubling divide between feminist and anti-imperialist struggles in the belly of the beast. I write this piece with two audiences in mind: to my sisters in the Kurdish women’s movement, in recognition of the ongoing work many of you already do to defend the revolutionary and anti-imperialist foundations of your struggle; and to the anti-imperialist comrades with whom I organize in the belly of the beast, as a call to reclaim feminism as a legitimate and necessary component of anti-imperialist struggle rather than abandoning it because empire has attempted to co-opt it.
Many women within the Kurdish women’s freedom movement have long articulated critiques of how imperial powers attempt to appropriate women’s struggles. Yet as the movement’s ideas circulate globally—particularly in the United States—there has been a growing tendency to selectively adopt its language, symbols, and concepts while detaching them from the revolutionary political framework that produced them.
This detachment does not come only from imperialist actors. Some segments of the broader Kurdish political field, including those who have long been hostile to the revolutionary project of the Kurdish freedom movement itself, have also claimed the achievements of the Kurdish women’s movement while stripping them of the historical and political context from which they emerged.
Ironically, this dynamic has also shaped the response of parts of the anti-imperialist left in the United States. Approaching Kurdish struggles without attention to colonization of Kurdistan and genocidal violence against Kurdish people, and to the political distinctions and histories within Kurdish movements, some have come to understand the Kurdish women’s movement primarily through the distorted representations produced either by imperial powers or by Kurdish actors antagonistic to the revolutionary movement itself. As a result, they distance themselves from a struggle that emerged from within an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial movement built in material solidarity with other anti-colonial struggles in the region.
This distance, in turn, deepens another problem: many Kurdish youth living in the belly of the beast find little space within anti-imperialist organizing for their own experiences of colonization and struggle. Cut off from the revolutionary pedagogy and solidarity that might otherwise connect their lives to the revolutionary struggles, some drift away from the left altogether, or turn their frustration both toward these circles who are incognizant of the Kurdish struggles and toward the Kurdish freedom movement—reproducing a vicious cycle of alienation and political distance.
At a moment when imperialist war in the region continues to claim civilian lives—including a US missile attack on a girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran that killed 175 people, many of them young girls, on February 28—it is more important than ever to reclaim revolutionary women’s struggles as integral to broader movements for freedom. Struggles that arise from the histories, conditions, and political traditions of the region itself offer a powerful rebuke to imperial powers that claim ownership over feminism even as they kill, imprison, and torture women and their loved ones with a discourse of “women’s empowerment.” One powerful example is the Kurdish women’s freedom movement, which developed within a broader Kurdish struggle for self-determination grounded in explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics.
It is these foundations that I want to hold onto today—at a moment when imperial powers are violently co-opting our visions of freedom, and when visible segments of the anti-imperialist left in the United States are increasingly distancing themselves from women’s struggles within the region. In some cases, they even place the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial resistance of Kurdish women in the same category as the liberal interventionist rhetoric of self-styled “feminists.”
An Intersectional Movement from the Beginning
The Kurdish freedom movement that emerged in the 1970s in Bakur (Turkey-occupied Kurdistan) under the name of Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) did not begin as a nationalist struggle that later “added” feminism. From its inception, it developed through a set of intertwined critiques that made intersectional analysis unavoidable.
First, it critiqued Kurdish nationalist organizations that framed Kurdistan solely as national self-determination while neglecting class exploitation and the dynamics of global capitalism and imperialism. The emerging movement insisted that anti-colonial liberation could not be separated from socialist transformation.
Second, it critiqued the Turkish left, which often failed to recognize colonization of Kurdistan. Even most Marxist organizations that acknowledged Kurdish oppression tended to treat it as a secondary issue rather than as a colonial structure central to the development of Turkish capitalism and its integration into structures of global capitalism and imperialism.
Kurdish revolutionaries understood something crucial: colonial violence against Kurds was not simply a matter of political repression. It was a colonial project rooted in resource extraction, displacement, and systematic violence that de-developed Kurdistan while producing a precarious, super-exploited Kurdish working class. This process was central to how the Turkish state managed class relations and consolidated capitalist development. Through land policies, forced displacement, and racialized violence, the state helped shape a particular form of Turkish capitalism—one integrated into dynamics of imperialism while relying on the super-exploitation of Kurdish labor and the disciplining of the broader working classes within Turkey.
Colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and racism were therefore not separate problems. They were mutually constitutive.
From the beginning, the movement articulated a political vision organized around freedom rather than narrowly defined national self-determination. The question was not simply whether Kurds could have a state, but whether societies structured by domination—colonial, capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal—could be fundamentally transformed.
When Women Refuse the “After the Revolution” Promise
Historically, many anti-colonial movements have depended heavily on women’s participation and labor. Women fought in guerrilla armies, organized communities, and sustained underground networks. Yet gender oppression was often treated as secondary within these movements—separated from the analysis of imperialism and colonialism and deferred as a problem to be resolved only “after liberation.”
In many cases, even where formal independence was achieved, patriarchal structures remained intact. This was partly because colonial legacies and imperialist interventions continued to shape postcolonial societies, preventing genuine independence. But it was also because many movements did not develop a materially grounded, intersectional analysis and practice that confronted the intertwined structures of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy.
The Kurdish movement began confronting this contradiction early. Abdullah Öcalan’s reflections in the late 1970s and 1980s introduced a critique of what he called the “dominant masculine”—a system of gender roles that traps not only women but also men within hierarchical expectations.
Yet these ideas did not emerge in isolation. They developed through an ongoing interaction between theory and the struggles of women within the movement itself. While anti-colonial feminist perspectives had appeared in other liberation movements, the distinctive strength of the Kurdish women’s movement lay in its insistence on and success in building organizations and institutions that enabled and strengthened women’s autonomous organizing from within the broader movement, from self-defense, to education, to abolitionist feminist justice institutions and practices.[1]
Few figures embody this process more powerfully than Sakine Cansız, one of the founders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a central figure in the development of the Kurdish women’s movement.
Sakine Cansız and the Making of Revolutionary Feminism
Cansız’s political identity formed at the intersection of multiple histories of domination.
First was the memory of the 1938 Dersim genocide, when the Turkish state massacred tens of thousands of Alevi Kurds over a two-year period and tens of thousands more were forcibly displaced. In her memoir, she recounts the moment she first heard Kurdish revolutionaries openly narrate the genocide that had long been erased from official history. Listening to them, she wrote:
“I felt trembled to my bones. We were all quiet. How can the existence of a nation be denied for so long? How come no history books had Kurdistan? We now learnt that our country is Kurdistan and that it was kept at the status of a classical colony… Just like every other nation, the Kurdish nation has an inalienable right to self-determination… I felt like I found what I was searching for.” (p. 119)
This was the moment when Cansız connected fragments of her family’s memories in Dersim to a broader colonial history of Kurdistan, a political entity systematically erased through the collusion of imperial powers and regional actors.
Second was her critique of the Turkish left. Although she actively participated in workers’ struggles, especially women workers—organizing factory workers and even initiating a hunger strike in İzmir—she sharply criticized what she called the “social chauvinism” of Turkish revolutionaries who refused to confront colonial domination over Kurdistan.
Third was her skepticism toward Kurdish nationalist organizations that reproduced feudal hierarchies and patriarchal leadership.
From the moment she joined the revolutionary movement, Cansız insisted that women must organize autonomously. From the moment of the secret founding meeting of the PKK in 1978, where she was one of only two women present, she was grappling with the reality of male comrades who failed to challenge patriarchy in their own lives.
Revolution, she insisted, had to begin in our lives.
Colonial Prison as a School of Feminist Resistance
Cansız’s revolutionary consciousness deepened during her imprisonment following Turkey’s 1980 military coup.
The coup, carried out by a fascist junta, was a turning point in Turkey’s transition to neoliberal capitalism, and its further integration into imperialist structures like NATO. The US was even involved in training the military personnel of the junta. Trade unions, leftist organizations, and student movements were violently dismantled. Among all opposition groups, the Kurdish revolutionary movement faced some of the harshest repression.
The infamous Diyarbakır Prison became a laboratory of colonial domination, much like Israeli prisons.
Prisoners were subjected to systematic torture designed to break the movement and sexual violence became a central weapon against Kurdish women and their families. The Turkish state weaponized patriarchal notions of honor—threatening rape and humiliation—to force confessions and dismantle networks.
Cansız and her comrades refused to submit.
Through collective resistance—hunger strikes, refusal to comply with prison authorities, and mutual solidarity—Kurdish women transformed prison into a site of political education. Their resistance challenged not only the Turkish colonial state but also patriarchal codes embedded within Kurdish society itself.
Rather than deterring women from joining the revolutionary movement, the brutality of the prison system and the collective resistance it provoked had the opposite effect. By refusing the patriarchal shame the state attempted to impose, Cansız and her comrades transformed sexualized violence from a weapon of control into a site of defiance. Their refusal not only sustained the movement inside prison walls but also inspired a new generation of Kurdish women to join the struggle, helping lay the foundations for the emergence of an autonomous and militant Kurdish women’s movement.
From Participation to Women’s Revolution
By the late 1980s and 1990s, women’s participation in the Kurdish movement had grown dramatically. Women organized not only as guerrilla fighters but also as politicians, lawyers, journalists, and grassroots activists—from the “peace mothers” who organized for an end of colonial war to the “Saturday mothers” who demanded justice for disappeared relatives.
A decisive step came in 1995 with the creation of women’s self-defense units within the guerrilla movement. Women’s autonomous organizing became a cornerstone of the movement’s strategy, reshaping its political institutions, social structures, and ideological framework.
The now-famous chant Jin, Jiyan, Azadî—Women, Life, Freedom—emerged from this long history of struggle against colonial domination, imperialist intervention, capitalist exploitation, and patriarchal power. For those who attempt to co-opt it for imperial agendas—and for those who distance themselves from the Kurdish women’s movement because of these distorted representations—this history offers an important reminder. Kurdish women’s liberation has been articulated as part of a revolutionary project that seeks a break from imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy together.
It cannot be reduced to the narrow framework of dress codes or liberal notions of women’s freedom. Instead, it places women at the center of a broader struggle for a free life, one that confronts violence in all its forms—imperial, colonial, patriarchal, and ecological—while opening the possibility of building new forms of sociality, community, and ways of being.
The Assassination of Sakine Cansız in Paris
The assassination of Sakine Cansız in Paris alongside two Kurdish women activists, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Söylemez, is a further revelation of the multilayered violence against Kurdish women at the hands of imperial and regional colonial powers.
Cansız and her comrades were assassinated inside the Kurdistan Information Center on January 9, 2013. All three women were shot execution-style with multiple bullets to the head.
The suspected perpetrator, a Turkish nationalist named Ömer Güney, died in a French prison in 2016 shortly before proceedings were scheduled to begin, and the full extent of the operation has never been publicly investigated.
Though Turkish authorities denied involvement, for Kurdish activists, the assassination and the lack of investigation represented Europe’s coordination with Turkey’s intelligence agency.
This assassination is not an isolated incident, but part of a long history of coordination between imperial and regional powers in the oppression of Kurdistan. From the denial of autonomy during colonial partition, to the supply of military support for genocidal campaigns, to the exploitation of Kurdish land and resources by multinational corporations, to the criminalization of Kurdish movements in Europe and the United States, imperial powers have both enabled and benefited from Kurdistan’s colonization. The murder of Cansız, Doğan, and Söylemez in Paris starkly exposes how these global dynamics of colonialism and imperialism continue to threaten Kurdish women’s struggle for freedom today.
Reclaiming Feminism from Empire
The Kurdish women’s freedom movement grew out of decades of struggle led by women such as Sakine Cansız—women who confronted imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and patriarchy simultaneously. It emerged within a broader revolutionary movement and was forged through sacrifice, internal struggle, and collective political work. Remembering this history matters today, particularly at a moment when the movement’s achievements are widely invoked but not always understood.
While we must remain vigilant about the co-optation and taming of our visions of freedom, we cannot afford to turn our backs on women’s struggles for liberation simply because imperial powers attempt to instrumentalize them. Empires routinely seize upon any available discourse—whether women’s rights in Iran or “drug cartels” in Abya Yala—to justify intervention and violence. It is also worth noting that in this latest fascist rupture, such discourses are increasingly being abandoned, as the pursuit of resources, such as oil in Venezuela and Iran alike, is now seen as sufficiently legitimate in itself, without the need for a pretext.
Importantly, abandoning feminism out of fear of liberal co-optation is not an anti-imperialist response. Doing so erases the feminist struggles that have long emerged from within anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements themselves, and it leaves the terrain of women’s liberation more easily captured by liberal frameworks.
At the same time, the Kurdish women’s movement offers a lesson for Kurdish groups that celebrate women’s achievements while detaching them from the revolutionary project that produced them. These achievements did not arise from the mere recognition of women’s rights or from symbolic representation alone. They were the result of sustained organizing, ideological struggle, and the construction of autonomous women’s institutions within a broader anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movement. To invoke the movement’s victories while detaching them from these foundations risks emptying them of their political meaning and turning a revolutionary project into narratives that can be absorbed into colonial liberal frameworks and used against our peoples.
The danger, in other words, lies both in abandoning feminist struggles and in appropriating them in ways that sever them from their radical roots. Both dynamics ultimately benefit imperial power by weakening an anti-imperial and anti-colonial internationalist solidarity.
The Kurdish women’s freedom movement reminds us that feminism does not belong to empire. It is not an external imposition but a struggle forged within movements for collective liberation. The path toward genuine freedom will not be built by choosing between feminism and anti-imperialism. It will be built by insisting—through theory, organizing, and solidarity—that the two remain inseparable.
NOTES
[1] Yeter Tan, “Abolition Feminism in Practice: An Alternative Justice Model of the Kurdish Women’s Movement,” in Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance, Ed. Shahrzad Mojab (Mazda Publishers, 2024), p. 396-415.