Checkpoint in Diyarbakir, 2016. Wikicommons/Vladimir Platonow/Agência Brasil. Some rights reserved.
One of the undisputed achievements of the Kurdish movement in Turkey and Syria is the advancement of women in social, economic, and political domains of life. The theoretical underpinning of the movement’s efforts to achieve gender equality lies in the concept of jineology elaborated by the movement’s leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Placing the liberation of women at the center of his theory, Ocalan identified monotheistic religions, the nation-state, and capitalism as three roots of women’s oppression and traced the emergence of gender hierarchies as far back as the Neolithic era. Together with the focus on ecology and direct democracy, women’s empowerment is one of the pillars of democratic autonomy and confederalism – Ocalan’s vision of a non-oppressive society, pursued by the movement both in Turkish (Bakur) and Syrian (Rojava) Kurdish regions.
