Political Science

Exceptional Inclusion: Understanding the PKK’s Gender Policy

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The PKK’s gender policy, which includes maintaining a fighting force that is 40% female and the promotion of women’s liberation as a key component of its political platform, makes the PKK an outlier among both Kurdish nationalist groups and leftist armed movements in the Middle East. Based on interviews with members of the PKK’s allied civilian political movement and former PKK combatants, this paper argues that rather than being a function of the PKK’s ethnic or ideological identities, this policy emerged as a result of a confluence of four other factors: the PKK’s leftist ideology, the preferences of its leadership, and the need to recruit selectively all served as permissive factors. Ultimately, however, it was the greater participation of Kurdish women as a result of Turkish state violence in the Kurdish southeast in the 1980s that ultimately changed the PKK from within.

Publication Title

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism

Publication Date

2023

Volume

46

Issue

4

First Page

433

Last Page

450

ISSN

1057-610X

DOI

10.1080/1057610X.2020.1759265

Keywords

Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, gender, gender policy

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