Women Fighters in the Kurdish National Movement

Mustafa Kemal Topal is Assistant Professor at the Roskilde University in Denmark, where he also received his PhD. He is also fellow at the Bergen University in Norway, havening been awarded the Independent Research Fund Denmark International’s Postdoctoral Grant for his new project ‘Kurdish Women’s Democratic Experiment in Post-Conflict Northern Syria’.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Women's childhood experiences of double otherness. Chapter 2: Detachments and Reorientations in a three-generational perspective. Chapter 3. Reconstructing Identity, Love, and Sexuality in the Context of MountainsChapter 4. Theorizing of Separation and Biological Body Chapter 5. Effects of Women's Combat Experiences on Understanding of Gendered BodyChapter 6. Women's post-Conflict Reflections and Implementation of the New SocietyChapter 7. Summary and Conclusion

Engaging with a vast body of literature on power, colonialism, and gender Topal offers an original and insightful study of the multifaceted experiences of women fighters and the evolution of gender relations within the Kurdish movement across generations. Pursuing an interpretivist approach informed by in-depth interviews and multiple site visits, his work represents the state-of-the art in qualitative methods in Kurdish studies.