ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on femi(ni)cide in the context of war and forced displacement. Bringing together critical feminist literature on war and forced displacement and on femi(ni)cide, it argues that shedding light on the interaction between state, colonisation, capitalism, and patriarchy offers powerful insights into the relationship between femi(ni)cide and war/forced migration. The chapter moreover encourages scholars to take seriously the language, methodology, and actions of political/social movements as crucial, dynamic agents in struggles against violence. To that end, it centres the Kurdish women’s liberation movement’s historical experiences and contemporary resistance approaches to femi(ni)cide. Surveying the Kurdish women’s liberation movement’s recent publications on the topic of femi(ni)cide, particularly those occurring in the context of war and forced displacement, the chapter introduces the movement’s “political feminicide” concept, a term that aims to conceptualise the specific targeting of women’s political resistance and leadership. The aim of this is to encourage theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of femi(ni)cide that can simultaneously capture several interrelated phenomena: systems and structures beyond individual perpetrators behind femi(ni)cide, femi(ni)cide as a domination concept and its employment during war, and the targeting of individual women who resist patriarchal systems of power, including the state, especially during war and conflict. The final section of the chapter outlines recent international campaigns of the Kurdish women’s movement that take femi(ni)cide across sites –from homes to warzones, from so-called honour killings to political feminicide – as an occasion to build transnational alliances against war and patriarchal violence.
