The Kurdish Women’s Movement has played a pioneering role in the re-establishment of women’s position in political and social life. The co-chair system enables women to institutionalise the transformations in gender relations and make way for the democratisation of society and a free common life.
In this webinar, Ayşe Berktay (HDP, Women’s Assembly) will provide an insight into the origins and practice of the co-chair system and share experiences within the HDP.
Dr. Jeff Miley interviews Meral Çiçek about the recent Turkish bombing of the Makhmur Refugee Camp and Sinjar, in Iraq.
Meral Çiçek was born in 1983 in a Kurdish guest-worker family in Germany. She started political and women’s activism at the age of 16 within the Kurdish Women’s Peace Office in Dusseldorf. While studying Political Science, Sociology and History at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt she started to work as reporter and editor for the only daily Kurdish newspaper in Europe, Yeni Ozgur Politika, for which she still writes a weekly column. In 2014 she co-founded the Kurdish Women’s Relations Office (REPAK) in Southern Kurdistan (Northern Iraq). She is also editorial board member of the Jineoloji journal.
Jeff Miley is a Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the Board of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC) and a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan. He is co-editor, with Federico Venturini, of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).
Continue reading “Meral Çiçek, of the Kurdish Women’s Relations Office, on the Bombing of Makhmur”
Dr. Jeff Miley interviews Dr. Sanal Mohan, the author of Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala (Oxford University Press, 2015), about the social and political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kerala and in the rest of India.
Continue reading “Sanal Mohan on the Response to COVID-19 in Kerala and the Rest of India”
Dr. Jeff Miley interviews Dr. Hisyar Ozsoy, Member of Parliament and Co-Spokesperson of International Affairs for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), about the social and political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in North Kurdistan and the rest of Turkey, and about the response of the Kurdish freedom movement.
Jeff Miley is a Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the Board of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC) and a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan. He is co-editor, with Federico Venturini, of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).
Continue reading “Interview with Hisyar Ozsoy of the HDP on COVID-19 and its Consequences in Turkey”
Dr. Jeff Miley interviews Ercan Ayboga about the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in North Kurdistan and the rest of Turkey, and about the response of the Kurdish freedom movement.
Ercan Ayboga has worked in the town administration of Diyarbakir (Amed) and was co-coordinator of International Relations and heritage sites, including the urban Tigris River project. At the same time is active in the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, based in Turkish-Kurdistan. He is a co-author of Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in the Syrian Kurdistan (Pluto Press, 2016) which has been published also into German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Greek.
Dr. Jeff Miley interviews Ghedir Sofie, a member of the public relations council in the health department of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Rojava.
Jeff Miley is a Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the Board of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC) and a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan. He is co-editor, with Federico Venturini, of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).
Dr. Jeff Miley interviews Gacheke Gachihi, of the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), on the MSJC’s campaign for a people-centred response to the COVID-19 crisis in the informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya.
For more information about the MSJC’s campaign, including urgent recommendations for a people-centred response to COVID-19, please visit the MSJC website, at: https://www.matharesocialjustice.org/msparc-mathare-special-planning-area-research-collective/urgent-recommendations-for-a-people-centered-covid19-government-response-in-mathare/
Continue reading “Gacheke Gachihi, of the Mathare Social Justice Centre, on COVID-19”
SEMINAR
East Kurdistan/Rojhelat: the struggle of the Kurds for democracy and freedom in Iran
Join us for a discussion of The Kurdish peoples’ struggle for rights, for gender equality and democratic confederalism which is critical for the future of Iran, the Middle East and the end to war and oppression.
Matt Nathan, Director of the Freedom for Öcalan Campaign, describes to Kurdish Journalist Aleddin Sinayic how key trade unions came to back the Freedom for Öcalan Campaign, after becoming aware of the siege of the Kurdish-majority Syrian city of Kobane imposed by Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Islamic State) and exacerbated by the Turkish state. Nathan, who is also Labour Party Councillor for Clerkenwell, discusses how UK-based trade unions came to see the libertarian socialist vision of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan as representing a “fulcrum around which many issues that as trade unionists we would instinctively find solidarity with”.
Isabel Käser traces the complex history of the Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movement, discusses how women’s autonomous organisational structures have emerged and how they operate today between the mountains and the cities of the four different parts of Kurdistan.
Her talk, at the LSE Middle East Centre, analyses the emancipatory power this movement holds but also unpacks some of the tensions that emerge from the interplay between militarism, the party’s body politics and the movement’s revolutionary quest for a more democratic Middle East. Recorded on 4 June.
Continue reading “(AUDIO) The Kurdish Women’s Movement: On Revolution, Militarism and Body Politics”
