Intersectionality and Political Violence through the case of the Women's Protection Units (YPJ) and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)

This work aims at uncovering the impact, production and reproduction that gendered and racialized narratives produce on the study, practice, and narratives of terrorism and political violence. To do so, feminist and post- colonial scholarship is analyzed to use its theoretical insights to uncover how latent forms of racialized and gendered assumptions intersect with political violence. The case of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Women’s Protection Units in Kurdistan provide valuable examples of how, internally and externally to violent organizations, gender and race have interplayed. This highlights broader patterns of global politics in which at times invisible forms of gendered and racialized perspectives are reproduced, essentializing women as weak, emotional, and deprived of political agency and men from the Global South and the East as inherently violent, irrational, and backward. This work thus seeks to study if gendered and racialized conceptualizations intersect with political violence, the actors involved, and the impact of global and regional narratives on reproducing gendered and racialized biases.