The Impact of Feminist Critiques on Human Rights Frameworks in Armed Conflict: A Case Study of the Kurdish Women’s Movement
Mainstream human rights and humanitarian law often present armed conflict experiences of gender through narratives of protection and victimhood. The Geneva Conventions and subsequent developments in international human rights law primarily emphasized legal protections for women, focusing on sexual violence, displacement, and loss. While these efforts exposed systemic abuses, they also reinforced a reductive image of women as passive victims in need of protection. Such portrayals hide the various roles women and queer individuals play in conflict as political agents, members of resistance groups, caregivers, and combatants. At the same time, it reinforces the patriarchal binary of protector and protected. Feminist scholars argue this narrative both essentializes gender roles and legitimizes militarism, with discourses of “just war” or humanitarian intervention presenting military force as morally necessary, often in the name of saving women and children. Yet, as Cynthia Enloe and Carol Cohn demonstrate, these logics hide how militarism and military intervention reproduce the very gendered and racialized hierarchies they claim to dismantle.
Although historically significant in establishing certain legal protections, dominant human rights frameworks fail to capture the structural and systemic gendered dynamics of war and militarism. Rather than advocating women’s inclusion in armies, this work aligns with a radical, anti-militarist feminist tradition that challenges the normalization of war and questions the legitimacy of militarized security. It is important to recognize that militarism extends beyond battlefields, reshaping both public and private life through hierarchy, discipline, and violence.
To critique these dynamics, this article adopts an intersectional understanding of gender as a relational system shaped by race, class, sexuality, ability, and coloniality. From this perspective, the experience, and deployment of violence in war are deeply racialized and patriarchal, constructing hierarchies of who is “grievable”, who is “protectable”, and who is “expendable”. This refers to the ways in which certain lives are valued and mourned while others are ignored. Therefore, militarized masculinities, combined with the marginalization of racialized, feminized, and queer populations, make some groups systematically neglected within both wartime politics and postwar reconstruction.
The liberal human rights framework reinforces these exclusions. Grounded in autonomy, state sovereignty, and individualism, it defines agency narrowly as self-empowerment and institutional inclusion. Such logics obscure alternative forms of resistance that are collective, relational, and situated outside rights-based discourses. Feminist scholars, such as Sumi Madhok and Ratna Kapur, demonstrate how the human rights framework often supports neoliberal and heteropatriarchal systems, thereby undermining women’s communal, non-liberal practices of resistance.
This article therefore asks: How can a feminist rethinking of militarism and agency reshape the way human rights frameworks engage with women’s roles in armed conflict? It argues that rethinking militarism and agency from a feminist perspective exposes the limitations of current human rights frameworks and offers more transformative, justice-oriented ways of engaging with women’s roles in war. Instead of focusing on individual empowerment or military inclusion, this research highlights collective forms of agency manifested in resistance, care, survival, and political subversion. These practices challenge dominant narratives of war and peace and open space for alternative imaginaries of justice.
Ultimately, this research does not argue for equal representation within the military. Reformist strategies, such as the inclusion of women or LGBTQ+ soldiers, are often celebrated as signs of progress while leaving patriarchal and heteronormative structures intact. As Bulmer notes, this “patriarchal confusion” legitimizes the military rather than transforming it. Instead, this work questions the very existence of the military as a patriarchal, colonial, and racialized institution. By rethinking agency through a feminist perspective and radically critiquing militarism, it contributes to imagining justice beyond domination, survival beyond war, and freedom beyond carceral logics of protection.
1. Questioning Gender and Militarism From a Feminist Perspective
Dominant human rights frameworks portray women in armed conflict as passive victims who need protection. While protective approaches expose systemic abuses, they depoliticize women’s actions, obscuring their risks, resistance, and political agency. This section uses radical intersectional feminism to challenge these representations.
Radical intersectional feminism, as understood here, encompasses Black, postcolonial, queer, and anti-militarist feminist thought. From this perspective, gender is not a fixed identity but a relational and performative system. Agency, likewise, differs from liberal notions of autonomy: it is understood as context-specific, shaped by structural conditions, available resources, and embodied practices.
Militarism, meanwhile, can be defined as a political and ideological system that prioritizes military values and institutions at the centre of social life. It normalizes force as governance, frames security through perpetual threat, and extends beyond the battlefield into civilian life. Feminist theorists show how militarism permeates public discourse, social norms, and distributions of vulnerability, operating as a cultural logic that organizes daily life.
This section, therefore, has two parts. The first explores how feminist theory challenges the construction of women as mere victims, showing how their actions can be understood as political. The second examines feminist critiques of militarism, examining how security structures rely on gendered and racialized logics of protection and power to sustain control
2.1.1 Reimagining Agency Through Radical Feminism
A central concern of this research is how women in war are portrayed as victims. This framing suppresses their political agency and sustains gendered power structures that cast men as active agents and women as passive objects of rescue. Radical intersectional feminists challenge this narrative by exposing how it erases women’s roles as caregivers, organizers, resisters, and combatants, roles that disrupt or reproduce power in complex ways.
These roles are frequently unrecognized because they do not align with traditional masculine standards of visibility, autonomy, and formal participation. As a result, actions that fall outside these norms are often interpreted as apolitical. Radical intersectional feminism highlights how underlying systems shape who gains recognition. This allows us to see women’s roles as political, organized, and intentional acts, reinterpreting the role of women in war. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity clarifies how these gender norms regulate visibility and legitimacy: to appear in war as a fighter, victim, or hero, one must conform to narrow, militarized ideas of gender. From this perspective, agency is never free-floating but structured by the rules and expectations that determine which actions are acknowledged as political.
Empirical research illustrates this dynamic. Sjoberg and Gentry show how archetypes such as “monsters,” “mothers,” or “whores” pathologize women who transgress gender norms and limit the political meaning of their actions. For instance, in media coverage of women involved in armed conflict, female combatants are often depicted either as “monsters” who are unnaturally violent, “mothers” who were coerced into violence to protect their children, or “whores” whose sexuality is blamed for their actions. Such framings strip these women of political agency, reducing their choices to deviance rather than recognizing them as deliberate political actors.
Additionally, agency formation occurs within militarized institutions themselves. Ayelet Harel’s work on the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates how women achieve authority only by conforming to masculine norms of competence and emotional control, thereby reproducing patriarchal patterns rather than transforming them. This suggests that women in the army do not challenge the institution itself but reproduce the same patriarchal patterns. At the same time, Western media portray the participation of Israeli women in the military as a feminist victory. However, feminism must confront the question of how one can claim feminist values while participating in or supporting acts of systemic violence and oppression, such as the ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
On the other hand, women activists in post-conflict situations use their violent experiences to create political change despite receiving no official recognition from state or international institutions. Through memory work, transitional justice, and community organizing, women activists demonstrate a strong form of gendered resistance. These women establish their own definition of justice by using collective memory and grassroots mobilization. Yet their work and the political nature of their activism remain unrecognized by both the media and society at large, which persists even if it does not take place in formal spaces traditionally dominated by men.
The examples demonstrate that women's agency in war exists in diverse forms that do not fit into dominant paradigms. Women express their agency through various means, including protest and care, as well as silence, emotional labour, and strategic compliance. The power structures can find women's actions within state institutions or against state institutions. The key factor is not how women act like men, but how their own actions modify or transform existing power structures. Feminist theory pushes us to think differently about what counts as political action and whose actions are seen as meaningful.
Finally, it is important to take into account that postcolonial and decolonial feminists remind us that even critical frameworks can overlook certain voices. Western legal and humanitarian discourses, as well as white feminism, can portray women in the Global South as voiceless victims in need of saving. These narratives ignore the political strategies and forms of resistance already being practiced by these women, especially when they don’t match liberal ideas of what empowerment should look like. Decolonial feminist perspectives take this further, arguing that women and queer communities in the Global South are not only resisting, they are generating political thought, building community, and shaping their own futures.
2.1.2. Feminist Critiques of Militarism
Feminist anti-militarist theory challenges the legitimacy of military force as a tool for justice. According to this perspective, militarism extends beyond military forces and armed battles because it represents an ideological framework, establishing violence and hierarchical control as important elements of political systems. The concept of militarism determines how states establish their sovereignty, how they use power, and how they create gendered and racialized subjects through narratives of protection.
Modern states are connected to militarism. According to Young, the state establishes its authority through two directions: external security against foreign threats, and internal protection of domestic order. Therefore, the state presents itself as a powerful protector, while its citizens receive the status of dependent subjects who need protection. Security works in ways that keep patriarchal systems in place because it decides who gets protected, who doesn’t matter, and who’s allowed to use force supposedly for the good of everyone.
Additionally, it is also important to challenge the assumption that military conflict exists outside gender dynamics. According to R.W. Connell, militarism reinforces a dominant model of masculinity built around traits like control, emotional restraint, aggression, and heterosexual dominance. This ideal isn’t representative of all men, but it sets the standard against which other identities are judged. Military institutions maintain this model through their use of symbolic rituals, hierarchical structures, and training protocols that promote this type of masculinity. Therefore, the military education system teaches soldiers to hide their emotions, maintain control, and merge their individual identity with national objectives.
Feminist anti-militarism challenges the way security is defined. Carol Cohn, for example, has analysed the language used in military policy, showing how terms like “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage” mask the human cost of war and strip violence of its political meaning. Furthermore, Sara Ruddick presents an alternative idea about security through her “maternal politics of peace”, which emphasizes care, interdependence, and life preservation over domination and control. Pushing us to consider how safety might be built through relationships and mutual support, not through violence or domination.
Therefore, security doesn’t always protect; it often works through violence. In many cases, what’s called “security” means living under constant surveillance, police control, or the threat of force. Things like border walls, drone strikes, and prisons are justified in the name of safety, but they also create fear and instability, especially for racialized and gender-nonconforming people. At the same time, the state, to “preserve its sovereignty”, frames itself as a protector, using its control over violence to appear legitimate. This image depends on keeping others, mainly marginalized communities, in a passive role, stripped of political agency. This reinforces social hierarchies where some lives are valued, and others are treated as disposable, depending on race, class, or citizenship.
In conclusion, feminist anti-militarism doesn’t aim to make war more humane or expand who gets to participate in violence. It exposes how institutions like the military, police, and prisons use the language of protection to justify racialized, gendered control. It calls for a full dismantling of the systems that normalize force. Instead of reforming these structures, feminist anti-militarism demands alternatives built on care, interdependence, and collective survival.
3. Human Rights Frameworks and the Gendered Logic of Victimhood
This section explores how international human rights and humanitarian law frameworks have constructed gendered harm through the figure of the female victim. This legal identity is not neutral, but politically produced. It makes certain harms, especially sexual violence, visible, while silencing structural, political, and racialized forms of violence. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the section explores how this figure has served both humanitarian and militarized agendas, obscuring women’s agency and reinforcing interventionist logics.
3.1. The construction of victimhood in International (liberal) Law
International humanitarian law (IHL) has traditionally emphasized women’s protection rather than their participation, defining them by their vulnerability. Karen Engle critiques the post-1990s gender mainstreaming efforts, especially after the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for doing this. While these initiatives brought gender into the topic of the conversation, they also reduced women to symbols of suffering, not mentioning their agency and political subjectivity.
The origins of this idea started in the post-Cold War era. Humanitarianism started growing and relied on emotional images of suffering to justify intervention. For help to arrive, people must appear as victims. In colonial and missionary contexts, this often meant portraying women as passive and oppressed by their own cultures, reinforcing the idea that outside powers were rescuing them through a so-called “civilizing mission.” This strategy was also used to create humanitarian law, where complex political conflicts are reduced to stories of good intentions and moral rescue.
Legal scholars have also argued that international law only reacts when violence becomes extreme, since it is dramatic enough to demand attention from the population. The law normally just recognizes certain forms of harm, the visible one, that normally is related to sexual violence. However, it does not cover other structural forms of violence, like land dispossession, economic marginalization, or the erosion of communal rights, that also deeply affect many women. For instance, in Colombia, many displaced Afro-Colombian and Indigenous women lost their ancestral lands not through direct attack, but through economic mechanisms related to militarization and extractivist development, but these violences were not covered by the law or transitional justice mechanisms.
In sum, international (liberal) law has constructed women primarily as victims, privileging visible and dramatic forms of harm while neglecting structural, economic, and communal violences that shape their lives. By reducing women to symbols of suffering and denying their agency, these legal frameworks not only reproduce colonial and humanitarian narratives of rescue but also obscure the broader dynamics of militarism and dispossession.
3.2. Militarized protection and the logic of security
Feminist critiques of militarized protection highlight how this logic relies on a gendered narrative, portraying men as protectors and women as the protected. J.H. Stiehm’s concept of the “protector/protected” binary illuminates how militarist ideas cast men as active agents and women as passive figures in need of rescue. This framing not only reinforces patriarchal norms but also legitimizes state power and shapes the justification of humanitarian and human rights interventions.
This instrumentalization is evident in both policy and practice. For example, during the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, Afghan women were depicted in Western media as voiceless victims of local oppression. Their so-called liberation provided moral justification for military occupation, while their political voices were largely ignored. Similarly, UN Resolution 1325, celebrated for incorporating gender into the international peace and security agenda, often positioned women in peace processes as symbols of moral authority, care, and empathy rather than as political actors with independent agendas.
The gap between representation and reality is further evident in peacekeeping operations. Peacekeepers, tasked with protecting civilians, have been implicated in numerous cases of sexual exploitation and abuse in places such as Congo and Haiti. Yet public discourse continues to depict them as guardians. Likewise, contemporary “gender-sensitive” security programs and empowerment initiatives, often designed with technical goals and external expertise, risk silencing the very populations they claim to support. Such measures demonstrate how gender and sexuality are instrumentalized, framed as protection but serving nationalist, carceral, and state-centered ends. Marginalized groups, including queer, racialized, migrant, or politically defiant populations, are frequently excluded or punished under the guise of safety.
As Ratna Kapur and other scholars note, governments have repeatedly employed the language of women’s rights to justify surveillance, military interventions, and restrictive security policies. In these cases, “protection” functions less as care and more as a tool of control, reinforcing existing hierarchies rather than challenging them.
In conclusion, militarized protection legitimizes state power by framing security as care. It silences the political agency of those it claims to protect while reproducing hierarchical and patriarchal structures. Rethinking security beyond this framework opens possibilities for collective well-being, mutual care, and genuine political agency.
3.3. Rethinking harm, survival, and resistance
As shown in the previous sections, women’s rights and experiences are often misrepresented within conventional frameworks of security and justice. Rather than attempting to fit women into established categories, feminist scholars call for a fundamental rethinking of these concepts, asking us to redefine what counts as harm, how agency manifests, and which forms of resistance are recognized.
Firstly, harm is not always something direct, in the moment, and loud. Sometimes, it shows up slowly, like in polluted air, in the burden of unpaid care work, or in the way entire communities lose their job due to economic pressures. Rob Nixon calls this kind of harm “slow violence,” and it is sometimes ignored because it’s not immediate. This slow violence can also include forced sterilization, unpaid care labour, and the long-term impacts of occupation and displacement. Though these harms rarely appear in legal documents or reports, they shape the daily realities of people living in militarized or post-conflict settings.
Secondly, agency cannot be measured solely by liberal or masculine standards. Political action does not always take the form of public protest, armed struggle, or formal participation. Agency also appears in everyday practices, caring for others, organizing small networks, and sustaining communities, which are inherently political acts, even if they remain unrecognized by dominant frameworks.
Thirdly, the concept of resistance must similarly be expanded. Women living through conflict often employ strategies that subvert violence and oppression: establishing neighbourhood safety groups, keeping schools operating in secret, facilitating the safe passage of displaced persons, or even participating directly as combatants. Recognizing these acts as political challenges, conventional notions of resistance highlight the ingenuity and resilience of women in conflict-affected contexts.
Finally, violence is not only physical, it can also manifest as erasure. When women’s experiences, stories, and knowledge are ignored or silenced, this too constitutes a form of harm. The goal is not merely to “give voice” to those excluded, but to interrogate and transform the systems that determine whose voices are valued in the first place.
In conclusion, a feminist approach redefines harm, agency, and resistance, moving beyond narrow, conventional frameworks. By attending to slow violence, everyday political action, and overlooked forms of resistance, it provides a more nuanced understanding of women’s roles and experiences in conflict, emphasizing survival, creativity, and political subjectivity over victimhood or symbolic inclusion.
To illustrate these concepts in practice, the following section examines the Kurdish movement as a case study, highlighting how women navigate harm, exercise agency, and engage in diverse forms of resistance within a conflict-affected context.
4. Case Study: The Kurdish Movement
4.1. Introduction
The Kurdish freedom struggle expands across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and has taken different forms in each. In northern Syria, the region known as Rojava has become an especially important example since the start of the civil war. Since 2012, Kurdish communities there have been experimenting with a new way of organising society, based on the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan. His model, called democratic confederalism, focuses on direct democracy, gender equality, environmental sustainability, and the rejection of capitalism. For Öcalan, patriarchy isn’t just one of many problems; it’s the starting point of oppression. He believes that any change has to begin with women’s liberation. That’s why some people called it the “women’s revolution.”
Within this movement, women occupy roles rarely accessible in other contexts. They’ve helped run local councils, set up cooperatives, led political education programs, and even formed their own military units like the Women’s Protection Units. However, this has created controversy in feminist theory. As discussed, war can be shaped by patriarchal values. Thus, when women take up arms, they might end up reinforcing the same structures they want to challenge.
Critical and postcolonial feminists, including Cynthia Enloe, Gayatri Spivak, and Jasbir Puar, offer a different perspective. They argue that women’s agency must be understood contextually: under conditions of military occupation or systemic repression, armed resistance can be a legitimate form of survival and political expression. In these circumstances, condemning women’s use of violence is not necessarily feminist, but rather a position of privilege.
The Kurdish case is interesting to understand these tensions. Kurdish women’s participation in both armed and civilian resistance challenges the existing feminist categories. Their practices raise questions: Can an armed struggle be feminist? Is taking up arms always bad, or can it be a form of radical care and self-defence? This chapter argues that the Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava challenges feminist ideas about militarism, agency, and victimhood. It shows that women's resistance in conflict zones can be complex and contradictory. Sometimes it subverts patriarchal power, other times it can be reinforcing it.
4.2. Feminist Antimilitarism and the Kurdish Case: Pacifism vs Resistance
As explained in the previous sections, feminist scholars have long examined how gender shapes our understanding of war and peace. Antimilitarist feminists argue that war is rooted in patriarchal structures, and that women participating in armed struggle risk reproducing the very systems feminism seeks to challenge. This perspective has led many feminists to reject the use of violence, not only within the military but also in any form of organized resistance or activist action.
But that’s not the only feminist view. Over time, other voices have challenged this universal pacifism. They emphasize the importance of context. In settings of occupation, systemic repression, or genocide, armed resistance may not contradict feminist principles; instead, it can constitute a legitimate form of survival and political expression. As Cynthia Enloe famously asked, “Where are the women?”, not to cast them solely as victims, but to recognize their multifaceted engagement as protestors, organizers, and combatants. Thus, women’s relationships to violence are not static. In anti-colonial uprisings, revolutionary movements, and armed self-defence struggles, women have taken up arms not to copy masculinity, but to resist and declare their political presence.
The Kurdish case helps us to understand this debate. Since the 1990s, Kurdish women have emerged as organized armed actors, most notably through the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), an all-female militia. Their struggle is not for state power or nationalism, but to defend communities, protect lives, and sustain local governance structures rooted in equality, cooperation, and care. The slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (“Women, Life, Freedom”) encapsulates this vision, linking armed resistance with everyday survival, dignity, and the pursuit of a new social order. Here, the use of force is explicitly framed as self-defense, aligned with the principles of democratic confederalism, rather than conquest or domination.
Participation in armed struggle, however, carries risks. Violence can reshape individuals, institutions, and movements, and even radical spaces may inadvertently replicate hierarchical military structures. In the Kurdish movement, men fighters often receive more recognition than women engaged in community organizing or education. Leadership hierarchies can begin to mirror military structures, and the pressures of conflict may sideline collective, participatory politics. But Kurdish women seem to be paying close attention to these risks. Through political education, shared leadership, and rules that ensure women’s equal participation, they’re trying to make sure that feminist values aren’t just talked about, but actually practiced.
From a feminist perspective on agency, meaningful choice emerges not in ideal conditions, but within the constraints of power. Kurdish women’s decision to fight represents situated agency, an adaptive practice of survival and resistance shaped by decades of repression, cultural erasure, and threats. Their struggle encompasses more than territorial defence, it includes creating self-governing communes, establishing women’s academies, and dismantling honour-based violence. In this regard, their actions are not a betrayal of feminist principles but an effort to protect them.
These dynamics also expose international human rights frameworks. Legal and humanitarian discourse typically frame women as victims or peacebuilders. What we see in the Kurdish case is that women taking up arms isn’t always about copying male roles or going against feminism, it can be political and feminist on its own terms. These women aren’t fighting to be included in existing systems, but to build something different. Their struggle reminds us that resistance doesn’t always look the way Western human rights models expect. Their example underscores the need for frameworks that recognize diverse forms of survival, agency, and resistance beyond narrow legal or liberal categories.
4.3 Kurdish women’s agency: beyond victimhood and heroism
While the previous section examined armed resistance, Kurdish women in Rojava also exercise agency through institutional, educational, and everyday social practices that challenge both patriarchal structures and simplistic notions of victimhood or heroism. Their struggle encompasses not only defence on the battlefield but the ongoing creation of alternative social, political, and ideological systems.
A central feature of this transformation is the institutional restructuring of governance. Men and women share leadership under a co-chair system, and a 40% gender quota ensures women’s inclusion in decision-making processes. Autonomous women’s councils possess the power to veto laws detrimental to women’s interests and operate alongside mixed-gender assemblies, demonstrating that inclusion is substantive rather than symbolic. This reinforces the idea that their struggle is not just about protection, but also about creation.
These reforms have produced tangible social and legal outcomes. Child marriage, forced marriage, and polygamy have been outlawed, while “Mala Jin” centers provide community-based support for victims of domestic violence, prioritizing healing over punishment. Such initiatives reflect a feminist ethics of justice embedded in everyday practice.
Education and knowledge production are equally central. Kurdish women have developed Jineolojî, “the science of women,” a context-specific framework that challenges patriarchal and positivist knowledge systems by foregrounding women’s lived experiences. Taught alongside ecology, history, and gender theory, Jineolojî is delivered at academies across Rojava and informs both civilian and military spheres. Significantly, this education is not limited to women; male participants, including combatants, are also engaged in gender training, promoting a culture of shared responsibility and collective learning.
Beyond institutions and education, Kurdish women enact relational, everyday agency. They participate in community governance, organize cultural life, cultivate food, mediate disputes, and sustain social structures. This expansive understanding of agency emphasizes the creation of life and society as inseparable from resistance, demonstrating that feminist practice in conflict zones extends far beyond legal participation or combat roles.
In conclusion, the Kurdish women’s movement exemplifies how agency can be collective, relational, and contextually grounded. By combining armed defence, institutional reform, education, and everyday social work, women in Rojava challenge traditional binaries of victim and heroine and expand the possibilities for feminist political action. Their practices illustrate that resistance is not only about survival but also about the creation of alternative social and political realities, offering a model for understanding feminist agency beyond conventional frameworks.
It is important to acknowledge that these practices are not without limitations. Even with co-chair systems, education programs, and collective governance, hierarchies and inequalities can persist, and women involved in armed or political work face significant risks. The pressures of conflict may at times challenge the ideals the movement seeks to uphold. These complexities do not diminish the significance of the Kurdish women’s achievements, but rather highlight the complexity of implementing feminist principles in conflict-affected contexts.
4.4 Western Co-optations
Western media, liberal feminists, and policymakers have sometimes celebrated the Kurdish women’s movement. Yet this recognition has rarely translated into significant support. Instead, it has frequently been selective, depoliticized, and aligned with broader Western political objectives. This section examines how Kurdish women’s struggle has been co-opted through liberal and militarized frameworks, risking the undermining of the very agency these narratives claim to valorize.
Part of this co-optation stems from the simplification of the movement’s political complexity. Kurdish women have often been praised primarily for their gender, seen as breaking stereotypes of the “repressed Muslim woman.” While seemingly positive, this framing aligns with neo-Orientalism, exoticizing Kurdish women as feminist rebels and reducing their struggle to a consumable spectacle for Western audiences. Relatedly, Sara Farris’s concept of femonationalism highlights how feminist discourse can be entangled with nationalist and xenophobic agendas, reinforcing rather than challenging existing hierarchies.
Western support has also been opportunistic. Kurdish fighters were embraced during the campaign against ISIS, but largely ignored when they confronted Turkish aggression, a NATO ally. In other words, their recognition was contingent on fitting a liberal script: celebrated when convenient, dismissed when their broader political agenda, including critiques of imperialism, capitalism, and statehood, challenged Western interests.
This selective celebration shows that Western recognition often reflects political agendas rather than a true understanding of Kurdish women’s agency, which must be seen in its local, collective, and transformative context.
4.5 Conclusion
The Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava challenges conventional liberal and feminist assumptions about war, agency, and power. Their practices show that, when grounded in collective ethics and anti-patriarchal principles, armed resistance can be feminist, though engagement with violence must always be critically examined, even within emancipatory movements. Beyond the state, these women are creating new forms of collective agency, justice, and security. Rooted in local contexts and sustained through ongoing reflection, their work encourages a rethinking of agency, resistance to co-optation, and the possibilities for transformative feminist action in conflict zones.
5. Feminist Alternatives
5.1. Introduction
This section explores how transformative practices can provide new imaginaries of justice, security, and agency. Rather than proposing a universal model, it investigates a heterogeneous, context-specific, and decolonial feminist praxis. Drawing on care, relational autonomy, and collective resistance, it centres feminist conceptions of justice that challenge the individualizing, state-centric, and militarized assumptions of mainstream human rights. It asks: what would justice look like if we rejected war-making and security institutions entirely? Beyond the state, beyond war, what forms of life, care, and accountability might emerge?
5.2. Reimagining agency: relational and collective practices
Feminist approaches challenge the narrow definitions of agency embedded in liberal human rights, which often equate it with visibility, legal recognition, or institutional participation. Agency is instead relational, context-dependent, and collective, emerging through networks of care, mutual support, and community-based action. Rebuilding communities in conflict zones, sustaining social networks under displacement, or organizing cooperative labour exemplifies political activity often invisible to traditional frameworks.
This perspective emphasizes everyday acts of resistance, survival, and collective transformation as legitimate and powerful forms of agency. Ruddick’s work on “maternal thinking” highlights the ethical and political insights derived from care labour, attentiveness, nurturance, and responsiveness to vulnerability, which are critical for peace-building. These practices demonstrate that political engagement extends far beyond formal institutions or armed struggle, encompassing care work, education, and social organization that sustain life and foster justice.
Reimagining agency thus shifts the focus from individualistic or Western-centric definitions toward a situated, relational understanding that accounts for context, collective action, and everyday political work. For example, care workers in occupied zones, women reconstructing shattered communities, queer kinship networks opposing border violence, these are forms of feminist activity not absorbed into state power, that have place thanks to this new reframing. These agents don’t carry weapons nor use the language of law, but they are not less political. Their methods are political, and help to preserve life.
5.3. Feminist Visions of Justice and Security
Feminist reconceptualizations of justice and security do not aim to include women within militarized systems or redistribute violence. Instead, they explore how power can be restructured through care, accountability, and interdependence.
Developed by academics such as Joan Tronto and Fiona Robinson, the ethics of care explain that justice is about the maintenance of life and the healing of relationships. They explain that the continuous effort of preserving life defines justice more than punishment, control, or abstract rights. According to this perspective, justice is realizing our interdependence on one another and creating structures to assist in people's social, emotional, and material well-being. Then, the existence of trust, community, and compassion defines security, and not the presence of police or military.
Feminist alternatives to militarized human rights are not limited to theory, they exist in practice over many countries. These approaches create prefigurative, care-based kinds of justice rather than reformist inclusiveness. For instance, women built Peace Huts in Liberia both during and during the civil war to help to resolve disputes and maintain communal responsibility outside of government buildings. Rooted in feminist ethics of dialogue and healing, they present a clear non-militarized justice model.
In the same way, migrant solidarity networks spread throughout Europe creating plan housing, legal support, and safe passage. These initiatives reject working with aggressive state systems and concentrate on fulfilling people's urgent needs. Additionally, black feminist collectives and Critical Resistance, among other abolitionist feminist groups, redefine safety not through police or incarceration but through group investment in housing, education, and care. These projects create alternatives and are grounded not in force but in care, community, and shared survival, bringing intersectional feminist ideals of security to life through mutual aid, horizontal organization, and a rejection of carceral logic.
Additionally, feminist movements have also followed these ideas from Palestine to Colombia, not only opposing violence but also offering alternatives like community courts, food sovereignty projects, or trauma healing communal activities. These efforts respond directly to the realities of militarized harm while creating new social structures from below. Rather than abstract ideals, they are grounded in lived experiences, collective survival, and concrete strategies for justice.
Finally, feminist visions of justice and security invite us to see the world differently: to protect bodies instead of borders, to nurture communities instead of punishing, to cultivate life instead of imposing law. These possibilities are not distant dreams, they are real paths we can walk. As feminists, it is our task to carry these ideals forward, to live them, to make them tangible.
6. Conclusion
This article has examined how mainstream human rights and humanitarian frameworks often reduce women in conflict to passive victims, obscuring their political agency and reinforcing militarized and patriarchal structures. Through the case of the Kurdish women’s movement and the lens of radical, intersectional, and anti-militarist feminist theory, it has shown that women’s resistance in conflict is complex, context-specific, and politically significant, challenging conventional liberal ideas of empowerment and protection.
Feminist scholarship enables a deeper understanding of how militarism operates across social, political, and cultural systems, while reimagining agency beyond individualistic, state-centered, or visible forms. By highlighting relational, collective, and everyday practices of survival, resistance, and care, this article emphasizes that agency cannot be reduced to formal inclusion in institutions or symbolic recognition.
Ultimately, this article calls for rethinking what justice, security, and resistance can look like. Rather than seeking inclusion within existing systems of power, feminist approaches imagine communal care, collective responsibility, and the creation of alternatives that affirm life and agency. The Kurdish women’s movement demonstrates that meaningful resistance is not a single strategy; it combines armed self-defence, political organizing, and everyday acts of survival and care. Together, these practices challenge oppressive structures and open space to envision a world where justice is lived, shared, and continually built.
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About the author:
María Prieto Sánchez holds a Double Degree in European and Spanish Law from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Maastricht University. She is currently pursuing two master's degrees: one in Access to the Legal Profession and another in Human Rights and Democratization at the Global Campus of Human Rights.
Her experience includes working as a research assistant, interning at the Human Rights Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and volunteering with NGOs focused on combating gender-based violence.
