Decolonizing freedom: Situating the Slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" in Everyday Life and Struggle of Kurdish Woman

Freedom is a contested concept and ideal by itself so that it is necessary to constantly be checked by answering two questions: what kind of freedom and for whom? Political thinkers have approached it from different points of view, many political visions across the world have been pursued in its name, and many people have been died to achieve it. Different models of freedom are conceptualizing and shaping consistently and continually. Yet, dominant political theories are generally conceptualized from perspectives that draw strongly on state- and Andro-centric approaches to conceptualization of freedom. In this regard, this paper strives to bridge these gaps through understanding meaning(s) of freedom lies behind the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" in which nested Kurdish women’s embodied experience of oppression and resistance in the context of everyday struggle for freedom to self-determination. The slogan "Woman,Life,Freedom" was chanted by Kurdish women at the Jîna/Mahsa Amini’s funeral, a 22 years old Kurdish woman who was arrested by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s so-called "Moral Security Police", the office responsible for enforcing the country’s dress code mandate, and died after taking by ambulance from police center to hospital and being in coma for several days. Soon after, the slogan resonated all over the country and beyond, chanted by protesters and travelled across the intersectional boundaries of gender, nationality/ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, creating a cross-border and transnational solidarity among very divided people. This paper contributes to decolonial feminist geopolitics perspective as it connects Kurdish women’s everyday struggle to the conceptualization of women’s active subjectivity in the context of decolonial resistance and offers a novel empirical account on how marginalized and oppressed women within oppressing ← → resisting relations envision and imagine ideal of freedom and critically demonstrates its potentials for decolonizing the concept and ideal of freedom in the world politics and international relations. It offers an innovative methodological framework through engagement with using Digital Ethnography, Participatory Action Research (PAR), and Cuerpo-Territorio (Body-Territory) methods in doing research in political science and IR with a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) approach and conducting interpretive logic of inquiry in collaborative research setting with Free Women’s Union of East Kurdistan (KJAR), active across borders as a pioneering cross-culturally and trans-locally network making Kurdish women movement with the political agenda of "Woman,Life,Freedom". to understand the meanings of freedom within Kurdish women’s decolonial resistance. Findings show that Kurdish women’s understanding, and interpretation of freedom consists of a wider and deeper, but also different and novel meanings of freedom which center de-colonial resistances as the foundation for a real liberation. A model of freedom has emerged within Kurdish women’s de-colonial resistance in the context of the coloniality of gender that is predicated on a broad type of freedom- one that would end subordination and oppression of any kind, bringing about values such as justice, self-determination, and a good life for all.