I met Mizgîn on a warm spring afternoon in a refugee camp in Switzerland. Mizgîn had been a member of the PKK for twenty-four years, spending her last years in the party as a top KCK commander. In spring 2017, she left the party and fled to Europe. A mutual friend and fellow former commander had arranged our meeting, and over many cigarettes and cups of tea, we told each other our stories, discussed the state of the world, and the women’s questions that not only plague the four parts of Kurdistan. With great sadness in her eyes and many deep sighs, Mizgîn told me about how she joined the party as a teenager, her time spent in Syria with Öcalan, her many years of struggle, her increasing doubts, and that seeing how things were run at the very top, particularly in relation to the urban wars in 2015–2016, finally gave her the impetus to leave. At a different table on the terrace another asylum seeker was playing sad PKK revolutionary songs on his baglama.1 Mizgîn nodded in his direction and indicated that we should keep our voices down.

Chapter 4 turns to martyr mothers in Maxmûr. This camp, with its violent history, is highly militarised and a place where the boundaries between the armed and civil spheres are non-existent. Almost every week someone from the camp falls at one of the many frontlines in the region, while the families in the camps, and especially the mothers, continue to live life according to the party’s liberation ideology. I show how the militant mothers of the camp play an integral part in continuing not only camp life but the struggle for freedom according to the PKK more broadly. I map out three key sites of daily life for mothers: first, the martyr house and death wakes; second, camp work; and third, the private house. Throughout I discuss how mothers organise and perform rituals of mourning, remembrance and resistance. Hereby, the martyr culture is a key location where a sense of belonging and sacrifice but also a vision and hope for a future nation are negotiated.

This chapter historically contextualises the Kurdish women’s movement and traces the trajectory of its organisational structures and knowledge production from 1978 to the present. It situates the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its local political and armed branches in the regional and international matrices of domination: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It zooms in on the main internal rupture points where the women resisted and fought against their male comrades in order to build their autonomous ranks within the larger liberation movement.

‘When I struggle for my freedom with women, I feel free and I feel equal. Maybe if we weren’t organised, I wouldn’t feel like that. But freedom is so far away, that I know, we need hundreds of years’ (Ayşe Gökkan, 14 November 2015). We were sitting in the office of KJA, the Congress of Free Women (Kongreya Jinên Azad) in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, when Ayşe Gökkan told me what equality and freedom meant to her. Our interview was often interrupted by the war planes roaring overhead and rattling the windows,1 Ayşe’s phone ringing and people walking into her office for a quick consultation.

The third chapter is an account of how PKK revolutionaries are educated in the mountains, analysing how the liberation ideology is learned and lived in the everyday. Here, women find a language to talk about their oppression and learn about their responsibility: to liberate themselves, their minds, and through armed and political struggle, other women in the region. I demonstrate how this process of learning to become ‘free’ is both emancipatory and coercive, arguing that while the liberation movement opens spaces for women, women can only participate in those spaces if they learn to become soldiers for the cause. The ethnographic data of this chapter adds another layer to my concept of militant femininities by paying attention to the matrix of domination and the intersecting power structures at work and puts forward a more nuanced analysis of agency.

Chapter 2 examines how the claim of difference and sustainability was organised and implemented by the Kurdish women’s movement in the political sphere of Diyarbakir, where the movement has a long-standing history of organising women according to party ideology and structures. I analyse how this struggle for space unfolded once the urban wars started in mid-2015, mapping out the tools and mechanisms of resistance used by the movement as a whole and the women’s structures in particular. This chapter gives space to the critical voices, residents not organised behind party lines, as they were caught in the frontlines between the PKK and the Turkish army.

The last chapter takes an in-depth look at body politics and sexuality and aims to do two things: first, to unpack the often sidelined aspect of the fighters’ desexualisation. How is this part of the subjectivity produced, believed, maintained and policed? What are the tensions that emerge from creating a desexualised guerrilla army that comes down from the mountains to liberate society? Second, this chapter discusses what I call ‘party bargains’. I argue that women break out of their particular societal constellations by joining the party and enter a new bargain, this time with the party. It discusses three sites of party bargains: the fighter, the civil activist or politician, and the mother, whereas the three categories are overlapping. I demonstrate that in each case these party bargains hold great emancipatory power and that chosen abstinence (for the guerrillas) can be seen as one of the main tools of female resistance that strengthens the female ranks. However, this process goes hand in hand with a strict process of discipline and coercion, and I ask whether the sex ban is in fact at the heart of the new gender norms and relations in the making and key to the party’s ability to control its revolutionaries.