Hasret Cetinkaya

Namûs describes a 'way of life' integral to Kurdish sociality and to the sense of self for many Kurds who live it in a plurality of ways. Constituting a form of power over the subject which can potentially take the form of domination, namûs is also a social relation of care and power between subjects and is integral to its subject's ethical relationship of self-to-self and processes of self-making. Post-Enlightenment and liberal frameworks of 'modern' selfhood, however, have tended to render namûs equivalent to 'honour' and 'honour-based violence' ('HBV'). Through this act of mistranslation, a life with namûs is constructed as violent, unworthy, racially inferior and harmful to women. Building upon multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in North Kurdistan, Turkey and Denmark, this article originally theorises namûs as a practice of ethical self-making that is epistemic, dignified and agentic in all its complexities. Women living with and through namûs actively work to cultivate this way of being, thereby interrupting the epistemic authority of liberal feminism. Namûs, this article argues, cannot be understood through blanket explanations of 'crime', 'oppression' and 'patriarchy', as the discourse on 'honour' would suggest. Breaking away from these injurious portrayals is, therefore, vital to realise global epistemological justice.

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, 'honour' has been systematically conflated with 'honour-related violence' (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the Muslim World. Adopting a critical post-and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV-a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women's sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge.

This paper analyses how the ‘Peace Mothers’ in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan are structurally located in the middle-ground between familial relations and the state, as they strive to come to terms with their children’s interpretation of the politics of decolonisation through the project of Kurdish democratisation and ‘revolution’. Such a politics takes its dominant form in the vehicle of The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a movement who see themselves as a decolonial and left-wing militant group, and whose membership is both young and committed to radical political transformation. At stake for the mothers of these members who have become an increasingly visible political actor in the Turkish public sphere, is a struggle with their children’s interpretation of possible futures, as well as being the middle-ground and the direct site of confrontation against the state. In contemporary Turkey, the ‘Peace Mothers’ are taking to the street, as their children are either in prison, guerrilla fighters, or as seen in 2019, on hunger strike. The children’s engagement with the state is hidden, compared to the struggle of the ‘Peace Mothers’. The ‘Mothers’ as such, are seen as confrontational, violent (symbolically), and as the so-called “producers of terrorists”.

The ‘Mothers’, as (de)sexed identities, are transgressing norms of propriety, something welcomed within the revolutionary spirit of the Kurdish movement, which places women in the forefront of their decolonial struggle against the state, capitalism and slavery. The ‘Peace Mothers’ are a powerful antidote to the state, as voices of the demand for equal rights, as well as resisting the precarity of their existence as Kurds. The ‘Peace Mothers’ are constantly reminded of being ‘women’ through the sexual harassment and violence they are met with. Their bodies, therefore, become a site of resistance and domination. Drawing upon recent events with the so-called ‘Peace Mothers’ of Turkey, the hunger strikes and the centering of the embodied figures of the ‘Mothergoddess’ at the front of Kurdish decolonial struggle, this paper draws upon new data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and interviews with the ‘Peace Mothers’.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on the 25th of May 2020 in the city of Minneapolis, a global anti-racist rupture in the fabric of racial capitalism has occurred. Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. Floyd after calling out “I can’t breathe!” was essentially choked to death on an open street. The act by Chauvin and the lack of action by the other police officers was captured through the cell phone cameras of bystanders. Despite this event happening under the conditions of the dispersion of the visual field and in an era of technological surveillance, the cops did what cops do.

In this article Hasret Çetinkaya reports on Judith Butler’s recent Agnes Cuming lectures at University College Dublin in January 2019. Çetinkaya’s article exceeds simply a report, and in and of itself is a plea for the revolutionary implications of the politics of non-violence Butler proposes both in her most recent writing as well as her public lectures. ‘Anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and radically democratic, Butler’s latest work has forced us, in a time of increasing nationalism, patriotic populism and the individuated-ness of precarity under neo-liberalism, to recognise the urgency to act globally, and to think of new forms of political obligation, not to the state, but to the world, and the global responsibilities that entails’.

In this weeks special report / long-read article Hasret Cetinkaya writes about the Repeal the 8th campaign in Ireland, seeking to amend the Irish constitution in order to facilitate the legislation for abortion. Hasret argues that central to these campaigns are deeper questions of patriarchy, kinship and anti-colonial struggle. What is at stake, she argues, is a matter of how we value the lives of others.

All around the world we are witnessing rights mobilisations for a more just and egalitarian world and ecology. From the feminist revolutions in Rojava and Iran, the anti-colonial struggle in Palestine, to feminist and indigenous movements in Argentina, India, Brazil, and Colombia, to name but a few, people across the world are engaged in struggles for rights, justice, and the future of life on this planet. These mobilisations, whether they use the language of human rights or not, are challenging not only the mainstream epistemologies that underwrite the global human rights discourse, but also expand the repertoire of claim-making. In this critical conjuncture, shaped by climate breakdown, deepening inequalities, as well as renewed forms of neo-colonialism, existing authoritarianisms, and insurgent fascisms, such alternative modalities of rights and the politics of claim-making are a source of inspiration and hope. As such, they are in need of careful examination and attention.