Politics Lecture Series | Dilar Dirik (University of Oxford) The Possibilities and Limits of "Non-State Justice-Seeking": The Case of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement
Summer 2023
Politics Lecture Series
Department of Social Sciences
09.05.2023, 12:00-13:00h
online via Zoom
Dilar Dirik (University of Oxford)
The Possibilities and Limits of "Non-State Justice-Seeking": The Case of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement
Online lecture hosted by the research and teaching unit Political Theory. To get access to the Zoom link, please register here until May 8.
----------------------------------
Dr Dilar Dirik holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. Since 2019, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She authored the book “The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice” (Pluto Press, 2022). Her research and teaching focus on forced displacement, state violence, non-state autonomy, women's struggles, and radical knowledge production.
Abstract:
The past decades have seen a rise in approaches emerging from the margins of the nation-state system, contesting the state and its relationship to justice. While alternative perspectives can at times intervene in dominant discourses and practices in the realm of justice, the ongoing hegemony of the international human rights framework continues to shape 'non-state' actors' imagination of and access to justice, particularly in the aftermath of state violence.
One interesting contemporary case transcending several state borders is the Kurdistan freedom movement, a decades-old militant and political movement, that relates to concepts like autonomy, self-determination, and democracy on explicitly anti-statist terms. Since the 1990s, and especially from the mid-2000s onwards, it shifted aspects of its ideology and practice in a manner that defines the state, in particular the nation-state, along with patriarchy, as the most institutionalized form of power and violence. This, in turn, had implications for its approaches to justice. Today, in a variety of ways, actors within this movement not only seek justice for the violence experienced. In the territories under their governance, they also practice forms of justice. In both cases, the movement claims to propose 'revolutionary', radical democratic perspectives beyond the state. These practices are not without obstacles and contradictions, however.
Based on in-depth qualitative research and with reference to wider 'non-state' epistemic traditions, this talk will introduce the Kurdistan freedom movement's concepts of justice through examples from its transnational political engagements. What are the possibilities and limits of justice-seeking practices beyond the parameters of human rights, liberal democracy, and the nation-state? And what do these tell us about the means of political action today?
