Dr Eda Gunaydin1
1University Of Wollongong, Australia
Biography:
Eda Gunaydin is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern politics, non-state order and race and gender in international relations. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including International Studies Quarterly, The International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Policy & Society. Her research has won awards, including the International Studies Association (ISA) Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Best Graduate Paper Award, the ISA Women's Caucus Graduate Student Best Paper Award, and the ANZSOG Siobhan O'Sullivan Prize for Policy Studies Research.
Abstract:
Transnational and postcolonial feminisms, as well as feminist international relations, richly critique the material and epistemic damage generated by attempts to ‘save’ women, as well as queer people, in the Global South (Munzahim 2024; Abu-Lughod 2013). This literature also potently explicates how differences (of identity and power) can prevent the establishment of meaningful solidarity between women across borders. This article focuses on a group of female foreign fighters, as well as LGTBQ members of the Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA), who travelled to Syria to fight ISIS and, later, state forces. It asks to what extent these entanglements reproduce ‘imperial solidarity’. The article argues that exploring the activities of these groups of fighters, who travelled to Syria to defend the ‘Rojava revolution’, a Kurdishheaded left-wing movement that has achieved self-governance in northern Syria for over a decade, reveals the presence of a transnational, feminist, militant solidarity, one oriented around ‘praxis-oriented, active political struggle' (Mohanty 2003, 7).