Gender in the KRI: Introduction
This series will give an in-depth look at women's security in the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI). Gender politics and violence have long been hot topics in international discourse. The emphasis the UN and western democracies place on gender equality has led to extensive research on women's lived experiences. The Middle East, in particular, has found itself under the microscope. Trigger Warning: This series contains a discussion of domestic violence, sexual violence, murder, and modern slavery.
The series is broken into five parts; an introduction to the area and issues, democratization and gender security, independence movements and gender representation, the ISIS occupation and gender oppression, and conclusions on gendered life in the KRI.
Iraqi citizens are not strangers to uncertainty; however, the US occupation of 2003 ushered an era of unprecedented change for the Iraqi Kurdish community. The 2005 constitution protected the Kurdish Region of Iraq(KRI) by increasing their autonomy level and initially reducing interference from the central Iraqi government, creating a de-facto Kurdish state. However, the post-2003 developments have been dominated by internal conflicts of traditional ideology and nationalism, destabilizing both politics and security for Kurds in Iraq. These regional contexts compose the background necessary to effectively analyze the devastating effects of ISIS on the KRI in the late 2010s and the referenda on Kurdish independence.
As the second-largest ethnic group in Iraq, the Kurds’ political and security situation is relevant to analyzing conflicts within Iraq, nationalist movements, and democratizing efforts internationally. The autonomy gained, and the secessionist challenge that the KRG poses to the central Iraqi government remains the main dynamic of Kurdish politics in Iraq. The success of the Kurdish independence movement in creating a de-facto state is a concerning challenge to the state system for many regional and international actors. Additionally, the advancement of the KRG towards democracy and an increasingly liberal society through active social movements is an example that many regional actors, most notably ISIS, have attempted to suppress.
As a historically oppressed and underrepresented people, the Kurdish community’s reality in Iraq is not usefully represented by traditional international relations theories. For example, a realist understanding would view the KRI as a subordinate component of the Iraqi central government rather than a separate entity because the KRI is not a sovereign state. A critical approach, therefore, would more accurately represent the Kurdish experience in Iraq. A feminist lens highlights meaningful changes in the gendered political and security situation of Iraqi Kurds. The KRI exhibits growing opposition to the patriarchal society and power structures that dominate Iraq, making the use of a feminist perspective significant and useful for analyzing politics and security.
This series of reports will argue that post-2003 democratizing and independence attempts that advanced gender relations in the KRI contributed to the disproportionate effects of ISIS on Kurds’ gender security and political activism in Iraq.
The development of democracy through the KRG encouraged social movements to confront gender issues that permeate patriarchal societies. This increased gender security in the face of discrimination from cultural Islam and Kurdish traditions.
Resistance and independence efforts since 2003 have formed avenues of political resistance against the central Iraqi government using liberal approaches to gender issues such as the treatment of gender violence in the judicial system. Therefore, the Kurd’s political situation has experienced a gendered liberalization in seeking further differentiation and independence from the state of Iraq.
However, the visible effects of these gendered movements exacerbated the effects of ISIS’s extreme gender conservativism. Contrasting gender relations under KRG and ISIS control demonstrates acutely gendered differences in Iraqi Kurds’ political life and security. Additionally, the development of more liberal gender relations made Kurdish political life and security a more visible target for gender violence and political oppression.
To approach the security situation in the Kurdish Region of Iraq from a feminist perspective, we must explain the concept of gender security and recognize the varying feminist interpretations of security. There is a consensus that the impact of insecurity or conflict is unequally weighted between genders (Detraz, 2013). The “gendering” of security threats means that the social group to which we are allocated changes our experience of dangerous situations. For example, in her foundational article describing the varying feminist approaches to security Ann Tickner (1992) outlines domestic violence, rape, poverty, and gender subordination as gendered security threats experienced disproportionately by women. Evidence of each of these threats to gender security can be seen in the Iraqi Kurdish community (Meny, 2020; Parvaz, 2016; Rasool and Payton, 2014; Yörük and Özsoy, 2013).
The gendered effects of conflict are explored through many forms of feminist scholarship, all of which provide useful insight into different situations (Sjoberg, 2012). The feminist lens most useful for analysis in the KRI takes a broad critical view. It emphasizes the security threats directly linked to gender inequality and the concept of gender subordination.
Another concept that dominates feminist analysis in the KRI is that of a “patriarchy.” In feminist literature, patriarchal systems describe the links between masculinities and femininities that sustain masculine domination and “keep women in their assigned places” (Cockburn and Enloe, 2012). The patriarchal system in Kurdish Iraq is drawn from an ethnic and religious culture built on a male-dominated familial system and dominant Islamic faith (Joly and Bakawan, 2016). Many scholars and activists claim that Kurdish gender violence and insecurity originate from their patriarchal system (Gill, Begikhani, and Hague, 2012). However, there has been recent disruption to this discourse because a different reality was highlighted by female Kurdish military personnel in their fighting with the Iraqi Peshmerga against ISIS (Bengio, 2016). This disruption raises a critical question as to whether academic perspectives divorced from their reality are victimizing or marginalizing Kurdish women in favor of western cultural and political norms (Begikhani, Hamelink, and Weiss, 2018). While statistics of gender violence and primary sources assure the reality of gender violence in the KRI, there is recognition of potential bias or prejudice in discussing the patriarchal systems of the Iraqi Kurdish community (Alinia, 2016).
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