Women in regions affected by war and forced displacement are highly visible in media accounts. Yet, their resistance against different forms of violence – from so-called domestic abuse to large-scale state violence – often goes unrecognized. Women & War is a platform to learn about powerful women’s struggles for liberation, justice and peace. The podcast amplifies critical contemporary feminist work in the field of war, violence, colonialism, and forced migration. The invited guests – who are engaged feminist academics and activists - speak about legacies of genocide, femicide, occupation, and invasion in the context of places like Armenia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Palestine, Pakistan and beyond. In addition to providing background and sharing knowledge, the guests reflect on their own scholarship and discuss contemporary knowledge production on women’s resistance. Together, guest and host counter Orientalist and patriarchal narratives and instead center women’s practices of resistance and collective struggle, past and present. While offering historical context to contemporary wars and conflicts in the region, Women & War seeks to be a space to build transnational feminist solidarity.The podcast is not detached from political events and developments. In fact, recent developments such as the 2021 handover of Afghanistan to the Taliban or the Turkish state’s military operations in three parts of Kurdistan over the last years were among the events that sparked the idea to launch this project. These and other experiences discussed in the episodes illustrate why it is crucial to view gender as a central, rather than secondary question in our understanding of political conflicts.This podcast is hosted by political sociologist Dr Dilar Dirik, Junior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. This project has been made possible through the University of Oxford's Public Engagement with Research Fund.
#6 State Violence, Militarism and Gender in Pakistan
The arms industry is widely known to be one of the most corrupt and deadly sectors in the world. Often exempt from transparency and accountability, this industry produces the weapons and technology necessary for the wars that kill, disappear or displace millions of people every year. Unfortunately, UK universities, too, are implicated in this business through their cooperation with arms manufacturing companies that supply weapons to war zones. This includes the University of Oxford, where thi...
1 Jul 2022
#5 Violence and Resistance in the Lives of Kurdish Women: From Dêrsim to Rojava
Historically, the Turkish state's relationship to women at the margins of its power has been characterized by violence and dispossession. Even as the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, brought about progressive reforms in society, such as education and work opportunities for women, permissible femininity required compliance with the nationalist framework of the state. The first female pilot in Turkey, Sabiha Gökçen, adopted daughter of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal, took part in the d...
1 Jul 2022
#4 Palestinian Women's Struggles against Colonization & Patriarchy
Palestinian women have a long history of struggling on multiple fronts. Throughout the history of the Israeli occupation, women organized themselves politically, socially, culturally and also militarily in the national liberation struggle. They were involved in guerrilla actions, but they also resisted as political prisoners, as organizers, and as carers. They participated en masse in the popular uprisings known as the Intifadas. Today, too, Palestinian women engage in a variety of strategies...
1 Jul 2022
#3 Theoretically Speaking: Capitalist Patriarchy and the Gendered War
This episode of Women & War does not focus on one particular context or region, but rather aims to give a sense of the ways in which feminists theorize war, violence, occupation, and colonization. How to connect everyday experiences and large-scale systems of oppression? How to make sense of resistance? How to think through and beyond differences? What is the role of knowledge production for justice and liberation? What should be the responsibilities of feminism in the 21st century?...
1 Jul 2022
#2 Women and Genocide: Insights from the Armenian Case
Knowledge production on genocide has historically tended to downplay or ignore the gendered logics that underpin the phenomenon. This has been challenged by feminist scholarship on war and political violence. The Armenian Genocide was an episode of murder, violence, torture, and forced migration, ordered by Ottoman Turkish officials and enabled by a range of actors. Armenian women were specifically terrorized in this phase. During long, deadly deportation journeys, they were exposed to...
1 Jul 2022
#1 Women's Struggles in Afghanistan: Hazara Women and the Return of the Taliban
In August 2021, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan after the US administration under Joe Biden decided to pull out of the country after two decades. As entire infrastructures for politics, civil society, and public services collapsed, the situation of women has been worsening on a daily basis under the Taliban's patriarchal regime of violence and domination. In this episode, podcast host Dilar Dirik is joined by outspoken activists Noshin Rad and Homira Rezai to speak about the sit...
30 Jun 2022
#0: Introduction to Women & War: A Feminist Podcast
Welcome to Women and War: a feminist podcast. This podcast is created by Dilar Dirik, a political sociologist at the University of Oxford (Refugee Studies Centre & Lady Margaret Hall) and has been made possible through funding from the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Fund. In this introduction episode, Dilar Dirik talks about the philosophy behind this podcast. Content warning: Several of the episodes have mentions (and, in some cases, graphic descriptions) o...
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