Ruken Isik in conversation with Sinam Sherkany Mohammad, Meghan Bodette, and Elif Genc. Organized by UNC Charlotte Women and Gender Studies, April 15, 2021.

Isik is a Kurdish-American researcher and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work focuses on Kurdish Women’s Activism in Turkey, Syria, and in the diaspora.

Bodette received a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, where she concentrated in international law, institutions, and ethics. She directs the Missing Afrin Women Project,

Genc is a PhD student in politics at the New School for Social Research and adjunct professor at St. John's University and Marymount College in New York. She is also an activist in the Kurdish women's freedom movement in Canada and the United States.

Mohammad is Representative of the Syrian Democratic Council to the United States and has served as the European representative of the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and co-chair of Rojava's Democratic Society Movement.

Kurds are the world’s largest nation without a state to call their own -- some 35 million people spread across parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syrian and Iran, not to mention the diaspora. They have suffered severe repression and even genocide in all those countries and have been fighting for independence and liberation for generations. Kurdish military units, several of which are led by women, have also led the fight against ISIS in recent years.

Since 2012 Kurds have conducted a radical experiment in self-governance in the northern region of Syria called Rojava, which borders Turkey. They have created a decentralized economy, known as a Democratic Confederacy, based on the principles of radical democracy, social ecology, and feminism. With the complicity of the U.S. government, Turkey invaded Rojava and other parts of the region in October 2019.

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