Peace at Multiple Fronts: The Peace Mothers' Alternative Form of Politics

• In Event: 496 - Regular Session. Peace and Conflict: Building Social Solidarity through Collective Action

Abstract

In this project, I focus on the Kurdish Peace Mothers Initiative, which was established in 1999 in Istanbul with an ideal of creating external and internal peace in Turkey. Peace Mothers have children who are Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK, Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas, pro-Kurdish political activists, or human rights activists, many of them missing, murdered, alive, or imprisoned. The Mothers have gained a significant amount of recognition in Turkey, Kurdistan, and abroad as highly visible members of the Kurdish Women’s Movement. First, they aim to stop the war between the Turkish state and the PKK guerrillas by using motherhood as a universal experience to recruit women from various ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds. Second, their acts go beyond peace-making between “Turks” and “Kurds” since they also work for internal peace among Kurds, particularly because the war between the Turkish state and the PKK changed the dynamics within the Kurdish community, and in turn, changed the ‘nature’ of conflicts among Kurds. Theoretically, I suggest that war at the national level cannot be analyzed independent of its effect on the local scale, as peace politics operates in multiple ways, from local to national, in processes that are constantly gendered and ethnicized. I further contend that even though the experiences of war and violence might have potentially locked these women within a state of inaction and passivity, Peace Mothers open up an arena to make their demands and agendas legible across boundaries through bridging the local and national peace initiatives.

Author

• Nisa Goksel, Northwestern University