Jin, Jiyan, Azadi: Examining American Women Foreign Fighters in North East Syria’s YPJ

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: Gender, Militaries, and Conflict

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants, this paper examines the recruitment pathways, motivations, and roles of American women foreign fighters in the ranks of North East Syria’s Women’s Protection Units, or Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ). Though research on women in armed groups has often vacillated between narratives of victimization and exceptionalism, this paper contributes to an emerging body of work that foregrounds women’s agency in militant organizations. More generally, my writing addresses a gap in the literature concerning Western women who voluntarily join armed movements that explicitly articulate revolutionary, feminist, and anti-capitalist political projects. Foregrounding the complexity of mobilization processes, this paper reorients the study of foreign fighters away from security-centric frameworks which focus on linear pathways to action such as ‘radicalization’ and toward a relational sociology of mobilization grounded in social networks, political identity, and collective action.

Author

• Cameron Hughes, University of California-Santa Cruz