Re-making Human Rights: Gender and Self-fashioning in the Political Imaginary of Rojava (REPAIR)

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In the midst of the armed conflict in Syria and surrounded by hostile regimes, an extraordinary feminist human rights dispensation is taking place in the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava. The women of Rojava have inspired feminists globally, as they have been the key actors in constituting a new society and the development of a human rights-framework as part of a pioneering experiment in democratic autonomy (democratic self-organisation). Rojava's democratic experiment, the role of women within it and the conceptual articulation of human rights discourse in the vernacular is an extraordinary example of an alternative transnational political imaginary which offers new and innovative ways of thinking about community, human rights, and gendered subjectivities as well as ethics and politics in the colonial present. REPAIR seeks to critically examine the intellectual resources and political imaginaries that have informed the vernacular human rights-framework of the AANES. Furthermore, it theorises the relationship between this vernacular human rights-framework, the project of global human rights, and the role of women activists in enabling an anti-colonial and feminist vision of human rights. REPAIR works to shift the epistemic centre of human rights discourse, by elevating within our field of vision processes of knowledge production on the vernacular politics, concepts and practices of human rights from the Global South. This involves shifting our focus beyond the horizon of the state and its institutional form and offer an account of human rights that centres the intersectional gendered subjectivities relations, self-making and activisms at the core of human rights provision. The originality of this project lies in its exploration of how Rojava provides alternative feminist conceptual vocabularies and futures for transforming human rights.