
Exclusionary Regimes, Autocratization and Democracy
Nazan Üstündağ
Contact: nazanust(at)hotmail.com
Instructor, Alice Solomon Hochschule
Nazan Üstündağ received her Ph.D. in 2005 from the sociology department at Indiana University Bloomington. Between 2005 and 2018 she worked as an Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of Sociology. Between 2020 and 2023 she received a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation Patrimonies program. Between 2018 and 2020 she was an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow. Currently, she is affiliated with Alice Solomon Hochschule in Berlin and broadcasts in Jin TV on worldwide news on women. Üstündağ’s work concerns feminist political theory, political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. Her book with the title, Mother, Politician and Guerilla: Political Imagination in the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, was published in 2023, by Fordham Press. She writes in different public venues and is a founding member of Women for Peace and Academics for Peace.
Research project
Universalism and Humanism in the Kurdish Women’s Movement
Challenges to humanism and universalism in the last several decades, although coming from the oppressed, often resulted in a suspicion of international laws and institutions, benefiting the movements of the right and giving leeway to autocratic and repressive policies. Ranging from Erdoğan to Modi to Mugabe and to Duterte, authoritarian leaders have utilized culturalist discourses and identity based arguments in order to repress their opponents and legitimize violence. Currently, we are witnessing a cautious return to the ideas of universalism and humanism in left politics and scholarship. This research aims at joining these discussions on “the human” and “the universal,” by focusing on the knowledge Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement (KWFM) produced in its resistance against the autocratic and exclusionist states of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Building a loose transnational network of thousands of activists and tens of organizations that claim human-ness and universalism, KWFM challenges such states from an intersectionalist perspective that has ironically been associated with posthumanism, and forces them to a discursive provinciality that can be a basis for re-imagining an inclusive polity.