Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj

Feminist IR challenges traditional ideas of power, security and global politics—and offers new ways to understand Kurdistan and the Middle East.

International Relations has traditionally been presented as a discipline concerned with states, sovereignty, war, military power, diplomacy, security and the distribution of power among international actors. Yet for much of its history, the discipline treated gender as peripheral to these questions. Women were frequently absent from the theories, institutions and historical narratives through which international politics was understood, while experiences associated with the private sphere—care, domestic violence, displacement, reproduction, family life and everyday insecurity—were often separated from what counted as “international” politics. Feminist International Relations theory emerged in part to challenge this separation.

The central contribution of feminism to International Relations is therefore not simply the addition of women to an existing theory. It is a deeper challenge to the assumptions that determine what International Relations considers politically important in the first place. Feminist scholars have asked who possesses power, who is excluded from decision-making, whose security matters, whose experiences are treated as politically significant and how ideas about masculinity and femininity shape the institutions and practices of international politics.

This matters particularly for understanding Kurdistan and the wider Middle East. Much of the political analysis of the region has traditionally concentrated on states, armed organizations, political parties, military operations, oil, borders and geopolitical competition. These remain important. But they do not provide a complete account of how power operates. A feminist approach asks what happens when the analysis begins with people and social relations as well as states and institutions. It asks how war affects women differently, how gender influences political authority, why certain forms of violence become visible while others remain invisible, and how women themselves act as political, economic and security actors.

What Is Feminism in International Relations?

Feminist IR begins from a relatively simple observation: international politics is not gender-neutral. Traditional theories often present themselves as universal explanations of global politics, but feminist scholars have argued that many of their foundational concepts have been constructed around historically masculine assumptions about power, rationality, security and political authority.

The distinction is important. Feminist IR does not simply argue that traditional International Relations deliberately excludes women. Rather, it demonstrates that the discipline has frequently been gender-blind. It has overlooked the ways in which gendered assumptions are already embedded within the institutions and concepts it studies.

For example, traditional understandings of security have often focused on the security of states. A state is considered secure when its territory is protected, its sovereignty preserved and its military capacity maintained. But what happens to individuals living inside that state? A country can be considered “secure” while women experience high levels of domestic violence, sexual violence, economic insecurity or political exclusion. A post-conflict country can formally achieve peace while violence against women continues inside homes and communities.

Feminist IR therefore expands the meaning of security. Security becomes not only the survival of the state but also the conditions under which people live.

This shift is especially important in regions affected by prolonged conflict. In Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Türkiye, political analysis frequently concentrates on armed conflict and territorial control. Yet the consequences of these conflicts extend into households, communities, schools, workplaces, refugee camps and local institutions. The international and the domestic cannot always be separated so neatly.

This is one of the fundamental insights of feminist IR: the personal is political, and the supposedly private sphere can be central to international politics.

Making Women Visible

One of feminism's earliest contributions to International Relations was simply to ask where women were.

Cynthia Enloe's famous question—“Where are the women?”—challenged scholars to look beyond presidents, generals, diplomats and soldiers and examine the women whose labor and experiences make international political systems possible. Women are not merely victims of international politics. They are workers, diplomats, activists, soldiers, politicians, peacebuilders, journalists, researchers, migrants, caregivers and political organizers.

This is particularly relevant to the study of Kurdistan. Kurdish political history has often been narrated through male political leaders, parties, armed organizations and military commanders. Yet Kurdish women have participated in political movements, civil society, resistance, education, journalism, governance and armed conflict.

My KPA analysis “Why Sulaymaniyah Has More Women in Leadership Than Any Other City in Iraq” illustrates this question at the level of governance. The article examined the growing presence of women in senior administrative positions in Sulaymaniyah, including education, tourism, commerce, environmental administration, civil affairs and municipal government. The significance of these developments is not simply that women occupy positions previously dominated by men. It is that their presence challenges assumptions about who is expected to exercise political and administrative authority.

The question therefore moves beyond representation. It becomes a question of power.

Who controls institutions? Who makes decisions? Whose expertise is recognized? Who is considered capable of governing? And what social assumptions determine the answers to these questions?

A feminist approach makes those questions central to political analysis.

Gender Is More Than Women

A common misunderstanding is that feminist IR is simply International Relations “about women.” It is broader than that.

Feminist scholars distinguish between biological sex and socially constructed gender. Gender refers to the expectations, identities and roles societies associate with masculinity and femininity. These expectations influence how individuals are perceived and how institutions operate.

International politics has historically associated masculinity with rationality, independence, strength, aggression, military power and political authority. Femininity has frequently been associated with vulnerability, dependence, care, domesticity and the need for protection.

These categories are not simply descriptions. They can become mechanisms through which power is organized.

The conventional image of the soldier, for example, is strongly masculinized. Men are constructed as protectors and legitimate users of force, while women and children are constructed as those who require protection. Yet women have always participated in war and political violence in diverse ways. They have fought, organized, supplied, resisted, gathered intelligence, negotiated, protested and participated in political movements.

The Kurdish experience provides numerous examples of this complexity.

My KPA article “From the frontline to Venice: how a Kurdish film is reclaiming the story of women in the war against ISIS” examined how the story of a female Peshmerga can challenge the conventional male-centered narrative of war. The significance of such stories is not simply cultural. They challenge the assumption that the battlefield is naturally a male space and that women are primarily passive victims of conflict.

The feminist question is therefore not only “Where are the women?” It is also: Why have certain political roles been associated with men in the first place?

War, Violence and the Meaning of Security

Traditional IR has historically treated war between organized political actors as one of the central objects of study. Feminist scholarship does not reject the importance of war. Instead, it asks what conventional approaches leave out when they define security primarily through military threats.

Gendered violence demonstrates the problem.

Sexual violence, domestic violence, forced displacement, exploitation and other forms of violence against women have often been treated as separate social or humanitarian questions rather than as matters of international security. Feminist IR challenges this distinction.

Conflict does not begin and end neatly at the battlefield. Violence can continue inside households and communities after formal hostilities end. In some cases, women experience heightened insecurity during supposedly peaceful periods because the institutions created to restore order reproduce existing gender inequalities.

This insight is highly relevant to post-conflict Iraq and the wider Middle East. The fall of an armed organization or the signing of a peace agreement does not automatically produce human security. A ceasefire between armed actors may reduce battlefield violence while leaving unresolved questions of displacement, justice, political exclusion, gender inequality and economic vulnerability.

Feminist security studies therefore asks us to distinguish between the security of political institutions and the security of people.

This also connects with my analysis “Iraq’s Minorities Are Not Just a Humanitarian Issue — They Are a Test of the State.” Although the article is not exclusively a feminist analysis, its underlying argument is compatible with an important feminist insight: communities and individuals cannot be reduced to passive recipients of humanitarian protection. Their security is connected to governance, representation, political authority and the distribution of power.

The same analytical logic can be extended to women. Women's insecurity should not be treated merely as a humanitarian consequence of political instability. It is also evidence of how political and social institutions distribute power.

The Public and the Private Are Connected

One of feminism's most important challenges to traditional IR is its rejection of the sharp division between the public and private spheres.

Traditional political analysis has often considered the state, military, diplomacy and international organizations to belong to the public sphere, while family life, care work and domestic relations are treated as private. Feminist scholars argue that this distinction obscures the ways in which the two spheres depend upon one another.

International economies depend upon forms of unpaid and underpaid labor that are disproportionately performed by women. Wars depend upon families and communities that sustain soldiers and displaced populations. States regulate reproduction, citizenship, family structures and social rights. Political institutions are shaped by assumptions about gender roles.

The supposedly private sphere is therefore deeply political.

This is also why the study of governance in Kurdistan cannot be separated completely from questions of gender. My broader work on “Government and Political System of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq” examines institutions, political parties and democratic development. A feminist extension of that analysis asks an additional set of questions: who participates in those institutions, who occupies decision-making positions, how political structures affect different groups, and whether formal political representation translates into substantive influence.

These questions matter because institutions do not operate in a social vacuum.

Feminism and Peacebuilding

Feminist IR has also transformed the study of peace and peacekeeping.

Traditional peace processes have frequently focused on armed actors and political elites. The assumption is understandable: those who possess military power must be included if violence is to end. Yet this can produce peace agreements negotiated primarily among men who represent armed organizations while excluding women and other groups who experience the consequences of conflict.

The result can be a narrow conception of peace.

A country may move from war to formal peace while women remain excluded from political decision-making, economic reconstruction and security institutions. Former combatants may receive reintegration assistance while women who participated in conflict remain unrecognized because they do not fit the conventional image of a combatant.

Feminist peacebuilding therefore asks not only whether armed conflict has ended but what kind of political order follows.

Who participates in reconstruction?

Who receives resources?

Who controls security institutions?

Who writes the new political rules?

Who is represented in negotiations?

And whose definition of peace becomes institutionalized?

These questions are particularly relevant to Kurdish politics because the Kurdish question is increasingly moving from an exclusively military framework toward questions of political representation, institutional integration and governance.

My analysis “The Kurdish Question as a Regional Security System” argues that developments in Türkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran cannot be understood as isolated Kurdish conflicts. A feminist perspective adds another dimension to that regional-security analysis: the regional system should also be examined in terms of how gendered political structures affect Kurdish communities and the people living within them.

The regional security system is therefore not experienced equally by everyone.

Intersectionality: Gender Does Not Exist Alone

Another major contribution of feminist theory is intersectionality.

People experience political power through multiple identities simultaneously. Gender intersects with class, ethnicity, race, religion, geography, age, citizenship and political affiliation. The experience of a Kurdish woman in Sulaymaniyah may therefore differ substantially from that of a Kurdish woman in a rural area, an internally displaced woman in Nineveh, a Kurdish woman in Iran, or a Syrian Kurdish woman living under conditions of conflict.

There is no single “female experience.”

This is particularly important when applying feminist IR to Kurdistan. Kurdish politics itself is not homogeneous. Kurdish communities live under different states and political systems, while Kurdish parties and movements hold competing ideological and strategic positions.

My article “When war is already everyday life: Kurdish statelessness and the politics of precarious survival” similarly emphasizes that Kurdish experiences differ according to geography, class, gender, political affiliation and generation. A feminist analysis reinforces this approach by asking how those intersecting identities determine who becomes vulnerable, who receives protection and whose political voice becomes visible.

This prevents feminist analysis from reproducing another simplification: treating women as one homogeneous political category.

Feminism and Kurdish Strategic Agency

The relevance of feminist IR becomes even clearer when the concept of agency is applied to Kurdish politics.

My recent work has increasingly examined the transition from autonomy to agency. In “From Autonomy to Agency: Kurdistan’s Next Strategic Transformation,” the central concern is whether the Kurdistan Region can transform its existing political autonomy into durable strategic capacity. “Kurdistan as a Geopolitical Crossroads” develops a related argument by examining how geography, institutions, security, economics and international relationships shape Kurdistan's strategic position.

A feminist extension of this argument asks whether strategic agency itself is being defined too narrowly.

If agency means only military power, territorial control and bargaining capacity between political elites, then large parts of society remain outside the definition of strategic power. But if agency includes institutional capacity, education, social resilience, political participation, economic inclusion and the ability of citizens to influence public decisions, the concept becomes much broader.

Women therefore become part of strategic agency rather than merely beneficiaries of it.

This is particularly visible in Sulaymaniyah, where women's participation in public administration demonstrates that political capacity can be exercised through institutions that are not traditionally categorized as “high politics.” Education, municipal governance, environmental administration, commerce and public services may appear distant from geopolitics, but they determine the quality and resilience of political institutions.

Feminist IR helps us see these connections.

Feminist Movements as Geopolitical Actors

The idea that feminist organizations belong exclusively to the social or humanitarian sphere is also increasingly difficult to sustain.

My KPA analysis “Feminist movements are no longer on the margins of geopolitics in Middle East” examined how feminist civil-society networks across the Middle East and North Africa are becoming increasingly significant actors in governance, political mobilization, social resilience and regional activism.

This does not mean that feminist movements have replaced states or conventional geopolitical actors. Rather, it demonstrates that power in contemporary international politics is increasingly distributed across networks of states, civil society organizations, communities, activists, international institutions and transnational movements.

That observation fits directly into the broader transformation of International Relations theory.

The international system is not composed only of governments.

Non-state actors matter. Social movements matter. Civil society matters. Women matter. Communities matter. And the relationships among these actors can affect how states behave.

For the Middle East, this is particularly important because political authority is frequently contested between formal state institutions, political parties, armed organizations, religious institutions, civil society networks and external powers.

A feminist approach does not replace geopolitical analysis. It makes geopolitical analysis more complete.

Why Feminist IR Matters for Kurdistan

Kurdish studies and Kurdish political analysis have historically been dominated by questions of nationalism, statelessness, state repression, armed struggle, territoriality, identity and international intervention. These questions remain fundamental. But the Kurdish experience can also contribute to a broader transformation of International Relations by demonstrating how gender, statelessness, security and political agency interact.

This is particularly relevant to the emerging debate about a more global and inclusive International Relations.

My article “Towards a Global International Relations: What Does It Mean for Kurdistan?” argues that Kurdish experiences can challenge conventional assumptions about sovereignty, federalism, contested borders, non-state actors, regional security, transnational nationalism and international order.

Feminist IR provides another avenue for that challenge.

If International Relations seeks to understand the world rather than simply reproduce the categories created by powerful states, then it must examine the experiences of people who have historically been marginalized from the production of international knowledge.

For Kurdistan, this means asking not only how Kurdish states and movements interact with regional powers, but also how gender shapes Kurdish political institutions, how women experience conflict and displacement, how women participate in political movements, and how gendered assumptions influence the construction of Kurdish national narratives.

It also means questioning who produces knowledge about Kurdistan.

The question of gender is therefore connected to the larger question of epistemic power. Who has historically been authorized to write the history of war? Who defines security? Who determines which political experiences deserve academic attention? Who becomes an “expert” on international affairs?

These are not merely academic questions.

They are questions about power.

Conclusion: From Adding Women to Rethinking International Relations

Feminist International Relations theory began with a challenge to women's marginalization, but its implications are considerably broader. It has demonstrated that gender is not an additional variable that can simply be attached to traditional theories of international politics. Gender is embedded in the concepts, institutions, identities and hierarchies through which international politics operate.

Feminism therefore asks International Relations to reconsider some of its most basic assumptions. Security cannot be understood only through states and armies. War cannot be understood only through battlefields. Peace cannot be understood only through ceasefires. Power cannot be understood only through governments. Political agency cannot be understood only through political elites. And international politics cannot be understood without examining the people whose lives are shaped by it.

For Kurdistan, this analytical shift is particularly valuable. Kurdish politics are increasingly being discussed through the language of strategic agency, regional security, institutional power and international order. Yet strategic agency will remain incomplete if half of society is treated as an object of policy rather than a source of political power.

The question “Where are the women?” is therefore not a narrow feminist question. It is an International Relations question.

It asks us to look again at the institutions we study, the histories we tell, the actors we recognize and the forms of power we consider legitimate.

And perhaps the most important contribution of feminist IR is precisely this: it does not simply ask us to put women into the existing picture of international politics. It asks whether the picture itself is complete.

About the Author

Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj is a researcher, geopolitical analyst and founder of Kurdish Policy Analysis. He holds a PhD from Brunel University London and writes on Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, regional security, geopolitics, governance, international relations and the changing Middle Eastern order.

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