Justice, rights-politics, and the coloniality of knowledge production: critical lessons from Rojava and the Jineolojî movement towards liberating life

Cetinkaya, Hasret ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0854-1576 (2025) Justice, rights-politics, and the coloniality of knowledge production: critical lessons from Rojava and the Jineolojî movement towards liberating life. The International Journal of Human Rights. pp. 1-25. ISSN 1364-2987

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Abstract

Since 2012 a revolution has been taking place in Northeastern Syria (Rojava). This project in ‘democratic autonomy’, has taken place in the anomic gap left by the absence of a state, and has been driven in large part by feminist activists. These feminist activists have played a pioneering role in re-imagining a moral and political society, through Jineolojî or ‘women's science’. Jineolojî now extends beyond Rojava, constituting a vibrant and powerful transnational or diasporic public sphere, working to develop and promote new ideas about justice, morality, and politics from a situated and embodied gendered perspective. Drawing on interview data and published materials, this article examines the constitution of Jineolojî, as well as the practices of research and self-fashioning activists undertake in the cultivation of new models for feminist power and legality. What emerges from these onto-epistemic practices of revolution and the entanglement of ways of being, knowledge and the law, is the production of new modes of desire, subjectivity, and rights. It argues that the practice of Jineolojî offers critical lessons for cosmological and political justice rooted in the local and a vernacular practice of rights.