The arms industry is widely known to be one of the most corrupt and deadly sectors in the world. Often exempt from transparency and accountability, this industry produces the weapons and technology necessary for the wars that kill, disappear or displace millions of people every year.

Unfortunately, UK universities, too, are implicated in this business through their cooperation with arms manufacturing companies that supply weapons to war zones. This includes the University of Oxford, where this podcast is based. As calls for divestment from the fossil fuels industry are on the rise, so too are student and staff campaigns for divestment in the war and border industries. 

Anti-war and anti-militarism have historically been key causes of women’s liberation struggles arund the world. This is not least because zones of war, conflict and securitization often create climates of impunity for all sorts of violence and injustice, including gendered and sexualized violence. 

State violence and militarism create war-like conditions even during times of peace, especially for women and for communities at the margins of state power. In the name of national security, states mobilize their resources to control and govern populations through violence or threats of violence. Unsurprisingly, the language of security often gets applied to wider constituencies to render dissent, opposition and resistance impossible.

In this episode, Dilar Dirik is in conversation with Mahvish Ahmad, who has researched and reported on state violence and militarism in Pakistan for many years. Among other things, they speak about the ways in which the lives of women, including women from oppressed and minoritized communities in Pakistan, get impacted by state violence and the ways in which state violence and patriarchal violence interact. What do women in Balochistan for example mean by patriarchy in uniform? What is it like to work and research on these topics as a woman? Mahvish talks about historical women’s struggles in the region and about contemporary feminist activism and women’s resistance in Pakistan. She further discusses the role of media in the representation of war and violence in Pakistan and the ways in which dynamics on the ground in warzones get framed according to dominant perspectives. 

In this conversation, we also learn about the value of learning from movements struggling for liberation, a major aspect of Mahvish’s work. What can we learn from the analyses put forward by social/political movements, especially in contexts of war, occupation, state violence, and militarism? In what ways has the US-led so-called war on terror shaped knowledge production on entire regions and countries? How are social movements and grassroots activists impacted by this?

Mahvish Ahmad studies state violence and movements resisting militarism in Pakistan. She is the co-founder of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research project investigating anticolonial movement texts in the 20th century (with Chana Morgenstern and Koni Benson), a co-convener of Archives of the Disappeared which investigates the problem of finding archives and evidence in sites of mass atrocity (with Yael Navaro, Mezna Qato and Chana Morgenstern), and a co-founder of Tanqeed, an English/Urdu bilingual magazine that primarily covered military violence in Pakistan until 2017 (with Madiha Tahir). She is an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics.


This project is made possible through the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research fund.

Music: Hum Dekhenge - Iqbal Bano

Historically, the Turkish state's relationship to women at the margins of its power has been characterized by violence and dispossession. Even as the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, brought about progressive reforms in society, such as education and work opportunities for women, permissible femininity required compliance with the nationalist framework of the state. The first female pilot in Turkey, Sabiha Gökçen, adopted daughter of the republic’s
founder, Mustafa Kemal, took part in the devastating bombardment of civilians in the Alevi-Kurdish region of Dêrsim (renamed by the state as ‘Tunceli’) in the late 1930s and continues to be praised as a symbol for the ‘modern’ values of the republic.
In this episode, Dilar Dirik speaks to Ozlem Goner on Kurdish women's experiences with state violence and their resistance against it.  Ozlem Goner talks in particular about her research on the  massacre in her hometown of Dêrsim.

Ozlem Goner is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her book entitled, Turkish National Identity and its Outsiders: Memories of State Violence in Dersim, was published by Routledge in June 2017. She is a steering committee member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava.

This episode was recorded at a time in which the Turkish state under Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened yet another military invasion and occupation of Rojava, while leading military operations in Başûr (Southern Kurdistan) within Iraqi borders and continuing repression against Kurds and oppositions inside Turkish borders. As activists and organizations under the umbrella of the Kurdish women's liberation movement have repeatedly pointed out, these campaigns of state violence have an explicitly feminicidal character. In recent years, politically active Kurdish women have become a strategic target of assassinations, drone strikes, and imprisonment. Thus, Ozlem and Dilar discuss the continuities between episodes of violence and resistance, past and present, as well as opportunities for common struggles beyond borders. 


This project is made possible through the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research fund.

Music: Daye Daye - Aynur Dogan 

Palestinian women have a long history of struggling on multiple fronts. Throughout the history of the Israeli occupation, women organized themselves politically, socially, culturally and also militarily in the national liberation struggle. They were involved in guerrilla actions, but they also resisted as political prisoners, as organizers, and as carers. They participated en masse in the popular uprisings known as the Intifadas. Today, too, Palestinian women engage in a variety of strategies and tactics, from educational work to protest actions to building bridges of struggle internationally. On a daily basis, Palestinians continue to defend their lands and homes from settler-colonial violence, as illustrated in what came to be known as the Unity Intifada in 2021.

In this episode, Dr Yara Hawari, a Palestinian feminist scholar, writer, analyst and activist, walks us through the decades-old history Palestinian women’s resistance against settler colonialism, apartheid, and patriarchal violence. Gendered violence, as Yara describes, is part and parcel of the militaristic Israeli state, which not only rewards hypermasculinity inside Israeli society, but also activates patriarchy in Palestinian society to control populations, including women. All of these factors shape the lives of Palestinian women and their everyday struggles for a life in freedom and peace.

Dr Yara Hawari is the Senior Analyst of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where she taught various undergraduate courses and continues to be an honorary research fellow. In addition to her academic work, which focused on indigenous studies and oral history, she is a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English. Her debut novella, The Stone House, was published in December 2021.

Music: Palestinian Freedom Medley - Aya Halaf

This project is made possible through the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research fund.