Unbounding Homeland: Spatiality in the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s Project of Kurdistan

This article explores the critical issue of the spatiality of homeland, as emerging from foundational texts and personal accounts of members of the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM). The notion of homeland sits at the center of the interweaving of place and identity, but it often suffers from silent statism, which emphasizes a cartographic approach and a definition of homeland space in absolute terms. By connecting work in cultural and political geography on homeland with feminist geopolitical scholarship and poststatist epistemologies, this article frames the Kurdish homeland as a political project, of which spatiality must be understood in relational terms. It supports this argument by exploring four key elements of the KFM project: autonomy, women’s liberation, ecology, and self-defense.