Kurdistan has made fragile gains in gender studies, and can do more

 

By Dr. Nazand Begikhani and Professor Gill Hague 

In the last two decades, Iraqi Kurdistan Region has witnessed many changes with extensive modernising developments. However, this process has not been without setbacks and both regional and wider geo-political challenges, reverses and hold-ups. Gender relations and women’s issues have been at the centre of this process.

In 2006, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq committed itself to developing gender awareness and strategies to improve the position of women, including in relation to gender-based violence and honour crimes.  Some important legal and policy changes were put into place, with new research and strategy development conducted in specific response to, for example, violence in the name of ‘honour’. In 2012, the KRG supported the High Council of Women’s Affairs’ project and committed to an End Violence against Women Strategy making further moves to improve legal and policy responses. 

Nevertheless, research by us and other scholars has shown that, despite strong commitments from progressive individuals in government and some encouraging moves forward, the gains have often been fragile and the responses to gender inequality and violence against women have sometimes been haphazard.

Legal and strategic improvements have been slow to take hold with a lack of effective implementation, sufficient training, policy-building and awareness raising programs.  Service provision for abused women and their children remains problematic. Of course, regional and international factors have had a role in the slowing down of the process, including the emergence of ISIS, as well as the civil war in Syria. In the last few years considerable resources in Kurdistan Region have been spent to fight terrorism and to respond to the humanitarian crisis caused by the ISIS attacks on Mosul, Shingal and other cities, which had led to mass exodus of the population to Erbil, Duhok and Sulaimani.

However, the KRG in its 2020 Vision made a commitment to improve women’s status and position in society, which includes a gender balance policy and challenging violence against women.  In 2017, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani (advised over the last ten years by one of the authors, Dr. Nazand Begikhani), along with his government cabinet, pronounced a decree ordering the development of gender-related studies centres for research and teaching in all Kurdistan’s universities, to provide academic support for these proposed new initiatives. The aim of these centres will be to develop training, teaching and awareness-raising, both within the universities and within society more generally.

This is expected to include building the academic curriculum on gender-related subjects, initiating new courses on women’s issues, and developing new research projects and research capacity, as well as partnerships with other researchers and universities within Kurdistan and internationally. 

The gender studies centres will encourage liaisons with women’s NGOs, parliament and government-related bodies to assist in, and strengthen, the formation of networks of women’s services, and projects to combat gender inequality and violence. Overall, within professional organisations, universities, legal, social and police services, women’s organisations, and society more generally, these centres will aim to enable debates, teaching, training seminars, courses, and professional conferences to strengthen the structures that are in place and to build further consciousness about the nature, incidence, extent and impacts of violence against women, as well as gender inequality.

Developments along these lines have already taken place at several universities including, the University of Sulaimani where in 2010-2011 a pioneering Gender and Violence Studies Centre (GVSC) was established in the Department of Sociology and later moved to the presidential section. Initiated by scholars at the University of Bristol and funded initially by the British Council with matched funding from the Kurdistan Regional Government, GVSC has now existed for eight years and has been developed with some input from the University of Bristol.

The Centre has developed premises, courses for students on gender-based violence and conferences and discussions on wider gender issues. Despite many challenges, its staff have attempted to build networks with women’s services, media networks, and to build capacity on women’s issues more generally. A book of the various papers and discussions in which they have participated is presently in production. The Centre has been a first of its kind to endure, beginning the process of pioneering something new on gender issues in the university context not only in Kurdistan, but across much of the wider Near and Middle East.

However, despite hard work by many of its Sulaimani-based staff and its international partners, there have been difficulties in developing the GVSC due to wavering commitment, structural complexities in the male-dominated context of most Kurdish universities, and some criticism from conservatives and from those less committed to challenging discrimination and violence against women. 

Also, as well as academic capacity building, the Centre has always had a policy emphasis on service development, social change and action, which some have critiqued as being insufficiently intellectual, and as cooperating with ‘un-democratic’ government structures.  Criticisms of this kind came from some so-called intellectuals who have behaved like ‘cultural oligarchs,’ and who personally targeted the women who initiated the project.

Nevertheless, the seeds have been sown and currently there are several gender studies centres in the Kurdistan Region, including the Kurdistan Gender Studies Centre at Soran University (2015) and the Gender and Development Centre

at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani (2016). The latter was based on a proposal similar to the one which led to the first Sulaimaniya Centre, drafted in 2015 by Dr. Begikhani at the request of Barham Salih, current Iraqi president and chair of the AUIS. As this is now linked to the Iraqi president, it received in November 2018 a large fund from the EU to develop a regional and national gender curriculum across Iraq.

These are all good moves and the staff working at these centres should not be held back by attacks and criticism. If the new government decree to establish such centres across Kurdistan is to be effectively implemented, it will be important to use and build on the past experience and recent developments.  As these attempts move forward, we can perhaps share experiences in building for the future, using insights from inside, as well from international institutions and also from women’s services and the High Council of Women’s Affairs, to generate studies on gender and violence against women (and children) and to integrate them into Kurdistan’s universities. 

The seeds have been planted and there is now official and government support as well as international efforts towards nurturing these seeds. A future in which Kurdistan takes on gender issues and gender-based violence in a more systematic way, supported by dedicated, embedded and respected gender studies centres in all our universities, beckons. We can make it happen.


Dr. Nazand Begikhani is a senior research fellow at the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, Center for Gender and Violence Research. She serves as an advisor to the Kurdistan Region prime minister on higher education and gender, and has worked as an advisor with the United Nations and human rights organizations. 

Professor Gill Hague is professor emeritus at the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, Center for Gender and Violence Research. She has had a pioneering role in establishing studies into violence against women in the United Kingdom and globally.  

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.