‘Martyrs and Heroines’ vs. ‘Victims and Suicide Attackers’

A Critical Discourse Analysis of YPJ’s and the UK media representations of the YPJ’s ideological agency

Amelie Malmgren and Michelle Fabiana Palharini Malmö University, May 18, 2018 Media and Communication Studies: Culture, Collaborative Media, and the Creative Industries One-year Master Thesis (15 Credits) Spring, 2018 Supervisor: Ilkin Mehrabov Examiner: Michael Krona Abstract

The present thesis compares media representations of Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ or the Women’s Protection Units), an all-female Kurdish military organisation, in British media versus the organisation’s own media outlets, with the aim to see how they differ, more specifically in terms of representations of their ideological agency. By utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA) in combination with postcolonial theory, the media construction of four soldiers’ deaths have been scrutinized in 30 media texts in order to provide a deeper understanding of the hegemonic discourses and sociocultural practices which underpin these constructions. The result shows a discrepancy in terms of representations of YPJ’s ideological agency. On the one hand, YPJ adopts an explicit effort to assert their ideology through a propagandistic discourse that emphasises their values of resistance, freedom, egalitarianism, gender emancipation and democratic confederalism, portraying their fighters as fearless martyrs and heroines that are determined to die for their cause. On the other hand, the UK media represent YPJ’s ideology in generic ways in which hidden ideological ‘us vs. them’ representations are deeply rooted in a broader naturalised Western hegemonic discourse, with portrayals of YPJ’s fallen soldiers mostly characterised by sensationalism and victimisation. One part of such hidden ideological agenda is the way in which YPJ constantly gets included in, and excluded from, ‘us’ (the West), depending on who the enemy is, in addition to mainly receiving media coverage in direct relation to ISIS, a common Western enemy. The result is a representation that endorses YPJ’s fight within a hegemonic Western discourse, neglecting their ideological agency. This has sociocultural implications since such hegemonic discourse misrepresents YPJ’s struggle, constructing their fight mostly as part of a Western counterterrorist strategy, which further legitimises the Western power to construct history based on its own premises and claims of truth.

Key words: YPJ, UK media, media representations, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Postcolonial studies, hegemonic discourse, sensationalism, victimisation, Kurdish female fighters

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List of Abbreviations

PKK - Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (Kurdistan Worker’s Party)

PYD - Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (Democratic Union Party)

YAJK - Yekitiya Azadiya Jinen Kurdistan (Union of Free Women of Kurdistan)

YJA STAR - Yekîneyên Jinên Azad ên Star (Free Women's STAR Units)

YPG - Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (People's Protection Units)

YPJ - Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (Women’s Protection Units)

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Table of Contents Abstract...... 2 List of Abbreviations ...... 3 Table of Contents ...... 4 1. Introduction...... 6 1.1 Aim and research questions ...... 7 1.2 Relevance to Media and Communication studies ...... 8 1.3 Delimitations ...... 8 1.4 Thesis Outline ...... 9 2. Literature review ...... 10 2.1 Representation of female soldiers in Western media ...... 10 2.2 YPJ in Western media ...... 13 3. Contextualisation ...... 16 3.1 The Kurds ...... 16 3.2 The Kurds in Syria ...... 16 3.3 The Syrian war: atrocities and opportunities ...... 17 3.4 The Rojava revolution ...... 18 3.5 Kurdish women’s movement ...... 20 3.6 YPJ ...... 24 4. Analytical Framework ...... 26 4.1 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ...... 27 4.2 Discourse / Semiosis ...... 30 4.3 Power...... 31 4.4 Ideology ...... 33 4.5 van Dijk’s ideological square ...... 35 4.6 Postcolonial theory ...... 36 4.6.1 Otherness ...... 37 5. Methodology ...... 39 5.1 CDA and research strategy ...... 40 5.2 Norman Fairclough: CDA as a method ...... 41 5.3 Data Collection ...... 43 5.3.1 Limitations ...... 43 5.3.2 Organisation and coding ...... 45 5.4 Subjectivity, objectivity and reflectivity ...... 46 6. Analysis ...... 48 6.1. Case introduction ...... 48

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6.1.1 Arin Mirkan ...... 48 6.1.2 Anna Campbell ...... 48 6.1.3 Avesta Xabur ...... 49 6.1.4 Barin Kobani ...... 49 6.2 Case 1: Arin Mirkan ...... 49 6.2.1 YPJ’s media...... 49 6.2.2 British media ...... 53 6.3 Case 2: Anna Campbell ...... 59 6.3.1 YPJ’s media...... 59 6.3.2 British media ...... 63 6.4 Case 3: Avesta Xabur ...... 67 6.4.1 YPJ’s media...... 67 6.5 Case 4: Barin Kobani ...... 70 6.5.1 British media ...... 70 6.6 Analytical discussion...... 74 6.6.1 Us vs. them (Otherness) ...... 74 6.6.2 Representations of fallen YPJ soldiers: sensationalist and propagandistic discourses ...... 76 7. Conclusion ...... 79 7.1 Scope for further research ...... 82 References ...... 84 List of Figures ...... 95 Appendix 1: Corpus ...... 96 Appendix 2: Coding ...... 101

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1. Introduction

“A country can’t be free unless the women are free”

(Öcalan, 2013, p. 7)

On March 15, 2018, Anna Campbell was killed by a Turkish air strike in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria and the news quickly spread around the world. Mostly because Campbell was the first British woman to die while volunteering in the war against ISIS (Dearden & Osbourne, 2018), but also because she was fighting alongside Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ or Women’s Protection Units in English), an all-female military organisation.

The Turkish onslaught on Afrin, known as Operation Olive Branch, constitutes one of the latest chapters in the Syrian crisis; a seven-year long conflict which involves various international political actors and thus has received the largest media war coverage in this millennium (Toivanen & Baser, 2016). However, even if the YPJ, with whom Anna Campbell fought side by side, have been engaged in armed battle since their establishment in March 2013 and the history of Kurdish female soldiers long proceeds the domino effect of the Arab Uprisings (Dirik, 2014), it was not until the ISIS’ siege of the autonomous Kurdish canton of Kobane in 2014 that they started to receive coverage in the Anglophone media (Szanto, 2016). A surge of attention swiftly spread among the Western media houses and on social media stories about YPJ soldiers like that of ‘The Angel of Kobane’1 went viral. Before the year was over, the organisation had been featured in an extensive photojournalistic piece in NBC News (Trieb, 2014), on CNN’s ‘Women of the year’ list alongside German politician Angela Merkel and British actress Emma Watson (CNN, 2014) as well as on BBC #trending (Devichand et al., 2014).

By now a plethora of news stories, comments and reports have been written about YPJ, often accompanied by visual illustrations and interviews (Toivanen & Baser, 2016). However, the majority of the attention the soldiers have received has been in direct

1 In 2014 a photograph of a YPJ soldier smiling into the camera while giving the victory sign was shared in the thousands on Facebook and Twitter where she was dubbed ‘The Angel of Kobane’. Accompanying texts claimed she had killed over a hundred ISIS fighters single-handedly, making her a symbol of resistance. Later the same image resurfaced in tweets claiming that she had been captivated and beheaded by ISIS. According to BBC News both stories were fabricated and ‘The Angel of Kobane’ never existed (Devichand et al., 2014). 6 relation to their assumed antithesis – ISIS. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to find news on the organisation where ISIS is not mentioned. This hyperbolic juxtaposition of ‘female’ fighting ‘male’ has also led to a media representation of YPJ as “modern-day heroine figures that are largely glorified” (p. 294). Another equally popular rendering in Western media, especially among tabloids, is an exaggerated focus on the soldiers’ physical appearance and headlines like ‘Battling beauty takes her own life to avoid Islamic State torture’ (Lawton, 2014), ‘Angelina Jolie of Kurdistan dies while battling ISIS’ (Robinson, 2016) and ‘Female Kurd soldiers fighting ISIS explain why they wear lipstick and make-up on battlefield’ (Webb, 2016) serve as good examples.

What we find troubling is that, regardless of whether YPJ soldiers have been represented as heroic superwomen fighting ISIS or as gun-toting beauties, portrayals in Western media have often neglected to mention that the organisation’s history is highly intertwined with that of the Kurdish freedom movement (Dirik, 2014). Nor do they tend to clarify that YPJ is part of the armed wing of Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in Northern Syria which practises democratic confederalism and is held by scholars as one of the most radical social experiments in today’s Middle East (Cemgil & Hoffmann, 2016; Hunt, 2017). Rather on the contrary, if the organisation’s ideological underpinnings do receive attention, it is mostly in simplistic and trivialised ways (Alonso Soriano, 2016). It might therefore not come as a surprise that the Western media representations of YPJ have already received criticism from scholars and activists alike (see Alonso Soriano, 2016; Dirik, 2014, 2015a; Szanto, 2016; Tank, 2017; Toivanen & Baser, 2016).

What is surprising, however, is that no one within Anglophone academia has yet focused on how YPJ represent themselves. Especially considering that they are active media makers and frequently update their web page, Facebook page and Twitter account.

1.1 Aim and research questions

The purpose of this study is to provide a deeper understanding of how YPJ portray themselves in the media by comparing their self-produced representations to those of Western media in order to see how they contrast. We believe that this serves as a good approach to critically reflect upon the monolithic and reductionist representations of YPJ’s ideological agency in the Western media. Thus, by examining four different case

7 studies with the help of Critical Discourse Analysis in combination with Postcolonial theory, we aim to problematize Western media discourses on the YPJ’s ideological agency while contrasting it with how YPJ choose to portray themselves. As such, we pose the following main research question:

How does YPJ's own media representation differ from the way the organisation is commonly portrayed in Western mainstream media?

We also pose the following operational sub questions in order to guide the research process:

How do YPJ portray themselves in terms of their ideology through their media channels?

How do Western media portray YPJ and their ideological agency? How do their portrayals differ from that of YPJ?

1.2 Relevance to Media and Communication studies

This thesis explores two opposing ways of presenting the same group of women, namely YPJ soldiers engaged in the Syrian war. The study of representations in media is important within the field of Media and Communication Studies and this thesis contributes with a stimulating discussion on the Western media discourses surrounding female soldiers, in addition to an analysis of YPJ’s own media representation - a research topic which to our knowledge has not been explored in English-speaking academia before. As a matter of fact, research on YPJ from a Media and Communication perspective remains scarce, thus, this study should be considered a humble addition to an area in dire need of further investigation.

1.3 Delimitations

In order to answer the abovementioned research questions we will focus on four different YPJ soldiers’ death and analyse how they have been portrayed in YPJ’s own media

8 channels and British media respectively2. Our emphasis is on larger hegemonic discourses and sociocultural practices in Western verses Kurdish society, thus, media outlets from each culture will be analysed together and we will not focus on institutional processes and differences within each media house. We will further limit our study to the analysis of these media representations and will not discuss how they have been received by audiences and the possible consequences they might have had. Neither do we aim to provide an exhaustive analysis of the media representations of the Syrian conflict as a whole, or give a full account of the political specifics that led up to each soldier’s death. Our interest lies solely in analysing how these four cases have been portrayed in a Western context versus YPJ’s own media outlets and problematize the hegemonic discourses within these representations.

1.4 Thesis Outline

Our study consists of 7 chapters. In this first introductory chapter we have outlined our area of interest in addition to presenting our research questions, choice of methodology and analytical framework. In addition, we have also situated the thesis within Media and Communication Studies. In chapter two, Literature review, we present relevant research on media representations of the female soldier with particular focus on previous research conducted on media portrayals of YPJ. In the following chapter, Contextualisation, we provide an extensive account of the Kurdish freedom movement, as well as YPJ’s background and ideology. In chapter four, Analytical Framework, the analytical structure that guides this study is explained and motivated. Chapter five, Methodology, focuses on our methodological considerations in addition to a discussion on our corpus, limitations and reflexivity in qualitative research. In chapter six, named Analysis, we present an analysis of our selected data by using our analytical framework in combination with abovementioned methodology. The final chapter, Conclusion, is where our findings are presented together with a concluding discussion before areas for further research are suggested.

2 See chapter 5 for a detailed discussion on sample. 9

2. Literature review

Even if YPJ’s own media representation has not (to our knowledge) been explored within English-speaking academia before, a fair amount of research has been conducted on Euro- American media representations on female soldiers in general. In this chapter we present previous research which is relevant to our thesis, with a special focus on the studies conducted on Western media portrayals of YPJ.

2.1 Representation of female soldiers in Western media

The presence of women in war is certainly not new and various scholars have already paid attention to the common perceptions and representations of female soldiers engaged in armed conflicts around the world. In 1982 Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote one of the foundational texts on war and gender where she problematizes the illusion of men as ‘Just Warriors’ and women as ‘Beautiful Souls’ and convincingly argues for a disenthrallment of the two tropes by illuminating to what extent they have come to define women as non- combatants and men as incorrigible beasts and warriors. Unfortunately, we argue, her reasoning is still as relevant today and can be seen echoed in various pieces of contemporary research on media representation of women engaged in armed conflict during the last decade. American scholar Brigitte L. Nacos’ study on female terrorists, for example, concludes that, even if there is no evidence that female terrorists are fundamentally different from their male counterparts in terms of motivation, ideological dedication and brutality, Western media’s treatment of them is still “consistent with the patterns of societal gender stereotypes” (2005, p. 436).

Nacos establishes six frames that are used in media in order to describe female terrorists and to validate and elucidate behaviour that is considered out-of-character for women, namely; (1) The Physical Appearance frame, (2) The Family Connection frame, (3) Terrorist for the Sake of Love frame, (4) The Women’s Lib/Equality frame, (5) The Tough-as-Males/Tougher-than-Men frame, and finally (6) The Bored, Naïve, Out-of- touch-with-reality frame (2005, pp. 438-445). Even if these categories are not mutually exclusive and often tend to overlap, none of them, as Pinar Tank points out, “adequately reflects women’s agency from a political or ideological vantage point” (Tank, 2017, p. 410). Rather on the contrary, by relying on frames like these, Western media undermines

10 female fighters’ political agenda by instead focusing on features which are easier to sell to their readers.

One such case is highlighted in Mats Utas’ (2005) research on female fighters in the Liberian civil war (1999-2003); that of a woman called Black Diamond. At the time she was Liberia’s highest-ranking female rebel, “a fearsome commander known for handcuffing wayward soldiers - male and female - to an air conditioning grate and beating them with a rubber hose” (Itano, 2003, para 6). According to Utas (2005), her brutality made her a counter-hegemonic actor to the dominant Western gender discourse and thus renowned in media for not behaving as an ordinary woman-at-war who bears the brunt of male violence (and consequently falling under Nacos’ (2005) The Tough-as- Males/Tougher-than-Men frame). Like Elshtain (1982), Utas too points out that the “binary opposition between peaceful women and violent men runs deep in Western emotio-histories” (2005, p. 405) and the appearance of Black Diamond and her fellow female soldiers therefore resulted in a state of confusion among journalists and an obsession with their feminine traits like hair-does, makeup and clothes; everything that stood in stark contrast to their roles as rebel combatants. To exemplify his reasoning Utas refers to the following excerpt from an article published in the Guardian, where Black Diamond is elaborately described by journalist Rory Caroll:

Her look is Black Panther-turned-movie star: mirror sunglasses, frizzy wig beneath the beret, silver earrings, red-painted nails. After clearing the port with just a handful of female fighters, she reloaded the Kalashnikov, adjusted the Colt .38 wedged in her hip and roared off in a silver Mitsubishi pick-up. (Carroll, 2003 cited in Utas, 2005, p. 404).

Chris Coulter, who researched interpretations on female fighters in the neighbouring country of Sierra Leone, complements Utas’ observation by stating that there is “decidedly a sexualized language in Western media descriptions of West African female fighters” (Coulter, 2008, p. 64). Coulter also agrees with Utas’ conclusion that, even if the portrayals of Black Diamond definitely did not deny her agency, they did ultimately reproduce and reinforce a broader dominant media frame that “has established Liberia as a case of difference—of the “African Other” to the rest of the world” (Utas, 2005, p. 404). In ‘normal’ African conflicts, like those in Uganda and Congo, women participated in rebel movements too but only by occupying supporting roles: “(t)hey cook, clean, and

11 often sleep with soldiers – not always by choice” (Itano, 2003, para 4). In other words, functions which did not challenge the conventional perception of what women in war do (and do not) and thus made them far less interesting to Western media outlets.

Another group of women engaged in conflict who has received considerable attention are the Palestinian female suicide bombers. Dorit Naaman (2007), who conducted research on their representation in Western (and Arabic) media found that, in contrast to the Black Diamond’s sensationalized hyper-agency, these women’s agency was completely removed. Naaman therefore concludes that “the most common way that Western media grapple with the deviation from traditional womanly roles is by adopting a thesis that female suicide bombers are victims of patriarchy” (2007, p. 943). She too exemplifies her argument with an article from the Guardian, where writer Giles Foden raises the question if men are in fact to blame for the women in terrorism and turns to Dr. Meir Litvak from Tel Aviv University for an answer:

Litvak certainly believes the role of women in Muslim suicide bombing is a function of patriarchal control: “Those who send these women do not really care for women’s rights,” he says. “They are exploiting the personal frustrations and grievances of these women for their own political goals, while they continue to limit the role of women in other aspects of life. (Foden, 2003 cited in Naaman, 2007, p. 943).

In combination with similar examples, Naaman convincingly argues that Western media’s treatment of Palestinian female suicide bombers relies on convenient gendered (and religious) stereotypes which do not consider the fact that women, like men, are fully capable of choosing to give up their life for a political cause. Rather on the contrary, by depicting them as “deviant from prescribed forms of femininity, forms that emphasize a woman’s delicacy and fragility but also her generosity, caring nature, motherliness, and sensitivity to others’ needs” (Naaman, 2007, p. 936) media places them in a Western hegemonic framework, which “enables readers and viewers to maintain both the comfortable gender status quo and their preconceived notions about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” (Naaman, 2007, p. 952).

Sara Struckman (2010), yet another scholar who has focused on representations of female suicide bombers in Western media, reaches the same conclusion. She analysed how the

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Black Widows – Chechen women who carried out suicide bombings to avenge lost husbands and sons during the country’s struggle for independence (and thus falling under Nacos’ (2005) Terrorist for the Sake of Love frame) – were portrayed in the New York Times. Struckman highlights that the term Black Widow was initially coined by Russian media outlets and later adopted by Western media; however, the New York Times did not fully buy the motivation given for the women’s violent actions. Consequently, the newspaper had to provide other culturally suitable reasons to account for their incentive and in doing so it “simultaneously broke away from and remained faithful to media’s role as a ‘circuit of culture’, skilfully disseminating acceptable feminine- especially acceptable Western feminine – gender roles” (Struckman, 2010, p. 92). The result of her research shows that most of the coverage suggests that “men are workers with political motivations and women are drawn into violence and terrorism only through their relationships with men” (Struckman, 2010, p.103); and, even if the Black Widow’s motivation for carrying out vengeance was questioned, the New York Times still relied heavily on gendered explanations which stripped the Black Widows of agency, “effectively robbing them of a desire on political grounds to fight for the Chechen cause” (Struckman, 2010, p. 103). A conclusion highly similar to that of Naaman’s (2007) research on the Palestinian female suicide bombers.

As above examples have shown, Western media representations of women engaged in armed conflict are more often than not perpetuating Elshtain’s (1982) binary opposition of ‘violent men as perpetrators’ and ‘women as victims’ (Koçer, 2016). Or, in cases like that of Black Diamond, whose brutality was hard to victimize, the female soldier is portrayed as something exceptional and deviant (Coulter, 2008, p 62), even if a growing body of research argues that women do join militant organisations for “their own purposes that they aim to fulfil within the ideology of militancy” (Olshanska, 2014, p. 9) and that women do commit violent actions, rationally or irrationally, just like men (see Alison, 2004; Cohen, 2013; Naaman, 2007; Sjoberg & Gentry, 2007).

2.2 YPJ in Western media

As mentioned in the introduction, YPJ have just recently started to receive attention by scholars and mainly within the fields of Peace and Conflict, Feminist, and Middle Eastern

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Studies. There are, however, a few researchers who have analysed how the organisation and its soldiers have been represented in Western media. Mari Toivan and Bahar Baser, for example, compare how YPJ are portrayed in British and French media between 2014 and 2015 and distinguish four main frames used for depiction - 1) Struggle for equality/emancipation/liberation, 2) Personal/emotional motivations, 3) Physical appearance, and 4) Exceptionalism (Toivan et al., 2016, p. 301) - which are not too different from those of Nacos’ (2005) mentioned above. Toivan and Baser conclude that, even if some dissimilarities could be found between the countries (British media tended to emphasize the evolution from victimhood to female heroes fighting ISIS, whereas French media chose to present them as modern-day Joan of Arcs defending the Kurdish liberté, égalité, fraternité (2016, p. 310) – YPJ were mainly portrayed with gendered agency and, just like Black Diamond (Utas, 2005), sensationalized for doing a ‘men’s job’ (Toivan & Baser 2016, p. 310). Little attention was paid to YPJ’s political agenda and their relation to the Kurdish Workers’ Party, PKK (which is criminalized in both countries), thus Toivan and Baser argue that “the frames that the media used to narrate female Kurdish fighters made their stories palatable for French and British audiences by omitting certain aspects that might come across as controversial” (2016, p. 310). An observation that is echoed in Pinar Tank’s article, where she concludes that “(d)espite a rising interest in Kurdish female fighters, few reports in English-language mainstream media investigate these fighters’ political agenda” (2017, p. 406). And, like Toivan and Baser (2016), Tank too found that the narratives used by media when depicting YPJ “speak to preconceived notions of femininity, centred on frailty and victimhood” (Tank, 2017, p. 406).

Another scholar who has also analysed media representations of YPJ is Edith Szanto (2016), although in a slightly different way. Her research focuses on the most widely disseminated pictures and videos in Anglophone media of women involved in the Syrian uprising and, as far as YPJ, she raises a highly interesting question. Why have they received so much attention compared to other all-female military organisations, like Hara’ir Dayr al-Zawr (Free Women of Dayr al-Zawr), Banat al-Walid (Daughters of al- Walid) and Ummuna ‘A’ischa (Our Mother Aisha), who are also fighting in the Syrian war (2016, p. 310)? Szanto conjectures that these groups are too ‘Muslim’ for the Euro- American taste and, thus, harder to sell than YPJ, who are interestingly ‘oriental’ but not too much so (2016, p. 310).

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Yet, the hardest critique of Western media representations of YPJ undoubtedly comes from Dilar Dirik (2014; 2015b), a scholar and Kurdish activist, who writes that:

Typical of western media's myopia, instead of considering the implications of women taking up arms in what is essentially a patriarchal society - especially against a group that rapes and sells women as sex-slaves - even fashion magazines appropriate the struggle of Kurdish women for their own sensationalist purposes (2014, para 4).

She also highlights that Western media “erroneously present Kurdish women fighters as a novel phenomenon” (Dirik, 2014, para 2), when the truth is that they have been fighting for decades, the only difference is that they did so “with very little media attention” (ibid. para 16).

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3. Contextualisation

In this section, we seek to contextualize the background of YPJ and to offer a deeper understanding of the organisation from a social, historical and, most importantly, ideological perspective. In order to do so, however, we deem it necessary to begin with a brief historical background on the Kurds, the oppression they have been submitted to and how the Syrian Kurds were able to establish themselves politically and military in in the northern part of the country known as Rojava. We will then provide an explanation of their current politics and the Kurdish Women’s movement in order to understand how and why YPJ emerged.

3.1 The Kurds

The Kurds are an indigenous ethnic minority native to the Kurdistan region, or the “Land of the Kurds” (Gunter, 2014, p. 1), which is situated in the mountainous Middle Eastern borders at the convergence of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Estimates on their population size vary greatly, with the most realistic approximations ranging from 35-40 million, of which around 19 million are found in Turkey, 10-18 million in Iran, 5.6 million in Iraq, 3 million in Syria, 0.5 million in the former Soviet Union and around 1 million in Europe (Knapp, 2016, p. 1). They compose the third biggest ethnic group in the Middle East (after Arabs and Turks) (ibid.) and the world’s biggest ethnic group that does not possess their own independent state (Gunter, 2014, p. 1). Throughout the 21st century they have been living under great injustice, suffering from several forms of oppression such as denial of territory and political voice, murder and persecution (Kurdistan National Congress, 2014, p. 4; Federici, 2015, p. 81).

3.2 The Kurds in Syria

In Syria, the Kurds compose the country’s second largest ethnicity and they have long been considered a threat to Syria’s Arab nationalistic identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, various efforts were carried out to ‘arabise’ the Kurdish regions in the North; for example the sudden government population census in 1962 when the Syrian Kurdish population was requested to prove that they had been residing there since (at least) 1945. All Syrian

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Kurds who could not prove it lost their citizenship, resulting in around 120,000 Kurds becoming “ajanib” (foreigner in Arabic) overnight (Human Rights Watch, 1996). As such they were not entitled to passports and could not exercise “the internationally legal right to freedom of movement and to legally leave and return their own country (Syria)” (ibid. p. 3). Unregistered Kurds also lost civil rights like voting, participating in politics, legally marry and owning property (Tank, 2017, p. 412). Further efforts to arabise the Syrian Kurds led to Kurdish towns receiving Arabic names, Arabs receiving Kurdish land, the prohibition of officially using the Kurdish language and celebrating Kurdish folklore and festivities. (Human Rights Watch, 2009; Kurdistan National Congress, 2014).

The Syrian government’s harsh treatment also made it difficult for Kurds to mobilise and find political outlets, despite a popular desire to improve their standings (Federici, 2015, p. 82). There have been efforts though, like the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria founded in 1957, but most of the early political aspirations were weak and fragmented, owing in part to the constant suppression from the Syrian government. Under the Hafez al-Assad regime Kurdish political parties and organisations were outright banned and classified as illegal (Federici, 2015, p. 82). Thus, when Kurdish protesters demonstrated openly en masse for the first time in Qamishli in 2004, the government responded with swift violence resulting in mass arrests and more than 30 people being killed (Amnesty International, 2004).

3.3 The Syrian war: atrocities and opportunities

The onset of the war in Syria, sparked by the Arabic Uprising in 2011, confronted the Assad regime with the prospect of several enemy fronts and in 2012 the government was forced to withdraw its security forces from the country’s Kurdish-populated areas in the North. The assumption was that the Kurds would not be able to challenge the government anyway and that local armed militias, especially ISIS, would keep them under control (Tank, 2017). This sudden power vacuum, however, presented the local Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) with the opportunity to raise to power, and by late 2013 three Kurdish cantons (Afrin, Cizîrê and Kobani) in the region of Rojava had been declared autonomous (Toivanen & Baser, 2016; Federici, 2015). This would have been inconceivable, as noted by Federici (2015), before the outbreak of the Syrian war.

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Figure 1 - Map of Rojava as of February 2014 (wikipedia.com, n.d.) (CC0 1.0)

PYD was initially established in 2003 by former members of Turkish PKK (the Kurdish Workers’ Party), to whom Syria gave temporary sanctuary during the 1990s since they were able to use the party as a “bargain chip against the Turkish state’s control of the water flowing from the Euphrates River into Syria” (Tank, 2017, pp. 413-414). During this period many Syrian Kurds joined the PKK and when the party was ousted from the country in 1998 as a result of war threats from Turkey, PYD emerged as an offshoot to the original (Gunes & Lowe, 2015). This connection is often denied due to PKK being listed as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States (Toivar & Baser, 2016). However, as Gunes and Lowe point out, it was this affiliation that gave PYD “greater discipline, organization and strategic planning in comparison with the older, fissiparous Kurdish parties” (2015, p. 4) and thus the ability to establish themselves as the main Kurdish party in northern Syria. Another new dynamic brought on by the Syrian war was the militarisation of the Syrian Kurdish struggle which became necessary, especially with the rise of ISIS (ibid.). As such, PYD’s armed wings YPG (People’s Protection Unit) and their female equivalent YPJ came to play key roles in the establishment of Rojava as an autonomous region (Federici, 2015).

3.4 The Rojava revolution

PYD’s Rojava project is remarkable in many ways but what makes it exceptional (Cemgil & Hoffmann, 2016; Gunes & Lowe, 2015; Hunt, 2017) is that it marks the first attempt to govern according to democratic confederalism, a political model developed by PKK’s

18 former leader, Abdullah Öcalan, who continues to lead the Kurdish freedom movement (Gunes & Lowe, 2015, p. 5). When Öcalan established PKK in 1978, it was a Marxist- Leninist movement aimed at achieving Kurdish independence through waging an insurgency against the Turkish government (Moreland, 2017). However, over the years Öcalan developed his ideology, especially after Syria’s aforementioned ousting of PKK in 1998 and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment by the Turkish state. While in solitary confinement, Öcalan came in contact with the writings of American eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin, whose thoughts on social transformation eventually led Öcalan to a radical paradigm shift: the Kurdish movement should renounce from their initial goal to establish a socialistic state of their own and instead aim for a pluralistic society where multi-lingual, multinational and multi-religious citizens would co-exist peacefully under a self- managing institutional structure (TATORT, 2013, p. 20). This political metamorphosis was the result of a critical reflection upon the capitalist society, which Öcalan deems a failure, and his conviction that it is inseparable from the nation-state model.

It is often said that the nation-state is concerned with the fate of the common people. This is not true. Rather, it is the national governor of the worldwide capitalist system, a vassal of the capitalist modernity which is more deeply entangled in the dominant structures of the capital than we usually tend to assume: It is a colony of the capital (Öcalan, 2011, p. 13).

Öcalan further argues that the capitalist system (and as a result the nation-state too) leads to unbalanced power distribution, exploitation and cultural assimilation (2011, pp. 11- 12). Thus, “a separate Kurdish nation-state does not make sense for the Kurds” since it would only perpetuate their subjugation and “replace the old chains by new ones or even enhance the repression” (p. 19). Instead he proposes democratic confederalism, a system of “political self-administration, in which all groups of the society and all cultural identities express themselves in local meetings, general conventions, and councils” (p. 26), an administration which is “flexible, multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented” and where “ecology and feminism are central pillars” (p. 21).

Öcalan’s ideas are currently being implemented in Rojava and, as such, each of the region’s three cantons, Afrin, Cizîrê and Kobani, has its own government, constitution and parliament in addition to its own laws, courts and police forces. There are quotas in

19 place to ensure that all ethnicities3 are represented and that at least 40 per cent of all institutions, administrations and bodies are comprised by one of the sexes. In addition, male/female co-presidency is applied in order to ensure gender equality (Kurdistan National Congress, 2014). Each canton decide over their own social systems and education and in the Charter of Democratic Autonomy, the issue of natural resources, economy and property is highlighted as follow:

“The economic system in the areas of self-administration [Democratic Autonomy] work in an equitable and sustainable global development based manner, based on the development of science and technology, which aim at ensuring humanitarian needs and a decent standard of living for all citizens, through the increase of production and efficiency, and by ensuring a participatory economy whilst promoting competition in accordance with the principle of Democratic Autonomy ("Each according to his/her work"), and preventing monopoly and applying social justice” (2014, pp. 12-13).

Each canton also has its own set of YPG and YPJ armies, which together defend Rojava.

3.5 Kurdish women’s movement

Even if it were the female combatants of YPJ who stole the headlines in 2014 when they defeated ISIS in Kobani, it is important to point out that female soldiers are not new in the Kurdish struggle. Rather on the contrary, Kurdish women have been actively engaged in battle since the establishment of PKK in 1978 (Tank, 2017, p. 416) and, during the party’s insurgence against the Turkish state, many of the infamous suicide bombings were carried out by female soldiers (Gunes, 2013).

According to Çağlayan, Öcalan recognized early on that PKK would need the support and active participation of women, if the “People’s war” he had initiated against Turkey was to be successful (2012, p. 9). The party therefore commenced an intense female mobilisation, especially in the rural areas of the country. In doing so, they also challenged

3 In Rojava Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians (Assyrian Chaldeans and Arameans), Turkmen, Armenians, and Chechens, who religiously follow Islam, Christianity and Yazidism live together (Kurdistan National Congress, 2014, p. 12). 20 traditional Kurdish family structures which strictly controlled women under patriarchal rule at the time (Çağlayan, 2012, p. 9). As pointed out by Tezcür, “many women (…) associated joining the insurgency with the opportunity to leave oppressive conditions” (2014, p. 258) and the number of female soldiers steadily increased. PKK provided an opportunity to fight against Turkey but also against the gendered hierarchies within their own society in which “(l)ack of education, economic dependency, lack of freedom, honor killings and similar modes of women’s subjugation ran rampant” (Pavičić-Ivelja, 2017, p. 138).

In the 1990s when the conflict between PKK and Turkey escalated, female soldiers made crucial contributions on the battlefield and women like Berı̂ tan, who killed herself instead of surrendering to the enemy in 1992, became role models for male and female soldiers alike, as well as important symbols for the Kurdish Women’s movement (Melis, 2016, para 4). Female PKK soldiers also begun to organise autonomously within the organisation and form their own military structures. In 1993 YAJK - Yekitiya Azadiya Jinen Kurdistan (Union of Free Women of Kurdistan)4 was established; a women’s-only guerrilla army complete with its own headquarters, commanders and training academies in the mountains of Kurdistan (Çiçek, 2015, para 12). This was actively encouraged by Öcalan (ibid.), whose initial criticism of patriarchy had deepened; by now he was convinced that only a bottom-up-approach which simultaneously addressed gender biases would bring freedom and equality to the Kurds. His theory was based on the conclusion that, if women constituted the most oppressed subgroup within a larger disempowered class (which they clearly did) the aspiration towards empowerment “must start from none other than women themselves since the liberation of the most oppressed subgroup consequently represents the liberation of groups and subgroups on all levels above it” (Pavičić-Ivelja, 2017, p. 137); much like the pyramid of capitalism in Marxist theory where the working class at the bottom supports all other classes but also have the power to topple the existing social order by revolting. In Öcalan’s own words:

The extent to which society can be thoroughly transformed is determined by the extent of the transformation attained by women. Similarly, the level of woman’s

4 YAJK still exists today but under the name YJA STAR - Yekîneyên Jinên Azad ên Star (Free Women's STAR Units) (Çiçek, 2015, para 12) 21

freedom and equality determines the freedom and equality of all sections of society. (2013, p. 57).

This theory eventually matured into a social science that Öcalan named Jineology, which literally translates into ‘the science of women’ (‘jin’ is the Kurdish word for woman) (Neven & Schäfers, 2017). The main aim behind Jineology is to bridge the gap that contemporary social sciences cannot fill since they are deemed too fragmented and divided (Nurhak, 2014). As a social science Jineology stems from Öcalan’s criticism of the development of existing scientific disciplines “within the framework of capitalist modernity” and following these tenets, it envisages a holistic slant on humankind, society and the universe; a “new epistemological approach fuelled by a conscience of freedom” (Valiente, 2015, para 19), which puts women at its core and holds their liberation as the solution. A central tenet in Jineology is the ‘principle of resistance’, which states that:

Women must see life as a domain for resistance. This is because without resistance women are being kept captive between four walls. Women are being loitered with simple tasks; therefore, to counter this, women must empower themselves by resisting in every possible way. (Öcalan, 2013 cited in Valiente, 2015, para 14).

A principle that not only gives women the right to resist, but also to defend themselves. Öcalan explains this with his ‘rose theory’ which draws on universal principles of nature where every organism defends itself in order to survive. Hence, “living organisms such as roses with thorns develop their systems of self-defense not to attack, but to protect life” (Dirik, 2015b, para 4) and, acccording to Öcalan, so should women.

As pointed out by Pavičić-Ivelja (2017), the principles proposed by Jineology were not only applied within PKK, but women in general were encouraged to tackle and take on traditional male roles in their daily lives, thus “Jineology soon became one of the central tenets of the Kurdish struggle, permeating all aspects of life, from the battlefield, economy and politics to everyday activities” (p. 138).

Currently in Rojava, the women have continued this tradition and merged it with democratic confederalism. In 2005 Yekîtiya Star (Star Union of Women) was inaugurated, an umbrella organisation which fosters and supports smaller communes of local women who in turn focus on education, economy and self-defence (Jinha.com, 2015, para 4). Everything is done by women for women without the interference of men

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(ibid.). Among the first laws to be passed in Rojava were those that protect women and children.

“Women have the right to exercise themselves in political, social, economic, cultural spheres and in all areas of life. Women have the right to organise themselves, and eliminate all forms of discrimination on grounds of gender. Furthermore, the rights of children are protected, particularly preventing child labour that exploits them psychologically and physically, and prohibiting marriage at a young age are the red lines of the understanding of democratic autonomy. The proportion of the representation of both genders in all institutions, administrations and bodies is of at least 40%” (Kurdistan National Congress, 2014, p. 12).

However, as pointed out by Dilar Dirik (2014), “it would be a stretch to call Kurdish society gender-equal, considering the prevalence of male-dominated rule and violence” and women in traditional families are still facing serious challenges despite years of struggling against chauvinism5. Thus, other initiatives besides Yekîtiya Star are: KCAVW – the Kurdish Committee Against Violence on Women - which organises seminars in an attempt to spread awareness on female-directed violence and encourages members of society to protect abused women” (Sheikho, 2017, para 3) and the SARA Organisation which advocates for women’s right in addition to collecting data and statistics on violations of these rights in Rojava (ibid.). In 2012 Yekîtiya Star also set up a women’s academy (where both sexes are welcome) and subjects like sociology, history and economy are taught through the lens of Jineology and democratic confederalism (Biehl, 2015). The following extract from Janet Biehl’s interview with Dorşîn, one of the teachers, serves as a good example:

“Our dream,” she said, “is that women’s participating and building society will change men, a new kind of masculinity will emerge. Concepts of men and women aren’t biologistic—we’re against that. We define gender as masculine and

5According to KCAVM’s annual report published on January 18, 2017, 799 women were victims of domestic violence in Rojava that year. The SARA Organisation’s report from 2016 affirms that “29 women received death threats, 3149 pressed charges for domestic violence, 38 were sexually harassed, 53 were minors forced into marriage, 13 were raped, and 27 tried to commit suicide as a result of familial and societal pressures” (Sheikho, 2017, para 20). 23

masculinity in connection with power and hegemony. Of course we believe that gender is socially constructed.” (Biehl, 2015, para. 28).

The academy also specialises in educating female revolutionary cadres thus, “(e)very program culminates in a final session called the platform. Here each student stands and says how she will participate in Rojava’s democracy. Will she join an organization, or the YPJ, or participate in a women’s council? What kind of responsibility she will take?” (Biehl, 2015, para. 28).

3.6 YPJ

YPJ was established in 2013 as an autonomous female counterpart to YPG (The People’s Protection Units) which is the armed wing of PYD. By now the YPJ makes up an estimated 35 percent of Rojava’s armed protection (Bengio, 2016, p. 39) and the organisation’s quick growth must be understood in the light of the context outlined above. The subjugation Kurdish women have endured (and are enduring) under traditional patriarchal rule, Öcalan’s encouragement of women reclaiming their right to organise and self-defend, in addition to the emergence of Jineology and democratic confederalism have all played important roles. Another imperative factor, however, was the rise of ISIS (Bateson, 2015). Harking back to the early 2000s, with their roots in al Qaeda, ISIS became one of the key players in the Syrian war and, over the course of 2013 and 2014, made large territorial gains in the country (Stanford University, 2017, para 1). With it came strict rule under religious Sharia Law and devastating violence, in particular a ‘hyper-masculine’ form of sexual violence against women, who were systematically raped, forced into marriages and/or sold as sex slaves (Ahram, 2015). Thus, as highlighted by Knapp, precisely because Rojava strives to be a radical democracy where women oppose to patriarchal claims of rule, the region came under attack by ISIS and its allies (2016, p. 133). This consequently led to more women joining YPJ since the organisation provided an opportunity to fight back (Bengio, 2016, p. 39). More experienced PKK female soldiers also began to arrive in Rojava and started training young people on how to handle weapons (Knapp, 2016, p. 136). These PKK soldiers also taught them theories on defence and self-protection, inspiring trust in families and encouraging more women to join the trainings (ibid.).

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By now there are YPJ academies in each canton in Rojava and the soldiers are active on all defence and social fronts (Bateson, 2015). When volunteers join YPJ they are enrolled in military training in addition to compulsory education in Jineology, the right to self- defend and democratic autonomy (ibid.). As stated on YPJ Press’ page:

“Women’s protection units YPJ have two main pillars as follow:

First: intellectual training within the framework of ideological, political, cultural and social to acquire standards and a model of free life, sexual and national awareness, and to adopt an ecologically democratic mindset.

Second: Military training, where they are trained in the use of weapons, as well as martial arts on the fronts and the development of war tactics and technical skills, in order to achieve combat skill based on legitimate defense approach, and attention to physical fitness” (ypj.press, n.d.).

As for the internal structures of YPJ and YPG, although both organisations are very similar, for YPJ more importance is placed on their social role and the specific patriarchal challenges women face (Bateson, 2015). YPJ soldiers are thus “designated the role of protecting women’s values and defending gender freedom; the focus is not just on their military capabilities” (p. 35), even if they are just as valued as soldiers as their male counterpart YPG. As noted by Tank: “(t)heir agency is best expressed in the words of Sozda, a YPJ commander in Amûde: ‘We don’t want the world to know us because of our guns, but because of our ideas. We are not just women fighting ISIS. We struggle to change the society’s mentality and show the world what women are capable of’” (2017, p. 427).

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4. Analytical Framework

In this chapter, we present the analytical framework that composes the backbone of the present thesis. Firstly, it is important to consider that the use of discourse analysis as a method requires the researcher to choose a theoretical framework within this field. As Martin Barker affirms, although scholars in this field do not always agree on any pivotal definitions of discourse analysis, the questions they are drawn to converge at a common intersection, that is, the “nature and role of language and other meaning-systems in the operation of social relations” (2008, p. 152). Most notably, scholars are concerned with the ‘power’ that these systems exert in the shaping of “identities, social practices, relations between individuals, communities, and all kinds of authority” (Baker, 2008, p. 152). Amongst many different tendencies in the work of discourse analysis that treat power as the key element in discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has emerged as one of the most widely used frameworks in the past few decades. CDA not only offers a comprehensive theoretical framework but also an overarching method for carrying out the discourse analysis, which is concerned with how social and political inequalities are manifested in discourse (see chapter 5 for a detailed explanation of CDA methodology). As Michael Meyer states:

In general CDA asks different research questions. CDA scholars play an advocatory role for groups who suffer from social discrimination. (…) [I]n respect of the object of investigation, it is a fact that CDA follows a different and a critical approach to problems, since it endeavours to make explicit power relationships which are frequently hidden, and thereby to derive results which are of practical relevance. (Meyer, 2001, p. 15).

In the case of our research topic and questions, the analysis of power relationships and the interconnectedness between language and culture present in discourse play an important role. Here it is crucial to consider that the present work deals with two different streams of discourse, namely that of the UK media about YPJ, and that of YPJ about themselves. As shown in the contextualisation above, social and political inequalities are important elements in the understanding of YPJ; a military organisation with a strong ideological foundation which represents a watershed in terms of how they acknowledge the role of women. As such, we regard CDA as the appropriate framework to analyse how

26 relationships of power manifest in discourse (from both sides) and how they either challenge or generate social and political inequalities.

Although CDA composes the backbone of the present discourse analysis, we also use Postcolonial theory in order to support the understanding of power relationships and their connection with the historicity of discursive events and the broader context in which the present research topic unfolds. This should also aid in the comprehension of discursive events’ “involvement in making history (their remaking of orders of discourse)”, as proposed in CDA by Norman Fairclough (1995, p. 11). An outline of these theories will be provided in the following sections. Further related concepts are also defined in the subsections where they are pertinent.

4.1 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

The origins of CDA is recognised as dating back to the 1970s with the works of Roger Fowler, Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress at the University of East Anglia (see Fairclough, 1992, p. 25; Thornborrow, 2002, p. 24; Trčková, 2014, p. 14). CDA is part of the hermeneutic tradition, which holds meaning to be ‘an ontological condition of social life’ that precedes the individual and determines the way an individual perceives the self and others. As Lilie Chouliaraki shows, in terms of linguistics, hermeneutics maintains that the ‘social’ can only exist as a result of our capacity to transform it into language (2008, p. 678). That is, “It is the historical nature of language or, more accurately, the horizon of interpretation that linguistic communication has historically constructed, that provides the conditions for understanding our world” (ibid.).

Within the backdrop of hermeneutics, as argued by Hans-Georg Gadamer, the social, political and economic scopes are components of our experiences that are moderated through language (1976, p. 31). Accordingly, it is possible to affirm that, as a research approach, CDA must be recognised in terms of specific contexts and historical elements, or as Michael Meyer puts it, CDA draws on the assumption that “all discourses are historical and can therefore only be understood with reference to their context” (2001, p. 15).

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CDA can also be considered as a broader label for a “special approach to the study of text and talk” which has emerged from several disciplines, and which is characterised as an overtly critical “approach, position or stance of studying text and talk” (van Dijk, 1995a, p. 17) rather than epitomising a school of thought. An important aspect of CDA is its problem-/issue-oriented nature. Fairclough states that CDA is a type of critical social science that is conceived in order to shed light onto the problems “which people are confronted with by particular forms of social life” (2001, p. 125). In this sense, CDA envisages to supply the means that can be used by people in addressing and successfully dealing with these problems.

The object of analysis of CDA are dialectical relationships connecting semiosis and elements of social practice, in which semiosis encompasses “all forms of meaning making – visual images, body language, as well as language” (Fairclough, 2001, p. 122). More specifically, CDA is concerned with the drastic changes that have been emerging in contemporary social life, with the role played by semiosis amongst processes of change, and with “shifts in the relationship between semiosis and other social elements” (Fairclough, 2001, p. 123). As Fairclough argues, the part played by semiosis in social practices cannot be taken for granted. Instead, this role has to be established through analysis, which highlights the importance of CDA as a scientific tool in the understanding of semiosis in the context of social practices (2001, p. 123). Also Gillian Rose, a scholar who has been focusing particularly on the visual component of semiosis, points to the danger of taking its meaning-making role for granted and argues for a critical evaluation of the impact images have on our understanding of the world (2007, p. 12). Here it is important to note that Rose distinguishes between vision and visuality. Vision simply refers to the physical ability to see, but visuality describes the ways in which our vision is constructed: “how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein” (Foster, 1988, p. ix cited in Rose, 2007, p. 2). Visual imagery, thus, photographs included, are never innocent but they construe the world and present it in particular ways and should therefore be considered a cultural practice which “both depend on and produce social inclusions and exclusions” (Rose, 2007, p. 12). A critical approach towards visual semiosis is therefore paramount in order to analyse how this is accomplished and how the problems arising from it should be understood.

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Another scholar who draws attention to CDA’s ‘problem- /issue- oriented’ nature is van Dijk who argues that this aspect allows for any theories or methods to be utilised on the basis that these fruitfully enquire into social problems that are relevant, for example forms of social inequality. This also highlights the multidisciplinary nature of CDA, or as van Dijk puts is, “empirically adequate critical analysis of social problems is usually multidisciplinary” (1985, p. 353). Fairclough too states that CDA as theory (or method) is in a “dialogical relationship with other social theories and methods, which should engage with them in a ‘transdisciplinary' rather than just an interdisciplinary way (…)” (2001, pp. 121-122).

In epistemological terms, CDA is rooted in “a combination of critical-dialectical and phenomenologic-hermeneutic approaches” (Wodak & Weiss, 2005, p. 123). However, as argued by Ruth Wodak and Gilbert Weiss, in terms of theory, “(t)here is no such thing as a uniform, common theory formation determining CDA” (2005, p. 123) but rather numerous approaches. Other scholars also share the same conclusion, such as Meyer when he states that “(t)here is no guiding theoretical viewpoint that is used consistently within CDA, nor do the CDA protagonists proceed consistently from the area of theory to the field of discourse and then back to theory” (2001, p. 18). As such, the task of mapping the theoretical framework is not only highly dependent on the research question at hand but also on the ability of the researcher to craft the analysis of data collected along with theories that can explain the researched phenomena. This, in turn, is a task that may happen simultaneously since the analysis of the collected data sets the discursive patterns and categories, which then require theoretical explanation (see further detailed explanation in section 5.3).

Fairclough suggests that, when utilising transdisciplinary categories, CDA analysts often take an unduly simplistic slant to the use of concepts such as power and ideology (2008, p. 817). Besides, some critiques of CDA often refer to the vagueness with which CDA uses the term ‘discourse’ (see Widdowson, 1995, p. 158). As such, we proceed by providing an elaboration on some important terms as to build solid foundations for the analysis.

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4.2 Discourse / Semiosis

Fairclough argues that the word ‘discourse’ itself can be used in various senses, as follows:

(a) meaning-making as an element of the social process, (b) the language associated with a particular social field or practice (e.g. ‘political discourse’), (c) a way of construing aspects of the world associated with a particular social perspective (e.g. a ‘neo-liberal discourse of globalization’) (2009, p. 1).

Because it is common to find confusion amongst these different ways of using the word discourse, Fairclough suggests using the term ‘semiosis’ for the first (a), which is the “most abstract and general sense” (2009, p. 1). Furthermore, using the word ‘semiosis’ for the first gives discourse analysis an edge, suggesting that it involves a variety of ‘semiotic modalities’ other than just language (such as visual images and body language) (2009, p. 1-2).

The notion of ‘discourse’ used in CDA is rooted in Michel Foucault’s ideas on discourse and power (Fairclough, 1995; Jäger, 2001) – in fact, discourse constitutes a key element in Foucault’s theoretical line of reasoning (Rose, 2001, p. 136). As pointed out by Hesmondhalgh, critical discourse analysis uses aspects of linguistics and Foucault’s idea that the experienced reality is constructed by discourses that are interwoven with relations of power (as cited in Hodkinson, 2010, p. 67). Concerned with the production of knowledge (as opposed to only meaning) and arguing that knowledge is constituted and socially constructed under circumstances of power, Foucault’s ideas compose a major variant of the social constructionist approach (Hall, 1997, p. 15) and he has consequently made enormous contributions to the fields of cultural and representation studies with his ‘discursive’ approach (Hall, 1997, p. 42). As Siegfried Jäger explains, knowledge here concerns multifarious kinds of content that compose a consciousness as well as numerous types of meanings that people use to construe and shape reality in their respective historical contexts (Jäger, 2001, p. 33). Such knowledge arises in discursive contexts in which people are inserted during their existence, and it is precisely this knowledge that discourse analysis aims to identify.

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Another important approach to the notion of discourse is that of Jürgen Link who offers a resourceful cultural science approach following Foucault. According to Link, discourse analysis should focus on:

current discourses and the effects of their power, the illumination of the (language- based and iconographic) means by which they work - in particular by collective symbolism which contributes to the linking-up of the various discourse strands (as cited in Jäger, 2001, p. 33).

This analytical basis presents an interesting perspective in terms of discourses found in our capitalist postmodern society as a means to make the capitalist ideology legitimate and ensure its prevalence (Jäger, 2001, p. 33), a view that relates to Fairclough’s third sense of discourse (c). This is a key understanding for the present work, since it aids in explaining ideological contextual patterns from the UK media as inserted in a neo-liberal discourse frame. This can be inferred from Link’s view of discourse as being an institutionally consolidated speech that determines action and as such exercises power (as cited in Jäger, 2001, p. 34).

The view of discourse as a means of interpreting elements of the world that are associated with a certain social perspective (Fairclough’s third sense of the world discourse) is used in the present analysis at the level of social practices as proposed by Fairclough’s CDA methodology (see further detailed explanation in section 5.2). In this sense, the concepts of power and ideology becomes pivotal in the discourses found in the data analysis, and also directly related to cultural values. As such, in the following section we elaborate on these two concepts as to offer a clear definition of what is meant by power and ideology in the present work.

4.3 Power

Various definitions of power can be found within different academic fields, making it a highly debated concept. Within this variety of definitions, CDA scholars have also provided their own elaborations on the concept, for example Wodak who states that “power is about relations of difference, and particularly about the effects of differences in social structures” (2001, p. 11). Language, in turn, plays an important role in relation

31 to power since it “indexes power, expresses power, is involved where there is contention over and a challenge to power” (Wodak, 2001, p. 11). In this sense, language can be used to establish power, challenge power and alter distributions of power.

An important aspect of power and language is the power/discourse relationship. Here, two aspects must be highlighted, namely ‘power in discourse’, and ‘power behind discourse’ (Fairclough, 1989, p. 43). Power in discourse holds discourse as the means through which relations of power are employed and put into practice, such as the power in “cross-cultural discourse where participants belong to different ethnic groupings, and the 'hidden power' of the discourse of the mass media” (Fairclough, 1989, p. 43). In contrast, power behind discourse concerns effects of power in relation to orders of discourse and how they are shaped and constituted by relations of power (ibid.).

Mass media, such as news media outlets, present some interesting elements in terms of power in their discourse. One of them is “one-sidedness” or, as Fairclough argues, in media discourse there is a clear split between producers and interpreters (or producers and consumers, if the media product is considered a commodity) (1989, p. 49). In addition, because media discourse is conceived for the mass audiences, producers build their discourses to an ‘ideal subject’, and actual interpreters (audiences) have to work out how they relate to the ideal subject (1989, p. 49). Thus, according to Fairclough, producers possess exclusive rights over the production and, as such, can decide on what to include or exclude, as well as how to portray events (1989, p. 50).

In addition, there is an unequal influence of social groupings that is also determinant of whose perspective is adopted in media coverage (Fairclough, 1989, p. 51). For example, in their investigation of structuring and selecting news, Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge argue that the probability of an event to become news is higher the more the event concerns elite nations, elite people, personal terms, and negative consequences (1974, p. 66). As a consequence, people and organisations used as sources in news reporting are not representative of all social groupings in the population (Fairclough, 1989, p. 50). Such asymmetric influence of social groupings takes place in the overall balance of sources, perspectives and ideologies, which to a large degree favour existing power-holders. As Fairclough argues:

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the media operate as a means for the expression and reproduction of the power of the dominant class and bloc. And the mediated power of existing power-holders is also a hidden power, because it is implicit in the practices of the media rather than being explicit (1989, p. 51).

Against this backdrop, ideologies emerge as closely related to power since power relations determine the nature of ideological assumptions and because, as Fairclough posits, ideologies compose the means of power legitimisation of existing social relations and differences of power (1989, p. 2). Such legitimisation is possible through the establishment of recurring norms that take these relations and differences of power for granted, which then become a commonsensical way of behaving (Fairclough, 1989, p. 2). Since the use of language is the “commonest form of social behaviour” (ibid.), language occupies a central place in ideologies. In the following section we present the understanding of the concept of ideology that is adopted in the present work.

4.4 Ideology

“One of the aims of CDA is to `demystify' discourses by deciphering ideologies.”

(Wodak, 2001, p. 10)

The understanding of the concept of ideology plays an important role in the present work, for two main reasons. Firstly, because as demonstrated in the contextualisation section, ideology is an active element in the understanding of YPJ. Secondly, because the investigation of how YPJ’s ideological agency is portrayed by the UK media and by YPJ themselves is central in our research. In this sense, the understanding of how ideological stances manifest in the UK media’s discourse around YPJ is paramount in the analysis, an assumption based on Fairclough’s argument that language is a material form of ideology (Fairclough, 1995, p. 43). Following this premise, it is key for CDA analysts to understand how social issues are mediated within the backdrop of ideologies. In the case of the UK, the latent ideology is capitalism in the form of neo-liberalism.

During the past two centuries, many philosophical and sociological schools of thought have proposed several definitions for the term ideology (van Dijk, 1995b, p. 244), making it a problematic concept due to the amount of conflicting definitions that exist (Trčková,

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2014, p. 18). CDA scholars have also elaborated on the term, mostly taking a critical- theoretical stance. Ruth Wodak, for instance, argues that critical theory offers an important perspective for the understanding of CDA and notions of ideology (2001, p. 10). An example of this is the relationship between the concepts of ideology and culture, and mass communication as discussed by Thompson. For him, ideology encompasses ‘social forms and processes’ through which ‘symbolic forms’ disseminate in the social world, that is: “the ways in which meaning is constructed and conveyed by symbolic forms of various kinds” (as cited in Wodak, 2001, p. 10). In this sense, the study of ideology involves a systematic examination and scrutiny of social contexts where symbolic forms are utilised as to determine relationships of domination (ibid.). Similarly, Fairclough sees ideology as an interpretation of reality that is constructed as a means to power legitimisation (Fairclough, 1995, p. 14) and, therefore, ideology composes an important element in the establishment and maintenance of ‘unequal power relations’ (Wodak, 2001, p. 10). An important aspect to note is that, as Wodak points out, for CDA, language ‘is not powerful on its own’ but it rather acquires power as it is used by powerful people (2001, p. 10).

Amongst CDA scholars, van Dijk proposes an approach towards a theory of ideology from a “multidisciplinary, sociocognitive and discursive” point of view (van Dijk, 1995b, p. 244). Arguing that earlier definitions of ideology are rather “vague philosophical” or “sociological jargon” (1995b, p. 244), van Dijk sets out to make explicit, amongst other elements, relationships between ideology, discourse and social practices. van Dijk’s definition of ideology is quoted here at length:

Ideologies are basic frameworks of social cognition, shared by members of social groups, constituted by relevant selections of sociocultural values, and organized by an ideological schema that represents the self-definition of a group. Besides their social function of sustaining the interests of groups, ideologies have the cognitive function of organizing the social representations (attitudes, knowledge) of the group, and thus indirectly monitor the group-related social practices, and hence also the text and talk of members. (1995b, p. 248)

Within his definition, ‘values’ constitute an important concept. According to van Dijk, ideologies are evaluative, forming the underlying foundations for judgements around what is ‘good or bad, right or wrong’, which in turn sets common guidelines for social

34 perception and interaction (1995b, p. 248). Sociocultural values – such as “Equality, Justice, Truth or Efficiency” (ibid.) – thus, have a central role as the key constituents of ideologies. As such, ideologies are also culturally relevant (some values more specific, some more universal), and different social groups select from these values on an interest- basis, which then serve as their social building blocks and the fundamental evaluative point of reference for the viewpoints that delineate ‘ideological systems’. Drawing on Eisenberg, van Dijk exemplifies this idea as follows:

For instance, feminists and anti-racists may emphasize the value of Equality, whereas corporate managers may stress Freedom (of the market), and professors and journalists the values of Truth and Reliability as a basic ideological criterion for their goals and actions. (van Dijk, 1995b, p. 248).

‘Structures of the ideologies’ also compose a key element in van Dijk’s theory of ideology. Here, the author argues that ideologies are organised in many ways, such as ‘Us vs. Them’, ‘own people vs. foreigners’, ‘established vs. outsiders’, ‘ingroups’ (we) vs. ‘outgroups’ (they) (van Dijk, 1995b, p. 249). For example, in his ideas around the role of the press in diffusing racism, van Dijk calls attention to how the press disseminate biased news based on positive self-representations of the West and negative other-presentation (van Dijk, 2012). Such dichotomy can be further contextualised under the broader umbrella of neo-liberalism as a Western6 ideology, for its origins are Anglo-American and associated with the administrations of Thatcher and Reagan (Fairclough, 2005, p. 23). The understanding of the abovementioned discursive construction of ingroups vs. outgroups is an important step in the present work since it helps to explain identified dichotomised ideological discourses in the analysed data. Here, we resort to two frameworks which we deem crucial in order to explain our findings, namely, van Dijk’s ideological square and Postcolonial theory.

4.5 van Dijk’s ideological square

As pointed out in the previous section, van Dijk sees group ideologies as characterised by a polarised representation of Self and Others / Us and Them. Such polarisation can be

6 The term ‘Western’ is used here according to Coronil’s definition which states that “the West is often identified with Europe, the United States, us, or with that enigmatic entity, the modern Self” (Coronil, 1996, p. 52). 35 seen in his proposed “ideological square” (see Figure 1), which shows how representations of the Other is done in a negative way (also referred to as ‘negative other presentation’) and representations of the self is done in a positive way (Tardy, 2009, p. 282).

According to Al-Duleimi and Al-Ebadi, van Dijk’s ideological square can be seen as a “strategy that combines underlying social beliefs to their expression in discourse” (Al- Duleimi & Al-Ebadi, 2016, p. 55). In this sense, van Dijk’s ideological square characterises “the way people talk about themselves and others” (ibid.), enabling the analysis of hidden ideologies in the studied texts.

Figure 2 – van Djik’s notion of ‘Ideological Square’. Adapted from van Dijk, 1998, p. 267.

4.6 Postcolonial theory

Postcolonial theory critically evaluates how the legacies of colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism have shaped and continues to shape the world. As an academic field it is of considerable range and not without its internal differences. However, as argued by Ina Kerner, postcolonial studies do share three primary concerns. Firstly, “they acknowledge that the global, postcolonial world as we know it is in fact the result of historical processes” (Kerner, 2017, p. 854). Here we have to consider that the colonial age lasted for roughly 500 years and at the end of the era Western colonial empires controlled close to 85 percent of the world (Prasad, 2003, p. 4). A fact that stresses the need to seriously assess the influences of colonialism, not only on current political, economic and social

36 structures, but also on present patterns of thought. The second major concern according to Kerner “is a focus on global entanglements and connections, both historically and currently” (2017, p. 854), which challenges the assumption that development in one place can occur independently from other places. Postcolonial studies thereby refute modernisation theories that hold Europe as the cradle of civilization and motor behind the world’s history. Thirdly, “postcolonial studies critically assess and address North–South power relations and asymmetries” (Kerner, 2017, p. 854), a task accomplished by focusing on the discursive, material and economic aspects found in the juxtaposition of global power relations. As for our study, we will especially draw upon one key issue within postcolonial theorising, namely that of Otherness, which we deem to be of particular interest.

4.6.1 Otherness

The idea of Otherness is in many ways fundamental to postcolonial studies and was introduced to the field by Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978) which is also held as the founding text of postcolonial theory (see Das, n.d.; do Mar Castro Varela & Dhawan, 2005; Wallaschek, n.d.). To Said Orientalism is “a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (1978/1995, p. 3) and one of his principal ideas is that knowledge about the East is produced, not through real facts, but through fictional constructs that portray it as the antithesis of the West (Sethi, 2013). By drawing on the theorising of Michel Foucault, he argues that Orientalism must be understood as a discourse; a specific form of knowledge with its own premises and claims of truth, and, since its object of study, “the Orient”, does not factually exist, the West has the power to tell that truth (Lockman, 2009). That is how the “European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment era” (Said, 1978/1995, p. 3). In addition, Said also confirms that the discourse of Orientalism serves as a:

collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures (1978/1995, p. 7).

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Here it is important to remember that “Otherness is due less to the difference of the Other than to the point of view and the discourse of the person who perceives the Other as such” (Staszak, 2009, p. 1). Thus, contrasting ‘us’ and ‘them’ is to choose a principle that permits humanity to be separated into a binary opposition where one group embodies the norm and is valued and the other group is characterised by its faults and is therefore susceptible to discrimination. Only the dominant groups are in a position to inflict their classifications on the matter (ibid.).

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5. Methodology

CDA is defined as an approach to media texts that considers linguistic and visual representations as “subtle indicators of the power of media technologies to represent the world to us and to orient us towards others in this world” (Chouliaraki, 2008, p. 691). This very definition of CDA might suggest that it composes a single method but, as Chouliaraki affirms, given that CDA is ‘context-specific’ and ‘historically-sensitive’, there is no ‘tool-kit of categories’ for the critical analysis of power in mediation (ibid.). The idea of context in CDA clearly includes interdisciplinary components such as social- psychological, political and ideological, suggesting an ‘interdisciplinary procedure’ (Meyer, 2001, p. 15). In this sense, different research questions and corpuses may require different definitions of the ‘power of mediation’ and different combinations of categories and techniques as instruments to scrutinise the relationship between power and mediated discourse (Meyer, 2001, p. 15).

Despite great diversity of ways in which scholars approach CDA as a method, some scholars have made an effort to map this diversity in order to provide a more concise view of methodology within CDA. Meyer, for example, presents a cursory systematic view of a possible CDA methodology and affirms that the first step in terms of the methodology of CDA aims at systematising the various theoretical influences since CDA is strongly based in theory (2001, pp. 17-18). These theories, in turn, are various and, again, interdisciplinary, ranging from:

microsociological perspectives (Ron Scollon) to theories on society and power in Michel Foucault's tradition (Siegfried Jäger, Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak), theories of social cognition (Teun van Dijk) and grammar, as well as individual concepts that are borrowed from larger theoretical traditions. (Meyer, 2001, pp. 17-18).

The second step involves the operationalization of theoretical concepts. According to Meyer, the central matter is the ability of the many methods of CDA to move from theory into ‘instruments and methods of analysis’, especially in terms of mediating grand theories and the specific case studies at hand, or “concrete instances of social interaction” (2001, p. 18). Here, two different scopes of empirical social research methodology must be accounted for, respectively: (1) the different data collection possibilities and (2) the

39 method to be utilised in data analysis. However separate these two tasks appear to be, as Meyer argues, in CDA data collection and data analysis happen as a “permanently ongoing procedure” (2001, p. 18).

Based on Meyer’s elaboration on CDA methodology, the connection between theory and discourse plays an important role. Given that CDA treats long-term analysis of “fundamental causes and consequences of issues”, a comprehensive acknowledgement of the relationships amongst “text, talk, society and culture” is necessary (Mogashoa, 2014, p. 105). In this sense, theoretical grounding appears as a central yet complex task, precisely because, as many scholars in CDA state, there are many different standpoints within CDA, each with their own theoretical components (Meyer, 2001; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). In the following sub-section, we present the research strategy that we used to operationalise the connection between theory and discourse while simultaneously clarifying how the analytical framework has been constructed.

5.1 CDA and research strategy

As shown in the previous section, different research questions and corpuses in CDA require different ways of operationalizing the analysis. Based on Meyer’s observation that data collection and data analysis happen as a “permanently ongoing procedure” (2001, p. 18), for the present research we have opted for a combination of abductive and retroductive strategies. Although the dialectical-relational approach of CDA is commonly associated with the use of deductively oriented theories (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 19), abductive and retroductive inferences can be combined in a complementary way, enabling a more comprehensive analysis in bridging theory and data (Meyer & Lunnay, 2012, p. 1). As Samantha Meyer and Belinda Lunnay argue, “(s)imilar to deduction, abduction and retroduction require the researcher to move between theory and data. However, data that are not in keeping with the initial theoretical framework become significant to the discussion of the findings” (Meyer & Lunnay, 2012, p. 1)

Hence, as new findings take place, new theoretical underpinnings might be necessary, which becomes possible through retroduction since it allows the researcher to bounce between data and theory. Wodak and Meyer also suggest the same combination of strategy, stating that regardless of whether an inductive or deductive strategy is chosen as

40 an entry point, both proceed abductively, and “oscillate between theory and data analysis in retroductive ways” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 19).

The combination of the abductive and retroductive inferences composes a key research strategy in the present discourse analysis. Although we had an initial idea of the theoretical framework that could potentially help us explain the discourses found in the collected data, the very process of analysing it required us to investigate new theoretical lenses. The utilisation of this combination of strategies meant that we could: (1) start by describing the activities and meanings found while concurrently providing categories and concepts that would serve as the basis in order to understand the research problem (in an abductive way); and (2) as new findings appeared, we could also utilise other theories, allowing for the interplay between theory and data (in a retroductive way).

5.2 Norman Fairclough: CDA as a method

Norman Fairclough has made an important contribution to the field of CDA by proposing an overarching method that brings together discourse, power and social structure, in which semiosis is considered a social process that is dialectically related to others, thus giving his stream of CDA the name dialectical-relational. His model consists of three interrelated dimensions of discourse (see Figure 2) since, according to Fairclough, “each discursive event has three dimensions or facets: it is a spoken or written language text, it is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and interpretation of text, and it is a piece of social practice” (1995, p. 133).

The first dimension relates to the object of analysis and encompasses written, verbal and visual texts, separately or, as in our case, in a multimodal combinations. The second dimension, in turn, relates to the processes (writing, speaking, reading, listening, viewing etc.) by which the text is produced and received. Lastly, the third dimension relates to socio-historical conditions which control these processes (Janks, 1997, p. 329). Furthermore, each of the abovementioned dimensions of discourse calls for a different kind of analysis. The respective analyses are:

(1) Linguistic analysis at the text level – description

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(2) Discourses and genres at the level of discursive practice – interpretation

(3) Social analysis at the social practice level – explanation

(Janks, 1997, p. 329; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002, p.69)

Figure 3 - Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse analysis. Adapted from Critical Discourse Analysis (p. 98) by Norman Fairclough, 1995, London: Longman.

By utilising Fairclough’s approach, a researcher is enabled to focus on the signifiers that make up a text (choice of words, active or passive voice, etc.), but is also required to recognise the importance of the social and historical circumstances which governed its production. This is due to the fact that Fairclough’s methodology refers to texts as “instantiations of socially regulated discourses” and, as such, “the processes of production and reception are socially constrained” (Janks, 1997, p. 239). As Janks states, “(i)t is in the interconnections that the analyst finds interesting patterns and disjunctions that need to be described, interpreted and explained” (1997, p. 239).

We deem Fairclough’s three-dimensional CDA method suitable for the present research precisely because it emphasises the interrelation between texts and society, and will therefore enable us to identify socio-historical factors and their influence in the shaping of dominant discourses. We also believe that Fairclough’s method offers a well-suited framework in order to identify and compare possible forms of power and hegemonic patterns present in both British media and in YPJ’s own outlets.

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5.3 Data Collection

According to Meyer, “there is no typical CDA way of collecting data” (2001, p. 23) but he states that it is possible to distinguish between two broad dimensions to data collection in empirical social research: eliciting and evaluating methods (Meyer, 2001, p. 18). The distinction lies, respectively, between the ways in which data are collected and the developed modus operandi used for the analysis of these data. In the words of Meyer, “(m)ethodical procedures for the collection of data organize observation, while evaluation methods regulate the transformation of data into information and further restrict the opportunities for inference and interpretation” (2001, p.18). In CDA, however, these two dimensions do not necessarily imply separate steps and the collection of data might not take place at once and before the analysis, but it might rather be a permanently ongoing procedure. Such ongoing procedure in the data collection is a feature of the present work, in which, as the interplay of theory and data analysis indicated new findings (as discussed in section 5.1), further data was sourced and incorporated in the analysis. There were, however, some initial decisions taken regarding our corpus based on both self-imposed limits and factors we could not control.

5.3.1 Limitations

A first step in order to create a viable corpus of analysis was to scrutinize YPJ’s own media outlets in order to see what they had published and thus deemed newsworthy. After having examined their official webpage (https://www.ypjrojava.org/), YPG’s official webpage (https://www.ypgrojava.org/), their main international outlet (https://anfenglish.com/) in addition to their official Facebook page, Twitter and YouTube channel7, it became apparent that a lot of the topics covered in their media were not of interest to Western media outlets and vice versa.

The only feature that appeared to be of concern in both outlets was reports and news stories on fallen soldiers. Thus, in order to conduct a comparative study of possible hegemonic discourses we decided to focus on case studies, on which we would be able to

7 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kurdish-Female-Fighters-YPJ-1814267612131127/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/defenseunitsypj?lang=en Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/YPGmedia 43 locate news in both outlets. The following decision to limit ourselves to British media was based on: 1) language constraints, and 2) that was where we were able to find most ‘matches’ with the cases we had located in YPJ’s media. We would, however, argue that British media serves as an interesting choice of comparison since, not only is the UK a former colonial power, it is also a country that identifies strongly with Western ideals. In addition, the UK has been providing military aid to the Kurdish Regional Government during its war against ISIS and also holds PKK as a terrorist organisation (Toivanen & Baser, 2016, p. 301).

Within the matches we found in British media we decided to create a corpus that would span over the whole political spectrum in order to avoid possible biases due to political affiliation, thus the following (online) newspapers were chosen; The Guardian (Left/Centre), The BBC (Centre/Left), The Independent (Centre), The Times (Centre/Right), The Daily Telegraph (Right) and the tabloid paper Daily Mail (Right/Populist) (for circulation see Figure 4).

Figure 4 – Newspaper websites ranked by monthly visitors in the UK (2013-2016, latest statistics available) (Statista, n.d.)

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In addition to the direct matches we were able to make (two), we decided to incorporate two additional cases, one which received extensive coverage in YPJ’s media, but nothing in British outlets, and a second one where the opposite is true. This decision was based on yet another critical principle within CDA; what remains unsaid and excluded is just as important as what is included in terms of how ideological discourses are formed (van Dijk, 1998).

5.3.2 Organisation and coding

Klaus Krippendorff’s methodology for content analysis which, amongst various fields of application, can be used in qualitative approaches such as CDA (2004, p. 16) has greatly enlightened the process of coordination between data collection, organisation and analysis in the present thesis, and especially his suggestions on organisation and coding.

Our initial corpus entailed 72 texts (including news articles and social media posts), a sample size we deemed too big and not computable within the scope of the present work. As Krippendorff states, “(t)he universe of available texts is too large to be examined as a whole, so content analysts need to limit their research to a manageable body of texts.” (2004, p. 111). We therefore decided to narrow down the units for analysis to 30 by utilising ‘relevance sampling’ (also called ‘purposive sampling’) as a text-based sampling technique. According to Krippendorff, relevance sampling is a ‘natural’ way of handling units of text that “aims at selecting all textual units that contribute to answering given research questions” (2004, p. 119). An important aspect of this sampling technique is that the final selection of units of text “are not meant to be representative of a population of texts” (2004, 119) but instead, they compose a corpus of relevant texts – which is appropriate for tackling the research question with more efficacy, maximising the quality of the analysis (for chosen corpus see Appendix 1).

The following step consisted of interpreting the selected units in a systematic way as to produce categories of analysis. Here we utilised coding as a procedural component (see Appendix 2). Coding plays a unique role in content analysis and require, most of all, human intelligence (Krippendorf, 2004, p. 125), that is, the competencies that a coder must have since these procedural components rely wholly upon the analyst’s judgements which, in turn, should reflect the stance of a scientific observer (Janis, 1965, p.55).

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According to Krippendorff, the term coding is used by content analysts when the process of interpreting the selected units ‘in the formal terms of an analysis’ is carried out according to ‘observer-independent rules’ (2004, p. 126).

By applying this method we could take an initial step to analyse the selected corpus and to generate a set of categories that we, as analysts, determined as methodologically appropriate in order to answer the research question within the initial analytical framework. Some of these categories also required new theories to be investigated in order to explain new patterns found in the texts – a perfectly viable process within the retroductive methodology used.

5.4 Subjectivity, objectivity and reflectivity

As a theory and method, CDA is underpinned by a social constructionist orientation to knowledge and rests on the epistemological assumption that multiple subjective understandings of sociocultural phenomena exist (White, 2004, p. 7). In other words, a researcher using CDA embraces the idea that there are more than one claim to reality and that objectivity is constructed. Consequently, research in itself must also be understood as a discursive construction which cannot provide the only conceivable representation of the world but, rather, “just one version which is part of the discursive struggle within the research field in question” (Winther Jørgensen & Phillips, 2000, p. 116). As such, the academic discourse, just like any other discourse, not only yields knowledge, social relations and identities, but also emphasizes preferred understandings of reality (ibid.) and the present thesis is no exception.

This raises certain difficulties because if multiple accounts of realities exist, there cannot concurrently be one single truth; hence, the researcher’s ‘truth’ becomes one possible version among many. How, then, can a researcher’s claim of veracity be considered valid among a plethora of other claims? What gives him or her the privilege? Or, in the words of Martin Barker: how does a researcher demonstrate a study’s “trustworthiness” (2008, p. 163)?

One way of tackling this problem is by emphasising the importance of reflexivity; an approach in qualitative research which advocates for the awareness of the researcher’s

46 role in knowledge production and how this in turn is influenced by the object of research (Hayes, 2012, p. 72). This self-scrutiny or “process by which research turns back upon and takes account of itself” (ibid.), calls for a constant and explicit motivation for the choices made in the research process, which not only enables the researcher to consider personal biases, but also provides others with the tools to evaluate a study and, as such, judge its validity (Winther Jørgensen & Phillips, 2000, p. 117). This unequivocal transparency is of extra importance within critical theory, including CDA, since it highlights that all research “is authored by a raced, gendered, classed, and politically oriented individual” (Creswell, 2009, p. 112); a conclusion that holds true for postcolonial theory too. Thus, a first step in order to position ourselves within and in relation to our research must be to acknowledge our own sociocultural background - we are ‘Westerners’ and, as such, also form part of the (re)production of neo-imperialistic discourses. One might consequently question our ability to fully understand and deconstruct the discourses present in YPJ’s media. Our way of overcoming this hurdle consisted of an extensive background research on the topic. In addition, the analytical framework chosen for the present thesis (see chapter 4) is there in order to help us recognize our own preconceptions and create an awareness as to our own discursive background. A serious involvement with the abovementioned theories also provided us with the ability to reflect on the researched phenomenon critically and scientifically. As for the methodology, we have opted to explicitly stating the shortcomings and limitations present in this study, in addition to carefully explaining how it was undertaken and motivating our choices. Finally, by proving “representative examples from the empirical material plus detailed accounts of the interpretation” (Winther Jørgensen & Phillips, 2000, p. 126) in our analysis, we provide the reader with the possibility to critically evaluate our analytical process and consequently form his or her own impression (ibid.).

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6. Analysis

In this chapter, we present our analysis case by case. However, before we commence, a brief introduction to each soldier is provided based on a combination of information found in British media outlets and in YPJ’s media. In order to corroborate the following facts we have used various sources for each case and left out the information we have not been able to verify.

6.1. Case introduction

6.1.1 Arin Mirkan

Arin Mirkan (real name: Deilar Genj Khamis) was a Kurdish woman fighting for YPJ who received attention in both British and YPJ’s media after she detonated herself on October 4, 2014 while in battle against ISIS in Kobani. Arin Mirkan grew up in the canton of Kobani but it is unclear exactly where. She was born in 1992 and was 22 years old when she died. We have not been able to find information about her exact incentive to join YPJ. As of 2016, there is a statue depicting her in army fatigue and angel wings in the city centre of Kobani. We will refer to her as Arin Mirkan, her chosen nom de guerre, throughout the text.

6.1.2 Anna Campbell

Anna Campbell (nom de guerre: Hêlîn Qereçox) was born in Lewes, England and died in a Turkish missile attack in Afrin on March 15, 2018 at the age of 27 while fighting with YPJ. Anna Campbell received a lot of attention, especially in British media, and she is believed to be the first British woman to die in Rojava. Before joining YPJ, she studied at Sheffield University and worked as a plumber. According to the eulogy on Empty Cages Collective’s webpage (a movement aimed at abolishing prisons, of which she was a member), Anna Campbell was a dedicated anarchist and queer feminist (Prison Abolition, 2018, para 4). We will refer to her as Anna Campbell and not use her nom de guerre throughout the text, since that is how it appears in most media texts.

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6.1.3 Avesta Xabur

Avesta Xabur’s real name was Zalûx (or Zuluh) Hemo and she was born in 1998 in the small village of Baliya in the Balbala district north of Afrin. She died on January 27, 2018 when she detonated herself next to a Turkish tank, consequently killing the soldiers inside. She was 20 years old at the time of her death and received extensive media coverage in YPJ’s outlets but, to our knowledge, not a single mentioning in the UK media. Avesta Xabur has a school in Kobani and a martyr cemetery in Afrin named after her. We have not been able to find information on why she decided to join YPJ or for how long she was involved with the organisation. In this thesis we will refer to her by her nom de guerre with the following spelling; Avesta Xabur, even if her surname is alternatively written Khaboor or Habur in our corpus.

6.1.4 Barin Kobani

Barin Kobani was a Kurdish YPJ soldier and probably in her 20s at the time of her death. She was killed in the village of Qurna north of Afrin in January 2018. The same month a video began to circulate on the Internet depicting soldiers taking selfies and posing next to Barin Kobani’s half-naked and mutilated body. One of the soldiers comments on her looks and another says “that’s our revenge against the pigs of PKK”. Barin Kobani received media attention in British outlets but, to our knowledge, no mentioning in the YPJ’s media. We have not been able to find information on her exact age, where she was born, her motivation for joining YPJ and her real name, thus, we will refer to her as Barin Kobani, her nom de guerre, throughout this text.

6.2 Case 1: Arin Mirkan

6.2.1 YPJ’s media

The mere amount of media texts dedicated to Arin Mirkan in YPJ’s media outlets indicates that she is considered an important person for the organisation. Four days after her death YPJ released a text which stated that:

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Here YPJ’s ideology can be clearly noted in the words “spirit of sacrifice for the freedom” which is claimed to be something expressed by Arin Mirkan. This functions as a propaganda tool that legitimises her self-immolation as something noble. Arin Mirkan’s choice to detonate herself (and killing a handful of ISIS soldiers by doing so) was not simply a suicide bomb attack but an expression of something bigger. She sacrificed herself for freedom. Here, the idea of self-immolation as an act of freedom can be understood as a discourse constructed against the backdrop of the Kurdish struggle which, following a CDA assumption (see section 4.1), can “only be understood with reference to their context” (Meyer, 2001, p. 15).

Another interesting element that stands out is the way in which Arin Mirkan’s fight is referred to as ‘Kobani’s fight’, as follows:

By the use of a nominalisation, where ‘Kobani’ becomes the agent instead of the real people involved in defending the city, YPJ effectively conveys the meaning woven into this particular battle against ISIS. Arin Mikan’s choice to sacrifice herself for ‘Kobani’ and everything it stood for must therefore be understood as the highest act of dedication to the cause a soldier can possibly commit. Here it is important to point out that Kobani, the city Arin Mirkan was defending and died in, had acquired huge symbolic significance at the time of her death. It was not just a place, but embodied the whole Kurdish freedom struggle and the resistance against ISIS’ siege, launched in October 2014, mobilized Kurds across the world. Winning in Kobani was not only about defeating ISIS, but it would be an important marker in the construction and consolidation of Kurdish liberty in Syria as well as in Turkey and Iraq. Such symbolic meaning attributed to the battle of Kobani can also be seen as a knowledge construction based on YPJ’s ideological underpinnings which compose a consciousness that gives meaning and shapes reality

50 within the historical context of the Kurdish struggle. This can be interpreted in light of Jäger’s idea that knowledge happens in discursive contexts that people are inserted in along their existence (Jäger, 2001, p. 33).

ISIS’ siege of Kobani was also the first time YPJ soldiers were as involved in battle as YPG, their male counterpart, since the organisation’s establishment one year earlier in 2013. Thus, the liberation of the city also served as an opportunity for YPJ to show their worth on the battlefield and Arin Mirkan’s sacrifice consequently became a symbol for the Kurdish women’s struggle as well.

Thus, the way Arin Mirkan is represented in YPJ’s media could easily be considered the rendering of a ‘double heroine’; not only did she sacrificed herself for the Kurdish freedom struggle but her death also demonstrated the bravery and value of female soldiers. However, here it is important to understand that, according to YPJ, these two portrayals are simply two sides of the same coin as the following text shows:

By drawing on an ideological discourse as well as on their belief that the Kurdish struggle must be understood as the struggle of women where the emancipation of the latter will solve the first, YPJ portray Arin Mirkan as a person who sacrificed herself for a greater cause and, in doing so, also became a role model and a “torch enlightening the path we are following”. Although YPJ hold all of their martyrs dear and everyone who has fallen in battle gets a mentioning in their media, Arin Mirkan’s extraordinary dedication has led her to become a symbol that embodies the whole organisation’s ideology:

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Through her self-detonation, Arin Mirkan stopped being one person and transformed into the revolution itself, consequently symbolising the memory of “all female comrades”. The text excerpt above also shows who the real enemy of YPJ is. It is not ISIS per se, but what they represent; fascism, which is held as a universal problem according to their ideology, just like colonialism. Therefore, when Arin Mirkan self-detonated, she did not only kill ISIS fighters, but committed a direct attack on the mentality from which they have sprung.

According to YPJ’s way of thinking, what makes their soldiers exceptionally good in the fight against ISIS is the fact that they are women, since ISIS and the mentality they represent is considered inherently male. Thus, one way of attacking them is by simply striving for a gender equal society where Öcalan’s ideology is applied; a society where women are free and can smile. Consequently, as pointed out in the text excerpt above, Arin Mirkan’s will be revenged not only by bullets but also with the “smiling faces of our women”.

Figure 5 - (ArYPJ2)

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This photo serves as a good example of the above-mentioned reasoning. It depicts Arin Mirkan behind a weapon with her gaze locked on the horizon and the enemy. What is important to understand here is that to YPJ her smile is as dangerous as the weapon she has in front of her. The accompanying text states:

“Arîn Mîrkan, symbol of the resistance in Kobani, was from Afrin. Now Afrin fights fascism like Kobani did.” (ArYPJ2)

Note that it is not ISIS per se she is aiming her gun and smile at, but “fascism” in general.

Yet another discourse present in the YPJ’s media texts about Arin Mirkan is that of interconnectedness – ‘us’ – between women, which in turn draws heavily on Öcalan’s ideology. The necessary female emancipation within Jineology does not solely apply to Kurdish women, but every woman across the globe. Women in the West, for example, are deemed just as subjugated as the women in the Middle East, since they too live under oppressive political and economic conditions manifested by the capitalist, neoliberal nation-state resulting from patriarchal rule. This ideological discourse can be found in the following excerpts from YPJ’s media texts which also deals with Arin Mirkan’s death:

Thus, according to YPJ’s media outlets, Arin Mirkan did not only die for the Kurds or for the Kurdish women but she sacrificed herself for the freedom of all women by attacking male oppression, this time represented by ISIS soldiers.

6.2.2 British media

As the analysis of Arin Mirkan in YPJ’s media shows, she was considered a very important person for the organisation, as well as an important symbol for the Kurdish

53 freedom struggle. This is the first apparent contrast with the UK media representation, which instead provides sensationalist information and only short passages about her (mostly as secondary information) in texts emphasising the fight against ISIS. Such is the case of ArTG1, ArTI2, ArDM1, in which Arin Mirkan is mentioned at the very end, with very little background information. Whereas for YPJ, Arin Mirkan’s self-detonation is portrayed as an act of martyrdom within their ideology (a symbolic form of resistance and freedom), UK representations provide a different portrayal, which can be observed in the following excerpt:

Here it is interesting to note the way in which the article introduces Arin Mirkan in the text by constructing an idea of her based on the emphasis on description/action such as “a Kurdish female fighter who blew herself up” and “suicide attacker”. Looking at these terms through the lens of Postcolonial theory also makes it possible to identify “Kurdish female fighter” as an essentialist term since a Kurdish female fighter could belong not only to YPJ but also to YJA STAR, PKK, armed Yazidi women, Peshmerga and so on. Besides, such an essentialist term poses further confusion for the reader who remains uninformed about the diversity of Kurdish military organisations which are then perceived as a monolithic bloc of Oriental “others”, that is, in a Orientalistic way (Said, 1978). Furthermore, the article places YPG as an intermediary subject between the article and Arin Mirkan when mentioning her name, creating a sense of distance. This is also the case in the following text excerpt:

“The YPK statement identified the suicide attacker as Deilar Kanj Khamis, better known by her military name, Arin Mirkan” (ArTI2)

Another notable difference is that, while the words ‘martyr’ and ‘martyrdom’ are fundamental for YPJ when referring to Arin Mirkan (and all their fallen soldiers), these words do not appear in the UK media representations. Instead, expressions like “Kurdish female suicide bomber” (ArTI1), “suicide bombing” (ArTT1), “suicide attack” (ArTT1, ArTST1, ArDM1), “suicide bomb attack” (ArDM1) and “suicide attacker” (ArTG1,

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ArTI2) are used, which depict negative connotations that are associated with actions of terrorist groups, also functioning as a symbolic form that constructs Arin Mirkan as an ‘other’. That is, these terms create a watershed between the reader and the fighter in a dichotomised way: ‘us’ (Westerners, in which suicide attacks are consider an act of terrorism) vs. ‘them’ (the Other for whom such acts are normal but still cannot be understood by ‘us’) (Said, 1978, 1995). Another way of understanding this dichotomy is by comparing YPJ’s portrayal with that of the UK’s media, i.e. “fallen martyr” / “spirit of sacrifice for the freedom” vs “suicide attacker” / “Kurdish female suicide bomber”.

A further critical point is the neglecting of YPJ’s philosophy through the omission of the ideological underpinnings that form the basis of the group’s existence and, instead, the framing of their battle only in the context of ISIS:

In these excerpts, YPJ’s fight is emphasised within the counterterrorist fight against ISIS, neglecting their own reasons for fighting. This way of representing the organisation also neglects the ideology behind their battle against fascism and patriarchal dominance and the self-defence of their own territory and people. This constant emphasis on YPJ’s fight in the context of ISIS can be more specifically understood, in light of Postcolonial theory, as an imperialistic stance present in the British media in the sense that YPJ’s own agenda is portrayed as belonging to a fight that concerns Western interests (in this case counterterrorism). This portrayal can be seen, again, as a discourse that legitimises Western ideology in an ‘Us vs. Them’ dichotomy. Here, Said’s (1978/1995) postcolonial theory sheds light into the notion of “otherness”, since the framing of YPJ’s fight against

55 the background of counterterrorism presents an Orientalistic discourse in which the UK (and more broadly the West) exerts the power of telling the truth (Lockman, 2009), which in turn reflects their own implicit constructions in which language works as an expression of power (Wodak, 2001, p. 11). The emphasis on the battle against ISIS can also be interpreted in light of van Dijk’s (1998) ‘us vs. them’ framework. For example:

“Isis raises the black flag: Islamists hail victory over Kurds as battle rages on Europe’s doorstep” (ArTI2)

Here, the order in which information is given emphasises ISIS as victors, referring to the Kurds (neither YPJ nor YPG) as their battle opponents, and constructing a link between that and Europe, framing the victory of ISIS as a threat to Europeans. Recognised as a terrorist group and an enemy worldwide (Cronin, 2015), ISIS is portrayed as ‘them’ – negative other representation (van Dijk, 1998) –, creating a polarisation in which groups that combat ‘them’ is on the same side of the polarisation as ‘us’. Ideologically, YPJ’s stateless democracy challenges the Western state and capitalistic ideology, which explains the suppression of information – as per van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square – on YPJ’s ideology in most texts about Arin Mirkan. However, by fighting against ISIS in Kobani, YPJ’s interests meet the interests of the UK (and more broadly Western interests) in fighting against a common enemy.

In texts where such discursive alliance between YPJ and British interests against ISIS is present, it is possible to observe the inclusion of selected positive information about Arin Mirkan which functions as an ‘expression of information that is positive about ‘us’’ – following van Djik’s ideological square (van Dijk, 1998) –, forming a ‘discursive alliance’ between ‘us’ (enemies of ISIS) that opposes to ‘them’ (ISIS).

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An interesting point of analysis in article ArTI2 is that the initial framing of ISIS as victors and a threat to Europeans is then mitigated in the above excerpts through the placement of YPJ (YPK) on the ‘us’ side, portraying them as combat resistant. It is also noteworthy that there is still no mentioning of their ideology of freedom, resistance and emancipation. The use of the active voice when referring to Arin Mirkan – “Khamis stayed behind (…) she attacked them” – increases her agency, which is an important discursive element because the action of Arin Mirkan (Khamis) is directly associated with the ‘us’ side, as in ‘we are taking action’.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the sensationalist representations of Arin Mirkan as well as the use of inaccurate information about her. According to Uribe and Gunter, sensationalism is “a characteristic of the news-packaging process that places emphasis upon those elements that could provoke an effect on the human sensory system” (Uribe & Gunter, 2007, p. 208). This can be seen in the following:

Considering that “(j)ournalistic information is based, to a large extent, on the use of words” (Pisarek, 1983, p. 156), scrutinising the choice of words in news reports is of particular importance because they carry different meanings. Halliday and Hansan call it ‘lexical cohesion’, that is, the “cohesive effect achieved by the selection of vocabulary” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 274). Thus, in the above excerpt Arin Mirkan is referred to in the headline as a “mother” / “mother-of-two”, a word choice that implies an emotional

57 appeal, acquiring a dramatic dimension in this case by the use of the active voice “launches” and the direct object “suicide attack”. Following Uribe and Gunter’s rationale, the emphasis on Arin Mirkan as being a mother of two children who launched a suicide attack can trigger emotional reactions from the audience who might picture the children being left alone without a mother, contributing to the sensationalist nature of the text.

However, Arin Mirkan did not have any children. Article ArDM1, for example, indirectly acknowledges that their source of information might not be of quality when it mentions “according to tributes on Twitter”, hurting the news outlet’s code of ethics in the principles of truthfulness and accuracy (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014). Additionally, the images used in these articles are not of Arin Mirkan.

Figure 6 - Image of the real Arin Mirkan (ArDM1)

Figure 7 - Photograph of unknown woman with two children claimed to be Arin Mirkan used by ArTST1

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Figure 8 - Same photograph also presented as Arin Mirkan, but this time in ArTT1

Such use of untruthful and inaccurate information combined with sensationalist strategies can be seen in light of click-baiting, one of the outcomes of neo-liberalism on news media. This highlights Fairclough’s ideas on the unequal influence of social groupings, which influences whose perspective is adopted in media coverage (Fairclough, 1989, p. 51). In this case, the very use of untruthful and inaccurate information denotes the reproduction of the implicit power of the media through the producer (as an information gatekeeper) and, more broadly, the dominant ideology (in this case neo-liberalism).

6.3 Case 2: Anna Campbell

6.3.1 YPJ’s media

In June 2015 the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) was established; a division within YPG consisting solely of international fighters. In 2017, they were joined by The International Revolutionary People’s Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF) as well as The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA) and the battalion has continued to grow ever since. While it is impossible to corroborate the exact number of individuals who have travelled to Rojava in order to join YPG and YPJ, it is easier to establish that non-Kurdish fallen soldiers receive extensive media coverage in both organisations’ media channels and Anna Campbell was no exception.

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Four days after her death, YPJ released a statement named ‘To the public’, which begins as follows:

“The revolution of Rojava, which became the revolution of peoples with the leadership of women, has attracted revolutionary women from around the world from the beginning. Day by day, it increased with its philosophy of a free life and the co-existence of all peoples. In this sense, women from all nations went to become a part of this revolution.” (AnYPJ1)

Here YPJ effectively explains Anna Campbell’s reason for joining the organisation in addition to motivating her choice. The revolution in Rojava is that of the peoples, in plural, and consequently of everyone’s concern, not only the Kurds. Anna Campbell fought and died for ‘free life and the co-existence of all peoples’ or, in other words, democratic confederalism as laid out by Öcalan. The need to highlight a discourse of interconnectedness – the opposite of Said’s (1978/1995) Otherness - is further established in YPJ’s media texts about Anna Campbell, which point out that:

In other words, the fact that Anna Campbell was not Kurdish but still chose to join YPJ should not be surprising, since the struggle in Rojava is an “international war” that concerns everyone. This is further emphasised by an intertextual reference to Ivana Hoffman, a German martyr who is held to be the first international woman ever joining YPJ, whose path Anna Campbell followed “until her last breath” (AnYPJ1). The extra emphasis on ‘internationality’ can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, it draws on an ideological discourse which state that, not only Kurdish women, but all women are victims of fascism and male oppression and consequently should organise and defend themselves. On the other hand, it also provides an explanation to someone who is not familiar with Öcalan’s teachings as to why Anna Campbell chose to join YPJ, hence the title ‘To the Public’. Either way, the organisation’s choice to accentuate the fact that Anna Campbell was involved in an international battle makes her media representations slightly different from those of other Kurdish martyrs. Arin Mirkan serves as a good example, who, according to one text, sacrificed herself for the “liberation of four parts of Kurdistan” (ArYPJ5). In Anna Campbell’s case, she is “immortal in everybody’s minds

60 as a heroic daughter of the peoples of Rojava and northern Syria” (AnYPJ1), but the sacrifice she made was not for Rojava per se. Instead, she died fighting for a global cause, something that goes beyond the Kurds and involves everyone – the international enemy known as fascism. The fact that Anna Campbell is given a slightly different treatment in YPJ’s media (to that of Kurdish YPJ soldiers who have died in battle) is also visible in other texts, where she is referred to by both her real name and her nom the guerre (normally YPJ tends to only use soldiers’ nom the guerre).

However, by referring to her as a ‘comrade’, YPJ effectively shows that Anna Campbell was fully part of the organisation and the ‘ingroup’ (as per van Dijk’s ideological square, 1998) and her death must, therefore, be understood as a sacrifice for their cause, which in turn makes her a heroine and a “symbol of all women after resisting against fascism”. Here it is important to consider the fact that Anna Campbell might actually not have been actively involved as a soldier (as in killing enemies), since she died in a convoy on her way to Afrin, which would have been her first real battle. Even so, she is honoured with the title Şehîd (Kurdish for martyr), which would normally be reserved for people dying in combat. Thus, in the case of Anna Campbell, the fact that she believed in YPJ’s ideology and was prepared to die for it is enough for her to be considered a martyr.

YPJ’s media representation of Anna Campbell also ensure that her own initiative for joining the war is clearly expressed. This is done by incorporating direct quotes from her; such the following quote in which she talks about ISIS (also called Daesh):

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This text is accompanied by a photomontage depicting Anna Campbell and another person holding up a homemade sign saying ‘Fight for Afrin’ together with the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) logo in the corner. Like most international fighters, who might face legal consequences once they return home for having fought ‘another man’s war’, Anna Campbell is concealing her face with a scarf. However, in the forefront of the montage she is depicted again, this time decisively looking into the camera while in full army fatigue and a pin of Abdullah Öcalan on her chest.

Figure 9 - (AnYPJ1)

There shall be no doubt that Anna Campbell knew what she was doing when she travelled to Rojava and that she was fully dedicated to the cause she had signed up for. Here it is important to consider the time of Anna Campbell’s death and why there was a new “face of the exploitative and fascist system” system”; in other words, it is imperative to consider the specific socio-historical context in which this text was produced (Janks, 1997, p. 329). In January 2018, two months before the convoy Anna Campbell was travelling with got hit by Turkish missiles, Turkey had launched its biggest military operation in Syria since Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016 and this time it was a direct offensive against PYD and YPJ/G, aiming at full control of the canton of Afrin. Thus, in YPJ’s eyes, Afrin quickly became the new ‘Kobani’ and the Turkish army took over the torch from ISIS by turning into the new representatives of fascism and oppression. The fact that it is important for YPJ to represent Anna Campbell as someone fully aware of this ‘new’ enemy, in addition to fiercely opposing it, can be seen in the following text excerpts:

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In other words, Anna Campbell knew what she was doing, she knew who she was fighting and she knew that she might die while doing so.

6.3.2 British media

Just like in YPJ’s media representation of Anna Campbell, there is a clear need in the British media to explain why she decided to leave her country and join the war in Rojava. However, the reasons behind her choice and the ways of portraying her actions highly differ; while YPJ pushes for Anna Campbell’s belonging in a borderless war against international fascism, British media’s portrayals of her aim at explaining why someone from England decided to join a foreign war, that is, following van Dijk’s ideas (1995b), why someone from the ‘ingroup’ chose to join the ‘outgroup’.

In order to do so, British media turn to Anna Campbell’s background and family for answers, paying close attention to her upbringing. The relationship between speaker and receiver is declarative in all texts, indicating that it is assumed that the receiver is not familiar with the topic, thus, there is a need to explain Anna Campbell to the public. This is done with a great level of detail, which portrays her as a strong-minded close to stubborn individual. Among the adjectives used to define her in the UK media outlets are: adamant, unstoppable, committed, principled, unshakable and determined, and, by focusing on her upbringing it also becomes clear that she has been like this since childhood. The following excerpt, which resurfaces in various texts, serves as a good example:

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Anna Campbell’s political tenacity and why there was “no stopping her” (AnDM2) is further explained as a result of her close relationship to her mother, “Adrienne – a committed activist and ecologist” (AnTT1), “who was well-known on the south of England’s activism scene” (AnTG1) before she died of breast cancer in 2005. Dirk Campbell, her father, is constantly allowed to affirm this:

These quotes are accompanied by a family photograph of Anna Campbell and her late mother curling up next to each other in bed, which might seem innocent, however, as argued by Gillian Rose (2007, p. 12), images never are, and in this case the combination of the family photograph and the written texts serves as a means to further emphasise their intimate connection and consequently also the assumed inspiration mother had on daughter.

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Anna Campbell’s father is also put under close scrutiny and explained in great detail, from the “obscure musical instruments” hanging on his wall and the books “on ecology, veganism, philosophy and politics – some Kurdish” lining his shelves to the fact that he was once arrested for staging a sit-in at a Boots store (AnTG2). Thus, by paying as much interest to Anna Campbell’s parents as to her and by stressing their left wing political stance, an indirect explanation is provided as to why Anna Campbell turned out the way she did and as a consequence was able to up and leave for someone else’s war.

Such depth of detail about her personality and life events also creates a sense of personalisation of who Anna Campbell was, bringing her closer to the reader, and evoking emotional reactions, which can, once again, be understood in light of Uribe and Gunter’s (2007) discussion around sensationalism. In addition, it is worth noting that the high level of detail Anna Campbell is given clashes with that of other YPJ fighters who receive very superficial level of detail in the UK media coverage. This calls attention to a hegemonic liberal mindset in selecting what to cover and how to cover, emphasising the sense of contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as proposed by postcolonial theory (Staszak, 2009).

An additional way of expounding why Anna Campbell left England for Rojava is by highlighting that, not only was she determined and unshakable but she was also so caring, kind and empathetic that she was actually borderline naïve. Thus, joining YPJ:

Consequently, Anna Campbell went to Rojava “after being recruited by Kurdish activists online” (AnTG2) and upon arrival she was “given the Kurdish war name Helîn Qerecox” (AnTI1).

However, whether Anna Campbell is portrayed as an unwavering activist or duped young woman, she is first and foremost a Briton – an ‘us’ (van Dijk, 1995b, p. 249)–; a discourse which is highlighted by the intertextuality between the texts dedicated to her and other media texts about British citizens who have also left England for Syria. Here, it is

65 important to point out that not only the soldiers who have joined YPG (and died like Anna Campbell) are included, but also the Britons who have left to join ISIS or other militant groups in Syria. What is deemed interesting is the fact that they are British and have chosen to leave their country, not necessarily which army they opted for. Consequently, Anna Campbell’s pick is described in a short and concise manner:

In addition, it is not always clear who the organisation was fighting at the time of Anna Campbell’s death; Turkey or ISIS? Both are mentioned, often stating ISIS in the title and then mentioning Turkey further down in the text. In an attempt to explain the political situation, attention is drawn to the fact that “Ankara has long-argued that the YPG/J is linked to its own insurgent group, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK)” (AnTG2), but the fact that this is actually accurate and that PKK is on the UK’s own list of terrorist organisations remain completely absent. This also holds true for descriptions of YPJ’s ideological underpinnings and philosophy, where, the few times the group’s ideology is touched upon, it is only in broad strokes.

Thus, instead of examining what Anna Campbell left for, British media choses to focus on why she did not stay at home.

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6.4 Case 3: Avesta Xabur

6.4.1 YPJ’s media

On January 28, 2018, only a week after Turkey’s official launch of Operation Olive Branch - the military manoeuvre aimed at gaining control in Afrin -, Avesta Xabur made the headlines in YPJ’s media outlets. The day before when “the Turkish army and its affiliated Jihadists attacked the village of Hemam” (AvYPJ2) she “infiltrated behind the enemy lines and detonated the bombs wrapped around her body near a Turkish tank” (AvYPJ1), killing “several Turkish soldiers” (ibid.); an act which instantly made her legendary within YPJ which subsequently dedicated various media texts to her accomplishment. However, in contrast to Arin Mirkan who also self-detonated, none of them starts with a direct explanation of what Avesta Xabur did. Rather on the contrary, YPJ choose to provide detailed reports of the circumstances which led up to her self- detonation. The following excerpt from “To the Press and public opinion” serves as a good example:

Before describing Avesta Xabur’s exact deed, a lengthy motivation is given as to why she was in her right to do so. Following the CDA assumption that discourses are historical and thus should be analysed in conjunction with their context (Meyer, 2001, p. 15), here it is important to acknowledge when these texts were produced. In January 2018, the Syrian war had just taken a turn for the worse for the Kurds. Before, when they were fighting ISIS, they had had the world’s spoken (or unspoken) support, whereas in the beginning of 2018 they were faced with a much more complicated enemy: Turkey, a nation which is both a NATO member and has important political affiliates8. Accordingly, it now becomes imperative to justify YPJ’s acts, who up until Avesta

8 When Turkey announced Operation Olive Branch, Boris Johnson (the British Foreign Secretary) among others, publicly recognised Turkey’s right to keep its borders secure, legitimising the operation. 67

Xabur’s self-detonation had led a “gallant resistance” whereas the “Turkish fascist regime” with its clear link to “gangs from the terrorist groups” has “sicced” the Kurds like furious dogs and murdered civilians. In the media texts about Avesta Xabur, YPJ also seize the opportunity to criticize the lack of international support:

In the above excerpt YPJ uses the historical oppression Kurds have been exposed to, which is now happening “once again” and consequently draws on an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ discourse (van Dijk, 1998), while, interestingly, also stating that:

Thus, YPJ might feel betrayed by the international community, whose help has failed to arrive, but women, Kurdish or not, are still included in their ‘ingroup’ (van Dijk, 1995b), which can be noted in “on behalf of all the world’s women”. In fact, according to YPJ, Avesta Xabur’s self-detonation serves as an example of all women’s ideological right to self-defence and by exercising that right she is now a “symbol of emancipated woman” (AvYPJ2) just like Arin Mirkan. Such strong ideological emphasis, which is rooted in their ideas on Jineology, can be understood as an attempt to seek and legitimise power such as contended by Fairclough when he posits that ideologies form the means of power legitimisation of existing social relations and differences of power (1989, p. 2). In this case, power legitimisation can be seen as an important tool in YPJ’s own propaganda. The following photomontage serves as a good example of how the YPJ constructs such a discourse of the ‘emancipated woman’:

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Figure 11 - (AvYPJ5)

Here Avesta Xabur is seen in the top left corner with Barin Kobani to her right and Arin Mirkan in the middle. There are also more YPJ soldiers that we have not been able to identify, but, more importantly, photographs of women from different parts of the world demonstrating together. Present in the montage are also Sakine Cansiz, one of the co- founders of PKK, who was murdered in Paris in 2013, Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary socialist and feminist, as well as Clara Zetkin, a German Marxist theorist and advocate for women’s rights. To YPJ, they are all the same and, as such, following Fairclough’s ideas (1989), it is possible to infer that this image seeks power legitimisation through a discourse that leverages their ideology by placing their martyrs side by side with other well-known and respected feminists.

The use of their ideology as a means of power legitimisation can also be noted in the attempt to link Avesta Xabur’s origins with the YPJ’s cause. The organisation’s media representation of Avesta Xabur also stresses her Kurdish roots and carefully explains how she was “from a patriotic family from the village of Baliya“ where she was “brought up with the philosophy of love for freedom and for the free Kurdistan” and through her self- detonation “she kept her promise to defend her people and their achievements” (AvYPJ3). Note that people is used in singular here, in contrast to the media portrayal of Anna Campbell, where a higher level of international interconnectedness – ‘us’ – is displayed.

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The fact that Avesta Xabur can simultaneously defend Kurdistan and her people, in singular, and be part of a global community of women, in plural, is fully reasonable according to Öcalan’s, and consequently YPJ’s, ideology. As pointed out above in Arin Mikan’s case, according to the philosophy of confederalism and Jineology, the Kurdish struggle must be understood as the struggle of all women. Thus, “(w)ith the powerful belief and ideology she [Avesta Xabur] had equipped herself with, she became a selfless spirit, executing a meticulous military tactic and theory” and consequently “embraced martyrdom and joined the caravan of martyrs” (AvYPJ3).

Figure 12 - Photomontage of Avesta Xabor in the sunrise together with Abdullah Öcalan. (AvYPJ6)

6.5 Case 4: Barin Kobani

6.5.1 British media

The case of Barin Kobani (just like that of Avesta Xabur) is an interesting one because, although she received large media coverage in the UK, nothing apart from the picture above (see section 6.4.1) can be found in YPJ’s media outlets. Such asymmetry in the coverage of her death between the UK media and YPJ’s makes for an intriguing element.

A closer look at the selected data (BaTG1, BaTI1, BaBBC1) indicates that Barin Kobani’s death made it to the headlines after a video was released on the web showing several men dressed in army fatigues playing with her mutilated corpse and making comments (and insults). The dramatic nature of the video and its graphic content attracted much public

70 attention, which helps to understand the reason why Barin Kobani – one of many other Kurdish soldiers who are killed in battle everyday – received large coverage in the UK media. This can be explained through the lens of Galtung and Ruge’s (1974) investigation of how news are selected (see section 4.3), and in this particular case, we can argue that Barin Kobani made it to the headlines due to the extreme brutality involved in her death. Besides, Barin Kobani’s fate became widely shared on social media – an extra selling point for media outlets since they can capitalise more on hotly debated and shared content. Here, we could also argue that the dramatic nature of her death composed a strong piece of news that poses a potential for readers to identify themselves with it in an emotional way, giving space for sensationalist representations. These can be seen, for example, in the lexical choice present in the headlines:

As can be noted, the highlight of these headlines is the emphasis put on how the public reacted to what happened to Barin Kobani, which is done through the use of the words “outrage” and “outcry”, indicating that the gravity of what happened is so great that it caused a strong social reaction of shock, anger and indignation. While this functions as a selling strategy (the headlines trigger great curiosity around what happened to her and why it deserved such public reaction), it also raises issues as to whether it considers YPJ soldiers’ ideological agency.

Take BaTG1 as an example. The article provides a deep level of detail by utilising “mutilation of female fighter”, with the word “mutilation” exerting a dramatic impact since it prompts mental visualisations of what the act of mutilation is. The emphasis on the barbaric act of mutilation can be interpreted as a victimisation tool in which Barin Kobani is portrayed as a victim. This, in turn, indicates a lack of consideration for YPJ’s ideology of resistance, that is, given YPJ’s determination to fight their enemies and never give up, Barin Kobani could have fought bravely until the moment she died.

Furthermore, an analysis of the representation of possible actors involved in the death of Barin Kobani indicates hidden ideological relationships in which the British media

71 neglects the agency of certain groups by referring to them in a generic way, while conferring more agency to selected groups (supported by the UK government) by referring to them by their names.

Use of generic terms:

Use of specific terms:

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The commonly used terms “Syrian opposition fighters”, “Turkish-led offensive”, “Turkish-backed rebels” and “Syrian rebels” depict a simplistic representation of the many existing rebel groups in Syria, as well as the complexity of alliances between them and different countries that back them as their own proxy militias in Syria. One of the consequences of such simplistic representations is an inaccurate construction of the different parts involved, which is more misleading in forming public opinion as opposed to fulfilling the purpose of delivering information that aids in a fair construction of the event being reported. One of the main consequences in the case of Barin Kobani is that, by using these generic terms, the article does not accurately portray the position of YPJ regarding who they affirm to be accountable for Barin Kobani’s fate9. Rather on the contrary, terms like “Turkish-backed rebels” and “Turkish-led offensive” found in the British media function as a way of mitigating the blame YPJ confer to the Turkish government by introducing an indirect link to them. As such, the representation of the ones who YPJ hold accountable becomes a general construction of ‘rebels’ that cannot be fully grasped.

Finally, it is also worth noting that, while BaTG1 leans more towards defending the Kurds, both BaTI1 and BaBBC1 follow very similar ways in their reporting, starting by mentioning the Kurdish reaction to the video (outrage, outcry), the position of the Kurds in relation to whom is to be blamed and an explanation of the offensive launched by Turkey. Up until this point, the presented facts give convincing reasons to empathise with the Kurds. Then, the texts carry on explaining that Ankara consider YPG to be related to PKK, which is considered as a terrorist group and believed to be using Afrin to launch an attack against Turkey. This might function as a point of contradiction since the very idea of linking the YPG/YPJ to a terrorist organisation generates negative emotions triggered by the word “terrorism”. This information then functions as a justification for the motivation behind Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch. Such textual pattern creates a polarisation with the Kurds on one side, and Turkey on the other side, but the UK media texts explicitly abstains from picking either side. While the use of sensationalism provides a dramatic tone to the texts, both the use of mitigation strategies and victimisation do not

9 In an interview with Kurdistan 24, a Kurdish broadcast news station, a commander and representative of YPJ explicitly holds the Turkish state/government accountable for Barin Kobani’s death. See following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66UIORh9qFw (minute 0:28) 73 accurately represent YPJ’s accusation of the Turkish government, which in turn neglects a fundamental element in YPJ’s belief of the role Turkey plays against the Kurds.

6.6 Analytical discussion

By looking at all cases together, it is possible to establish two main findings (which we aim to elaborate on further in the following subsections):

(1) ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomisation; (2) sensationalist discourses used in the representations of YPJ soldiers in the UK media vs. propagandistic discourses used in the representation of the same soldiers in YPJ’s own media.

6.6.1 Us vs. them (Otherness)

The ideological square of van Dijk was used to look at both YPJ and the UK media, showing how the language used by each of them seeks to legitimise their ideology in an ‘us vs. them’ dichotomisation (1995b, p. 249). As the analysis of the selected corpus shows, both sides display a clear ‘us vs. them’ discourse.

In the case of YPJ, the ‘us’ can be seen through the use of texts that emphasise their fight in Rojava as a collective fight, seeking to consolidate their struggle for liberty10, while reinforcing their values of egalitarianism, gender emancipation and resistance. The ‘us’ frame extends to an international fight to free women (and men) from the domination of patriarchy and capitalism, placing every person who believe in their ideals on their ‘us’ side. The construction of ‘them’, in turn, can be clearly seen in YPJ’s texts and discursive practices that oppose the hegemony and domination of the West and its patriarchal and capitalist system. The strong representation of YPJ’s ideology through media texts plays a key part in relation to power in the sense that the YPJ use language to challenge the dominant hegemonic power and ultimately attempt to alter the distribution of power (as

10 For example, when they say “Kobani is continuing to resist” (ArYPJ1), conferring agency to Kobani which, in turn, represents everyone involved in their fight (not just YPG and YPJ, but also all the people who they fight for). 74 per Wodak, 2001). Here, van Dijk’s ideological square (1998) allowed for the identification of the level and depth of information that YPJ include in their texts when referring to ‘us’11 or to ‘them’12, and how the included information either helps to legitimise YPJ’s discourse or represent the ‘other’ as negative. Conversely, suppression of information also plays an important role in this dichotomisation. For example, although the US (‘them’) has collaborated with YPJ in several battles against ISIS by carrying out airstrikes, this information is suppressed in their media texts.

The lower degree of explicitness of ideological content in the UK media texts does not mean that they are not ideology-laden. Much to the contrary, as the analysis shows, hidden ideological ‘us vs. them’ discourses are deeply rooted in their broader hegemonic discourse. A telling example is the way in which YPJ’s ideology is portrayed, which is rather generic or outright neglected. This suppression of information about the organisation’s ideology can, to a certain degree, be connected to a Western perspective of YPJ’s cause as an ‘oriental’ issue (of the ‘other’) that does not relate to ‘us’. This can be seen, for example, in texts about Anna Campbell in which there is a great need to explain why she (an ‘us’ member) decided to join ‘them’.

However, as pointed out in the analysis, this dichotomisation in the UK media suffers a shift whenever the news are about YPJ’s fight against ISIS. In this case, their fight converges with Western interests because they share the same enemy. The result is a negative portrayal of ISIS (creating a new ‘them’, as per van Dijk’s ideological square, 1998) and the inclusion of more detail about YPJ, praising them for battling against a Western enemy and turning them into a member of ‘us’. As such, an endorsement of the ‘other’ (YPJ) occurs in the terms of the hegemonic Western discourse. However, the representation of YPJ’s ideological agency and struggle still remains largely neglected. YPJ’s fight against ISIS is represented solely as counterterrorism, when in reality ISIS is one enemy amongst others in the broader context of the Kurdish question, the Rojava project, the Syrian conflict and the YPG and YPJ’s battles.

Yet another discourse became apparent when we analysed the texts that portray conflicts between YPJ and Turkey. As the analysis of the case of Barin Kobani shows, an ostensible

11 As a way to legitimise their ideological principles through the use of a propagandistic discourse. 12 Through negative representations of the ‘other‘. 75 neutral tone is often present, in which texts provide more or less positive and negative information for both sides (YPJ and Turkey), which at first seems to frame both as ‘others’. However, a closer look reveals hidden agendas in these texts (apart from BaTG1). This can be observed through the lexical choice adopted to refer to the different groups involved in the conflicts, a word choice that confers more agency to the groups which are supported by the UK, such as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) whose portrayal includes names of specific members. Another critical element is the generic way in which the UK media refer to the several groups involved. For example, when the video of the mutilated corpse of Barin Kobani became popular on the Internet and social media, YPJ directly accused the Turkish government for the atrocity. However, when expressing YPJ’s claims, the UK media uses the term “Turkish-backed rebels”, a term that mitigates the blame YPJ put on the Turkish state. On the one hand, considering that the UK has a positive relationship with Turkey, as well as the fact that Turkey is a NATO member, the articulation of such mitigation becomes plausible. On the other hand, considering YPJ’s fight within the backdrop of the Kurdish question as well as their ideological agency, such terms do not accurately represent their stance. This use of broad terms also creates a generalised construction of the ‘rebels’ that is misleading in informing the reader.

6.6.2 Representations of fallen YPJ soldiers: sensationalist and propagandistic discourses

The representation fallen YPJ soldiers receive in the organisation’s own media largely falls back on a propagandistic discourse where death and self-sacrifice are seen as heroic accomplishments and instrumental acts in a twofold battle; one aimed at defending Rojava and its people(s), and another against the capitalist system and patriarchal rule, which is deemed to be on an international level. However, as pointed out in our analysis, exactly where emphasis is placed on this scale seems to slightly differ, depending on whether the soldier was Kurdish or, as in the case of Anna Campbell, an international combatant. Either way, for YPJ it is pivotal to portray their own soldiers as fearless and unhesitant: their deaths were never in vain but actively contributed towards the defeat of the enemy (even when the soldiers died in a convoy on their way to battle). Through the use of an ideological discourse – an interpretation of reality that is constructed as a means to legitimise power (Fairclough, 1995, p. 14) – self-defending women are celebrated and

76

YPJ consequently justify self-immolation by portraying it as an act of heroic self-defence and the highest form of liberation. This reasoning is reinforced by YPJ’s utilisation of the term ‘martyr’, which removes any connotation of victimhood by indicating an honourable and brave death through self-sacrifice for a bigger cause. This heroic representation of each individual soldier also serves as an effective way of strengthening the representation of the organisation as a whole and portray it as unreservedly determined when it comes to achieving their goals. As such, an intentional suppression of information (as per van Dijk’s ideological square, 1998) about the death of Barin Kobani becomes plausible, since her mutilated body would be seen as a sign of defeat and consequently stand in contrast to the laudable self-representation YPJ aim to portray to the world.

In the UK media, however, there is an apparent lack of genuine interest for YPJ’s ideological stance and to thoroughly present the socio-political underpinnings that have led up to the organisation’s establishment and the reasons why individuals have chosen to fight for them. Instead, a sensationalist discourse is used to explain the circumstances surrounding each YPJ soldier’s demise. Anna Campbell’s death for instance is described with an unprecedented high level of detail, which none of the other cases received, since, as pointed out above, she was a member of ‘us’ - thus, there is a need to understand why she decided to join ‘them’. This portrayal presents sensationalist elements characterised by the emphasis on her personality traits and relationship with her parents who are conferred great agency in the texts through the inclusion of details about them (such as the fact that her mother died of cancer).

Barin Kobani on the other hand, is not considered a person for whom extensive explanation is needed as far as background, ideology or what she died for - rather it is what happened to her body after her death that is considered to be of interest since it offers the opportunity to sensationalise the story by portraying her as a victim. This apparent disinterest in YPJ’s ideological stance is also evident in the portrayal of Arin Mirkan, who, despite being a ‘suicide attacker’, can be incorporated in the ‘ingroup’ (van Dijk, 1995b, p. 249) through a strategy of mitigation where a worse ‘them’ is created (ISIS). Consequently, Arin Mirkan can be portrayed as someone who is of interest to ‘us’ since she is fighting for the same Western values. The neglect of ideological agency is even more accentuated in the sensationalistic and victimising representations of Arin Mirkan as a ‘mother of two’; not only does this remove focus from the reason behind her self-

77 immolation and YPJ’s broader cause, but also presents readers with inaccurate information since Arin Mirkan did not have children13. As to why Avesta Xabur did not receive any media coverage at all in the UK we can only speculate, something we refrain from doing. We can, however, affirm that there was no lack of information about her to be obtained from YPJ’s media outlets, had she been of interest to the British media. Her noticeable non-appearance also raises the question as to whether Barin Kobani would have received the coverage she did in the UK, had there not been a video of her mutilated body circulating on social media. Alternatively, would Avesta Xabur have been deemed newsworthy if there were graphic evidence of her self-detonation or if she had died fighting against ISIS? While these questions remain unanswered, the analysis of our collected data does confirm that in order for a YPJ soldier’s demise to receive coverage in British media, there has to be a common point of interest within Western ideology or an element of sensationalism (or a combination of both), since this has been the type of discourse identified in the UK media’s portrayals of these deaths.

13 YPJ hold the principle that women with children do not take part in the frontline battles, but instead work in other institutional areas within the organisation. 78

7. Conclusion

In the present thesis we have aimed at comparing media representations of Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ)14 found in British media with that of the organisation’s own media outlets, with the purpose of investigating how these two representations differ and, most importantly, identifying what discourses are present in such representations. Based on a vast literature review and a pre-study of both British media texts and YPJ’s own texts, we were able to initially identify two broad patterns that further motivated the research:

(1) a consistent and strong emphasis on the ideological foundations of YPJ and their current political system in the de facto region of Rojava in northern Syria, which is present in the organisation’s media texts; (2) a tendency for generic representations of Rojava and often a lack of representation of YPJ’s ideological agency by the British media.

Although our initial research on existing studies on Western media representations of YPJ revealed a clear focus on gendered portrayals, this has not played a central role in this thesis15 since we did not identify strongly gender-biased representations in our corpus, such as those present in the earliest media representations of YPJ16. What has been evident, though, is a lack of representation of YPJ’s ideology.

Based on the above pre-identified patterns, we devised three further operational aims that have guided our study and aided in answering the main research question. One of them was to investigate how YPJ portray themselves in terms of ideology through their own media channels. The other one was to look at how British media (as pertaining to the broader umbrella of Western media) portray YPJ and their ideological agency. Lastly, we looked at how these two portrayals differ, identifying discourses by deciphering ideologies.

14 Women’s Protection Units – an all-female Kurdish military organisation. 15 We have only found some texts that could be understood in gendered terms, such as the case of Anna Campbell who sometimes got introduced as ‘the first British woman’ to die fighting with the Kurds in northern Syria, instead of, for example, ‘the eighth Briton’ (seven British men fighting alongside YPG have died prior to her). 16 Such as articles depicting YPJ fighters as ‘Angelina Jolie of Kurdistan’ (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/kurdish-angelina-jolie-fighter-reportedly- killed-fighting-isis-a7231431.html serves as a good example). 79

In order to operationalise the proposed aims, we used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a method and analytical framework as proposed by Norman Fairclough, one of the founders of CDA as applied in sociolinguistics. Working with a combination of abductive and retroductive strategies, we were also able to integrate further theories that would help us explain the discourses found in the analysis. As such, besides CDA and its theoretical underpinnings (such as the notions of discourse, power and ideology), we also utilised Postcolonial theory in order to interpret certain Orientalistic patterns found in the British media (such as the concept of Otherness), as well as van Dijk’s ideological square which aided us in the operationalisation of dichotomised discourses in terms of ‘ingroups and outgroups ideologies’. In other words, van Dijk’s ideological square served as a way of identifying ideology-laden discourses, which we then interpreted through a postcolonial lens. By utilising this combination of theories, we have been able to examine how both the British media and YPJ create meaning through the use of language, demonstrating implicit power relationships that compose a broader ideological discourse.

As our analysis have shown, both sides (British media and YPJ) represent varying degrees of explicitness in terms of ideological discourses. For example, the media texts of YPJ display a much more unambiguous ideological stance, something that can be attributed to the propagandistic nature of their content which is crafted to legitimise their ideology, struggle and, very importantly, to be utilised as a discursive weapon against their enemies. For this reason, knowledge of their history and ideological underpinnings is of prime importance in order to understand their discourse, which is deeply rooted in Abdullah Öcalan’s ideas on democratic confederalism based on gender emancipation, egalitarianism, resistance, freedom and social ecology. Thus, by shaping the content of their media texts around their ideology, YPJ’s texts function as a propagandistic discourse and at the same time as a means to reinforce a discourse of martyrdom as an ideological tool to emphasise their resistance as an ultimate sign of strength as well as their intrepid attitude towards the enemy. As such, their fighters are represented as fearless heroes and martyrs who are prompt to sacrifice themselves for the larger cause they are fighting for.

In the case of the British media, the degree of explicitness of ideological discourse is less obvious. This possibly happens because the Western ideology of neo-liberalism and capitalism is dominant and hegemonic, creating the naturalisation of basic assumptions as commonsensical beliefs that form the normative pillars of Western discourse. Because

80 these ideological basic assumptions are naturalised as unquestioned common-sense beliefs, deciphering ideological discourses becomes a hard process that challenges one to step out of their own constructed reality in order to be able to see the deeper hidden ideological underpinnings that legitimise the power of the hegemonic discourse. On the one hand, YPJ, through their use of a propagandistic discourse, make conscious efforts to assert their ideological underpinnings, which seek to challenge the dominant Western ideology. On the other hand, the UK media, in their hegemonic position, portray the battles and struggles of YPJ (the ‘other’) in an Orientalistic way (Said, 1978/1995, p. 3).

Through the analysis of the selected corpus, we were able to identify the following discourses that compose the main findings of the present analysis:

(1) ideological representations in a “us vs. them” (ingroups vs. outgroups) dichotomisation; (2) sensationalist and propagandistic discourses around representations of fallen YPJ soldiers by the UK media as either victims or suicide attackers (neglect of ideological agency) vs. representation of fallen soldiers by YPJ’s media as heroines and martyrs.

Based on such findings, the present research corroborates previous studies (see section 2.2) conducted on the media representation YPJ soldiers have received in Western media. We too conclude that there is a lack of thorough portrayals of “these fighters’ political agenda” (Tank, 2017, p. 406) and if YPJ’s ideological underpinnings do receive attention, it is mostly in simplistic and trivialised ways (Alonso Soriano, 2016). However, while previous research has paid attention to the gendered representation YPJ’s soldiers have received, we have also detected how the use of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘in- and outgroups’ is applied and modified to maintain and serve the needs of a Western hegemonic discourse. Additionally, we can also confirm that YPJ themselves rely on a similar dichotomised representation, but who is included in ‘us’ and ‘them’ highly differs from that of the West.

However, the main difference between YPJ’s own media representation and that of the UK’s (as pertaining to the broader umbrella of Western media) is found in terms of ideological agency. Whereas YPJ adopt an explicit effort to assert their ideology through a propagandistic discourse that emphasises their values of resistance, egalitarianism, gender emancipation and democratic confederalism, the UK media implement a

81 sensationalistic and victimizing discourse where soldiers’ ideology and reason for giving their lives is mainly referred to in generic terms. Furthermore, by choosing when to include (or exclude) YPJ in ‘us’, the UK media also exerts the power to endorse YPJ’s fight within a Western hegemonic discourse where their struggle is portrayed as part of a Western counterterrorist strategy – a construction which further neglects the organisation’s ideological agency while legitimising the West to write history based on its own premises and claims of truth.

7.1 Scope for further research

The study that has been carried out for this thesis calls attention to a number of topics on which further research would be beneficial. As mentioned in the introduction, research on YPJ in general still remains scarce from a Media and Communication perspective. While we have addressed how the organisation’s own media representation differs from that found in British media, we consider a similar study where more Western countries’ media outlets are included to be advantageous in order to see if the UK treats the topic differently than, for example, Germany, where the Kurdish question has a lot of support. Another country of interest is undeniably the USA, since it started to support YPG/J militarily under the Obama administration (and are currently continuing under the Trump administration) even if it has put the country on a collision course with its NATO co- member Turkey and led to official warnings from Turkish president Recep Tayip Erdogan. Does such military support filter down to the American media representations of YPJ as well? Are they portrayed as an ‘us’ or as a ‘them’? Research in these areas would help to confirm and validate the study we have undertaken.

Yet another area of research that to our knowledge remains untouched from a Media and Communication perspective is that of YPG’s media production. Just like YPJ, they too are ambitious media makers and frequently update their channels. We deem this to be of interest since, as mentioned above, previous research on media representation of Rojava’s armed forces have mainly focused on the female soldiers and taken a gender perspective. We have, however, concluded that there are other, and just as prevalent, discourses present in British media representations of YPJ. Are the same discourses used to represent YPG? If so, how does YPG’s self-representation differ from those they obtain in other

82 countries? Does their self-representation differ from their female counterpart YPJ? Such investigations would provide further insight into how media is used by military organisations in the Middle East in order to represent themselves, in addition to understanding how and why it contrasts from the media representations they receive in the West.

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List of Figures

Figure 1 – Map of Rojava as of February 2014 (wikipedia.com, n.d.) (CC0 1.0)…..p. 18

Figure 2 – van Djik’s notion of ‘Ideological Square’. Adapted from van Dijk, 1998, p. 267………………………………………………………………………………...…p. 36

Figure 3 – Figure 3 - Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse analysis. Adapted from Critical Discourse Analysis (p. 98) by Norman Fairclough, 1995, London: Longman……………………………………………………………………….…….p. 42

Figure 4 – Figure 4 – Newspaper websites ranked by monthly visitors in the UK (2013- 2016, latest statistics available) (Statista, n.d.)…………...…………………………..p. 44

Figure 5 – (ArYPJ2)………………………………………………………………....p. 52

Figure 6 – Image of the real Arin Mirkan (ArDM1)………………………………...p. 58

Figure 7 – Figure 7 - Photograph of unknown woman with two children claimed to be Arin Mirkan used by ArTST1……………………………………………………….p. 58

Figure 8 – Figure 8 - Same photograph also presented as Arin Mirkan, but this time in ArTT1………………………………………………………………………………..p. 59

Figure 9 – (AnYPJ1)………………………………………………………………...p. 62

Figure 10 – (AnTG2)………………………………………………………………...p. 64

Figure 11 – (AvYPJ5)………………………………………………………………..p. 69

Figure 12 – Photomontage of Avesta Xabor in the sunrise together with Abdullah Öcalan (AvYPJ6)…………………………………………………………………….p. 70

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Appendix 1: Corpus

Articles and posts composing our corpus.

1. Arin Mirkan

British media outlets:

ArTG1. “Air strikes hit Isis positions as jihadists push into Kobani” James. C for the Guardian. Published: October 7, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/07/isis-militants-enter-kobani-on- syrias-border-with-turkey [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArTI1. The Independent “Kurdish female suicide bomber attacks Isis in fight for Kobani” Elefheriou-Smith, L. for the Independent. Published: October 6, 2014 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/kurdish-female-suicide- bomber-attacks-isis-in-fight-for-kobani-9776779.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArTI2. “Isis raises the black flag: Islamists hail victory over Kurds as battle rages on Europe’s doorstep” Mroue, B. & Rush, J for The Independent. Published: October 6, 2014 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-banner-raised- over-kobani-as-bloody-battle-continues-for-syrian-border-town-9777596.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArDM1. “Kurdish mother-of-two launches suicide attack to slow Islamic State advance in desperate battle for Kobane” Hall, J. & Brown, L. for Daily Mail. Published: October 6, 2014, updated: October 7, 2014 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- 2782092/Mystery-surrounds-fate-Kurdish-female-fighter-poster-girl-reports-emerge- killed-bullet-avoid-taken-hostage-ISIS.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArTT1. “Kurdish female fighter in suicide attack on Isil amid fighting for key Syria town” The Telegraph. Published: October 5, 2014 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11142226/Kurdish- female-fighter-in-suicide-attack-on-Isil-amid-fighting-for-key-Syria-town.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

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ArTST1. “Mother is hailed a heroine for suicide attack on jihadists” Smith, H.L. for The Times. Published: October 7, 2014 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mother-is- hailed-a-heroine-for-suicide-attack-on-jihadists-3w5rfgwdtkf [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

YPJ media outlets:

ArYPJ1. “Women's Defense Units #YPJ Command of Efrîn Canton - Statement regarding #Kobane and comrade Arîn Mirkan” YPJ Rojava on Twitter.Published: October 8, 2014 https://twitter.com/DefenseUnitsYPJ/status/519877858240380929 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArYPJ2. Kurdish female fighters/YPJ on Facebook. Published: October 5, 2015 https://www.facebook.com/1814267612131127/videos/1912398938984660/ [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArYPJ3. YPG on Facebook. Published: January 19, 2018 https://www.facebook.com/YPG/photos/a.786078711413727.1073741829.74806704 8548227/1696561933698729/?type=3&theater [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArYPJ4. The public relation office of YPJ on Facebook. Published: March 6, 2018 https://www.facebook.com/1709090465993734/photos/a.1714239028812211.10737 41828.1709090465993734/2166120256957417/?type=3&theater [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArYPJ5. “KCK: Women have a determining role in the building of communal life” ANF for ANF News. Published: March 8, 2015 https://anfenglish.com/women/kck-women- have-a-determining-role-in-the-building-of-communal-life-10620 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

ArYPJ6. “YPJ: There can be no revolution and freedom without women” ANF for ANF News. Published: March 8, 2015 https://anfenglish.com/women/ypj-there-can-be-no- revolution-and-freedom-without-women-10612 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

2. Anna Campbell

British media outlets:

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AnTG1. “British woman killed fighting Turkish forces in Afrin”. Matt, B. for The Guardian. Published: March 19, 2018, updated: April 14, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/19/briton-kurds-anna-campbell-dies- fighting-turkey-syria-afrin [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnTG2. “Anna Campbell’s father: ‘I don’t think I had any right to stop her fighting in Syria’” Matt, B. for The Guardian. Published: April 1, 2018: updated April 14, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/01/anna-campbell-father-no-right-to- stop-her-fighting-syria-kurds [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnTI1. “British woman killed fighting for all-female Kurdish militia in Syria” Deaden, L & Osborne, S for The Independent. Published: March 19, 2018 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/british-woman-killed-syria- anna-campbell-lewes-east-sussex-fighting-all-female-kurdish-militia-a8262831.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnDM1. “British woman, 26, who joined all-female Kurdish unit fighting ISIS in Syria is killed after ‘her convoy is hit by a Turkish rocket’ during battle for Afrin” Joseph, A. & Robinson, J for Daily Mail. Published: March 19, 2018, updated: March 20, 2018 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5517229/British-woman-26-fighting-ISIS- killed-Syria.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnDM2. “'I joked "it’s been nice knowing you"… I knew it might be the last time I’d see her': Father of British woman, 26, killed fighting ISIS in Syria tells of his anguish and pride at his 'unstoppable' daughter” Joseph, A & Robinson, J & Bracchi, P for Daily Mail. Published: March 20, 2018, updated: March 20, 2018 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520993/Father-British-woman-killed- fighting-ISIS-pays-tribute.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnTT1. “Anna Campbell's father: 'She was determined to make a difference to the world... I'm so proud of her'” Steafel E. & Evens M. for The Telegraph. Published: March 20, 2018 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/anna-campbell- determined-make-difference-world-proud/ [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnTT1. “British woman Anna Campbell who joined all-female fighting unit killed in Syria” Telegraph Reporters for The Telegraph. Published: March 19, 2018

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/19/briton-anna-campbell-killed-fighting- kurdisharmed-unit-syria/ [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

YPJ media outlets:

AnYPJ1. “To the public” YPJ for YPJ Rojava. Published: March 19, 2018 https://www.ypjrojava.org/To-the-public [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AnYPJ2. “Our British comrade Hêlîn Qereçox (Anna Campbell) has become the symbol of all women after resising against fascism in #Afrin to create a free world. We promise to fulfill Şehîd Hêlîn’s struggle and honour her memory in our fight for freedom.” YPJ Rojava on Twitter. Published: March 19, 2018 https://twitter.com/DefenseUnitsYPJ/status/975735773872959488 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

3. Avesta Xabur

YPJ media outlets:

AvYPJ1. “Female fighter made the ultimate sacrifice against the invaders” ANF for ANF News. Published: January 28, 2018 https://anfenglish.com/women/female-fighter- made-the-ultimate-sacrifice-against-the-invaders-24521 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AvYPJ2. “YPJ: Comrades of Avesta will make Afrin a grave for invaders” ANF for ANF News. Published: January 29, 2018 https://anfenglish.com/women/ypj-comrades-of- avesta-will-make-afrin-a-grave-for-invaders-24529 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AvYPJ3. “Yesterday Afrîn Mîrkan; today Avêsta Xabûr” ypg-international for YPG International. Published: January 29, 2018 http://ypg- international.org/2018/01/29/yesterday-arin-mirkan-today-avesta-xabur/ [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AvYPJ4. “Let’s reach the Era of Resistance to success with the spirit of March 8th” YPJ Rojava for YPJ Rojava. Published: March 8, 2018 https://www.ypjrojava.org/Let%E2%80%99s-reach-the-Era-of-Resistance-to- success-with-the-spirit-of-March-8th [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

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AvYPJ5. “On March 8th International Women’s Day, the YPJ is pioneering the struggle against invaders in Afrin. We promise to reach the honour of all women to the skies. Long live the resistance of women against opressors. Long live the struggle to create a free world.” YPJ Rojava on Twitter.Published: March 8, 2018 https://twitter.com/DefenseUnitsYPJ/status/971715325413789696 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

AvYPJ6. “The spirit of victory has been created in Kurdistan with the labour of hundreds of years” YPJ Rojava for YPJ Rojava. Published: March 4, 2018 https://twitter.com/DefenseUnitsYPJ/status/971715325413789696 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

4. Barin Kobani

British media outlets:

BaTG1. “Syrian Kurds outraged over mutilation of female fighter” Agence France- Presse in Afrin for The Guardian. Published: February 2, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/02/syrian-kurds-outraged-over- mutilation-of-female-fighter [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

BaTI1. “Barin Kobani: Video of Kurdish female fighter’s body prompts outrage” Mortimer, C. for The Independent. Published: February 4, 2018 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/barin-kobani-kurdish- fighter-video-female-fighter-body-mutilated-a8194261.html [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

BaBBC1. “Syria war: Outcry over dead female Kurdish fighter” BBC News. Published: February 3, 2018 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-42929247 [Retrieved: March 26, 2018]

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Appendix 2: Coding

Coding of our corpus (white: British media, grey: YPJ media).

Article Heroine Victim Us/Them Sensationalism Propaganda Ideology

ArTG1. x

ArTI1. x

ArTI2. x

ArDM1. x x

ArTT1. x

ArTST1. x

ArYPJ1. x x x x

ArYPJ2. x x x

ArYPJ3. x x x

ArYPJ4. x x x

ArYPJ5. x x x x

ArYPJ6. x x x x

AnTG1. x

AnTG2. x

AnTI1. x x

AnDM1. x x

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AnDM2. x x

AnTT1. x

AnTT2. x

AnYPJ1. x x x x x

AnYPJ2. x x x x

AvYPJ1. x

AvYPJ2. x x x x

AvYPJ3. x x x

AvYPJ4. x x

AvYPJ5. x x x

AvYPJ6. x x x

BaTG1. x x

BaTI1. x x x

BaBBC1. x x x

102