Negotiating what it means to be “free”: gender equality and governance in North and East Syria

In this article, I discuss the gender equality reforms in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, and how they have affected women’s lives since the implementation of the Women’s Law in 2014. Based on forty in-depth interviews and participant observation, this ethnographic study aims to understand how newly implemented practices and institutions borne out of an emancipatory political project prescribe acceptable forms of behavior. I argue that in engendering both discipline and resistance, awareness raising efforts and education seminars operate as governing tools and result in the emergence of new subjectivities neither entirely determined by ideology, nor by patriarchal structures.