FLUX: International Relations Review way, harmfully ingenuine feminist priorities may also come from within the stateless population, demonstrating how feminist and nationalist agendas may clash. Thus, women of IraqiKurdistan are more likely to experience double oppression because of nationalist ideology, particularly in the context of statelessness. Westernbased feminist literature has heavily covered the mechanisms through which statelessness may negatively affect women's status. These findings suggest that nationalist projects reproduce and rely on patriarchal norms and practices, using women's bodies as a battlefield for maintaining their political, social, and economic oppression (O'Keefe 2013, 1). This essay will devote more analysis to how nationalist ideology may positively affect women's status (O'Keefe 2013, 14). Nationalist ideology may positively affect women's status in several ways. Nationalist agendas may include gender equality as a key tenet, especially within the ideology of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) nationalist forces. In this way, both nationalist ideology and feminist ideology call for a disruption of the status quo and may work in tandem to achieve the changes each agenda seeks. For instance, within Syria's Kurdish population, the complementarity of nationalism and feminism contributed to the establishment of a broader political project for advancing women within Kurdish society and the Kurdish national agenda. Much of the literature centred on Kurdish women posits that the prominence of women's rights has always been a part of Kurdish nationalist ideology, albeit it has become more central over time (AlAli & Tas, 2018, 455). However, this seemingly omnipresent prioritization of women's rights has its origins in the Kurds' stateless condition. The PKK, the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey, was a challenge to the Kemalist nationalist ideology in Turkey. It is imperative to note that an integral part of the PKK's ideology and agenda is rooted in Marxist and communist beliefs. As a result, the PKK's "people's war" strategy of leftist social policies and nationalist uprising has integrated women's empowerment since the 1960s and 1970s (Al-Ali & Tas, 2018, 459). The PKK sought to 12 distinguish itself from and challenge Turkey; a part of this effort was to mobilize the Kurdish public for the Kurdish nationalist effort (Szekely, Henshaw, and Darden 2019, 7). Kemalist secularism had not led to significant changes in the daily lives of rural Kurdish women, in part because of their separateness and unique identity as Kurds. This power vacuum was an ideological opening for the PKK. As the PKK was ideologically predisposed to include women, their stateless movement for selfdetermination significantly facilitated the inclusion of large numbers of women. This development extended to the Syrian Kurdish nationalist movement. The PKK became a parent organization of the future PYD and looked to Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan for radical leftist ideological guidance (Szekely, Henshaw, and Darden 2019, 7). Ocalan, a Turkey-based Kurdish nationalist and father of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), has advocated for women's liberation throughout his life in the public eye. Thus, even though the PKK was focused on Kurdish liberation from Turkish rule, the organization's geographic and political proximity to Kurds across the border in Syria meant that the PKK strongly influenced its Syrian counterparts (Ferreira et al., 2018, 480). Further, the PKK and PYD are military allies and share similar experiences of cultural repression, including the quelling of the Kurdish language and names, that further facilitated the exchange of ideas and values in historical Kurdistan but across the Turkish-Syrian border (Szekely, Henshaw, and Darden 2019, 40). Thus, nationalist ideology in Syrian Kurdistan has served to advance feminist goals as both movements are rooted in leftist ideology and seek to uproot an unjust status quo. Consequently, the Kurdish women of Syria are more likely to experience a 'double revolution' as women's rights are developed alongside and within the nationalist agenda. It is natural to ask why Iraqi Kurds have not experienced a similarly striking confluence of women's liberation and nationalist ideology. Szekely, Henshaw, and Darden (2019) explain this difference by pointing to how Iraqi Kurdish national pursuits have been much less ideologically unified and more conservative than neighbouring Syrian Kurdish nationalism. Based in the Northern part of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan is home to only two regionally based major parties, the more conservative and personalist Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the center-left Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). The two nationalist organizations have failed to unify across partisan lines after over twenty years of attempting to do so since the bloody Kurdish Civil War (1994-1998) between the two forces (Wilgenburg and Fumerton 2015, 4). Additionally, these divergences have led the PUK and KDP to further their nationalist agenda via tribal elites and tribal dynamics (Szekely, Henshaw, and Darden 2019, 46). Tribal elites control nationalist ideology and maintain control of much of the Kurdish political and military power through their fighting forces, known as the jash (41). This steadfast partisan factionalism has been a critical causal factor in keeping Iraqi Kurdistan from becoming a complete, stable democracy capable of integrating political change to benefit women's status in the region. Thus, nationalist ideology, mainly that which is interested in feminist liberation, has not been as consistent and entrenched in Iraqi Kurdistan as it is for the Kurds of Syria. As a result of this discrepancy in combination, made possible by unique stateless conditions, Kurdish women of Iraq are more likely to experience a "double oppression." These differences exemplify the complexity and context-based nature of the relationship between statelessness and the status of women. In Syrian Kurdistan, specific political conditions in the region left a power vacuum for Kurdish nationalist movements to fill and promote gender equality. As a result, embracing feminism and challenging the dominant narrative of Syrian and Turkish statehood benefited the nationalist cause. Thus, Syrian Kurdistan has experienced a path akin to a 'double revolution,' as nationalist aspirations complemented feminist aspirations. Conversely, in Iraq, maintaining the political status quo, rather than making room for sociopolitical change, was the most beneficial strategy in the development and stability of Iraqi Kurdish nationalism (Joly and Bakawan 2016, 962). Thus, due to differing ideologies and mechanisms of nationalist mobilization, Kurdish women in Syria and Iraq have experienced a 'double revolution' and "double oppression," respectively. (Semi) Autonomous Spaces and Governance Autonomous spaces controlled by stateless populations can negatively or positively impact women's status based on various factors such as legal infrastructure and ideological roots. In Syrian Kurdistan, the ruling PYD party heads a de facto, autonomous government that is developing a federal system and regional parliament. In Kurdish-controlled spaces of Northern Syria, much of the power that women have gained has been attributed to the influence of the gender egalitarian philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan. Several phrases that Ocalan coined have become well-known sayings among Kurds and exemplify the strength of Kurdish feminism. One of these phrases, "To me, women's freedom is more precious than the freedom of the homeland," demonstrates how Ocalan redefined national liberation as women's freedom (Öcalan 2017, 19). This notion can be seen through advancements such as women gaining the right to divorce and inherit property on an equal basis; women have also gained the ability to keep their children and their homes in a marital breakup (Nordland 2018). Ocalan's philosophy has become the foundation of Kurdish lifestyles, particularly in Kurdish-dominated territories in Northern Syria and Eastern Turkey. The stability of Kurd-controlled spaces in Syria helped spread Ocalan's ideology, ushering feminist ideas to the forefront of public attention, as the population became less preoccupied with land defence, military strength, and general control. The stability of the Kurdish autonomous space in Syria, albeit de facto, has allowed for the proliferation of these more feminist ideals to permeate and change women's political and social status in Kurdish Syria. Consequently, women of Syrian Kurdistan have been more likely to experience a 'double revolution' in which statelessness, and the unique potential for autonomous control that it presents, have complimented the feminist cause. Unlike its Syrian counterpart, Iraqi Kurdistan has not followed suit concerning women's 13