Women in transnational migrant activism: Supporting social justice claims of homeland political organizations

Abstract

This article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the Netherlands. The novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male dominated and directed. Two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a Kurdish women's organization supporting the communist cause in the 1980s and the Kurdish struggle in the 1990s in Turkey, respectively. In both organizations, gender equality was subordinated to broader ideologies of political parties in their homeland. Leftist activists in the Cold War era supported a narrow definition of the "politics of redistribution," while Kurdish activists, combined classical features of the latter with those of traditional identity politics.