Challenging the ‘normal’: curious women conscientious objectors to military service in the male conscription system in Turkey

This article investigates how gender roles shape, normalize, and reinforce militarism and vice versa. Drawing on in-depth interviews with nineteen conscientious objectors, it explores the impacts of militarism on society and offers a picture of women’s demilitarization attempts in Turkey. It applies Cynthia Enloe’s feminist curiosity to understand the link between militarism, gender, and conscientious objection. Recent works have applied Enloe’s feminist curiosity and brought about a feminist approach to critical military studies. Such works, illuminating as they are, have paid little attention to the case of Turkey, the only member of the Council of Europe that does not recognize the right to conscientious objection. Most importantly, current debates on resistance to militarism and the right to conscientious objection are centred on the case of Israel, where women are conscripted. This constitutes a significant lacuna in the literature which this article tries to fill by examining Turkey, where women are not conscripted yet they declare their conscientious objection. The article illustrates that conscription constitutes only one dimension of militarism and that militarism also affects women’s lives even though they are not subjected to compulsory military service. In so doing, it broadens the discussion on the right to conscientious objection by studying those who are previously assumed to be ‘irrelevant’.