Women in combat roles are present in at least 40% of armed rebellion movements, yet the narrative of women outside of traditional roles in conflict is invisible in various discursive communities of practice. Silence and misrecognition are the root of this issue: to be considered as agents and full partners of social interaction, female combatants need to exist in the discourse of leaders and institutions. Embedded in the feminist IR theory, I utilise Critical Discourse Analysis and Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis to unveil the extent of recognition given to female fighters in data internal and external to conflicts. United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820 and 1889 are analysed to explore whether women are institutionally ‘allowed’ to exist as agents in war beyond the roles of victim and peacemaker. Analysis of discourse from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party then serves to dive deeper into the recognition of female fighters by the leaders of armed struggle movements. Despite the ambitions of gender equality of all three actors, the research reveals that a greater level of feminist ideology seems to exceptionalise female combatants, thus not including and recognising them to the same extent as men.

The aim and purpose of this study is to explore how the Western media, more precisely six British newspapers, portrays the Kurdish female fighters of the Women’s Protection Units and the Peshmerga, who today are fighting against Deash in Northern Iraq and Syria. There have been a growing media interest in the Kurdish female fighters since the rise of Daesh, and they were an often recurring subject in newspapers and other media platforms during 2014 and 2015. I have collected 32 articles from six different newspapers, and applied a framework consisting of six different frames developed by Brigitte L. Nacos together with theories of media framing and social constructivism. The methodology is conducted as a critical discourse analysis, inspired by Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model.     In the articles, the Kurdish female fighters are portrayed as a different phenomenon, however, the articles still describes them as brave and dignified fighters who are rational in their understanding of what they are fighting for and what they are sacrificing. They are portrayed as being motivated by issues such as equality and female liberation in contrast to Deash anti-female values. The previous research conducted by feminist scholars often focuses on that the media portray women, who conduct acts of political violence, in a negative ways, such as deviants who are lacking traditionally stereotypical feminine characteristics or that their looks are in focus instead of their motivations. However, I have drawn the conclusion that there is more to how the Kurdish female fighters are portrayed then what one would think.

With the uprising of the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011, a myriad of news articles covering Syrian people' protests were published in the international media. However, it was after the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Syria and accordingly, Rojava region ​– the ​Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, de facto Autonomous Region ​– in 2014, that the region became the attention center of the international media. A considerable number of academic articles have analyzed the representations of the Kurdish female fighters in the Western media in different angles, such as the framing of the female fighters, their motivations, their roles in the war etc. There may exist a limited number of academic papers analyzing the Kurdish female fighters from the non-Western media perspective which might present a different picture from that of Western media analysis. Applying framing theory in combination with a qualitative content analysis approach, this study is intended to explore the Kurdish female fighters’ framing in Arabic, Kurdish and Russian media, namely Al-Jazeera, ANF and RT, respectively. Moreover, orientalism theory, feminist theory on militarization and war, and war and peace journalism theory are implied to investigate the framing of the kurdish female fighters in the three media.

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.