Dr. Isabel Käser

Isabel Käser is an SNSF-Ambizione Fellow and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology. Her work centres on gender, war, de/militarization, and migration, as well as feminist mobilisations with a focus on the Middle East, particularly different parts of Kurdistan and its diasporas. 

Her current project Leaving the party: former Kurdish rebels and the remaking of post-revolutionary subjectivities in Iraqi Kurdistan and the European diaspora examines the ways in which political violence and criminalisations continue to reverberate in people’s lives and bodies after an armed struggle. Based on ethnographic research with and the life stories of former rebels, Isabel explores the everydayness of the leaving process and asks how people from different Kurdish national liberation movements navigate the borders and obstacles they encounter as they disentangle themselves from their militant past and rebuild a new life. Drawing on transnational and post-colonial feminist theory, Isabel’s work is situated at the intersections of feminist international relations, critical military studies and feminist geography.

Isabel gained her PhD at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London, and is the author of the award-winning book "The Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement: Gender, Body Politics and Militant Femininities" (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She has taught BA and MA courses on gender, sexuality, conflict, and art and activism in relation to the Middle East at SOAS, the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr, and the University of Bern. She has worked in journalism and diplomacy, most recently as the Project Lead of “Art in Peace Mediation” (2019-2020), a research project of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA).

Prior to her Ambizione Fellowship, Isabel was a Postodoctoral Researcher at the University of Bern (2022-2023), a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre (2020-2023), and the Principal Investigator of a collaborative project between the LSE and the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr titled “The Kurdistan Region of Iraq Post-ISIS: Youth, Art and Gender” (2021-2023), for which her and her team analysed the nexus of feminist art and youth activism in Iraqi Kurdistan.