Dr Hasret Cetinkaya

I am a feminist human rights scholar working at the intersections of international law, gender studies and post-/de-colonial theorising. My research explores the ways in which the “social life” of rights and ethical life (legal and ethical subjectivity) are experienced in gendered ways, and cut across by the coloniality of power. At the centre of my work is a concern with epistemic justice and the politics of knowledge production. In particular, I am passionate about developing a critical understanding of  the role of law and legal institutions in the formation of power/knowledge about the lives of marginalised women in the Global South and in diaspora communities in Europe. 

My current and first book project ‘Honour’ and Human Rights: Namûs, Ethical Life and Legal Subjectivity examines these themes through the lens of “honour”, or namûs (in Kurdish), focusing on the ways in which representations of namûs within human rights advocacy (both nationally and internationally) –– including the academic and UN Human Rights reporting on “honour” and “honour-based-violence” –– has material consequences for the women who live with and through such an ethical way of life. I focus particularly on the Kurdish diasporas ensnared by the bio-political regimes of Europe. This project is grounded in multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in North Kurdistan, Turkey and Denmark among Kurdish women who live with and through “honour” (namûs) in their everyday. This research on practices of so-called “honour” offers a critical rethinking of modalities of freedom and power in local and contextual ways, as it grapples with questions of the self, ethics and power within cultures of human rights and the law. 

I am also researching a second book project on the Re-making of Human Rights: Gender and Self-Fashioning in the Political and Legal Imaginary of Rojava, for which I was awarded funding from the Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship scheme in 2022 (funded by the UKRI). This project explores the vernacular articulation of human rights by feminist activists in North Eastern Syria and within the “diasporic public sphere” of Rojava, and critically examines their alternative transnational political imaginary of rights. At stake, in this radical experiment in democracy and justice are new and innovative ways of thinking about community, human rights and gendered legal and political subjectivities as well as the ethics and politics of justice in the colonial present of the Middle East. 

Prior to joining Manchester Law School in September 2023, I held a Marie Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA) at London School of Economics’ Department of Gender Studies. I was awarded a PhD from the Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway (formerly NUI Galway), where I was also a recipient of the prestigious Hardiman Doctoral Research Scholarship. I have LLM degrees in International Law and Human Rights from both the University of Essex and University of Copenhagen. 

I sit on the Editorial Board of Feminist Legal Studies Journal (Springer).