‘When I struggle for my freedom with women, I feel free and I feel equal. Maybe if we weren’t organised, I wouldn’t feel like that. But freedom is so far away, that I know, we need hundreds of years’ (Ayşe Gökkan, 14 November 2015). We were sitting in the office of KJA, the Congress of Free Women (Kongreya Jinên Azad) in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, when Ayşe Gökkan told me what equality and freedom meant to her. Our interview was often interrupted by the war planes roaring overhead and rattling the windows,1 Ayşe’s phone ringing and people walking into her office for a quick consultation.