What is it about?

This paper explores how the female Yazidi survivors' lived experience of ISIS captivity counter-intuitively offers modes of preserving agency and hope under conditions of extremity. The survivors engage their agency to resist their oppressors but in unconventional and non-Western ways of being that include endurance and suffering. This feminine Yazidi exemplar of resistance through endurance and passive suffering challenges traditional Western approaches to agency.

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Why is it important?

Both theoretically and empirically, examples of experienced agency and hope are thin under conditions of extremity, genocide, degenerate war, and prolonged conflict. Adding to this fatalistic view, women and girls are particularly at risk for violence and conflict-related-sexual violence under these conditions. Perhaps contrary to expectations, we provide qualitative evidence from the Yazidi women themselves and theoretical evidence from existential and feminist thinkers that agency as resistance, resilience, and hope are possibilities under such extreme conditions while also recognizing the ongoing context of the survivors' traumatization.

Perspectives

I hope that this article continues to bring awareness not only to the Yazidi genocide and to the plight of the Yazidi people, but to genocide as a contemporary phenomenon, as it is tragically not something that we have relegated to history. I have been moved by the Yazidi women and girls, and I hope that our work in this paper has done justice to their harrowing but also inspiring resilience. I am so grateful to my co-authors who are long-standing collaborators without whom this work would not be possible.

Amy Fisher-Smith
Fielding Graduate University

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This page is a summary of: Last girls: Necropolitical death worlds and agentic resistance among Yazidi female survivors of genocide., Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, August 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000329.
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