In the 21st century, concepts of humanity and universalism came under theoretical and political pressure. Posthumanism has gained popularity among scholars as marginalized groups, who were excluded from the supposedly all-inclusive category of the human began challenging the systematic banishment of certain people to “the zone of non-being” (Fanon).
Yet, currently, we are witnessing a cautious return to the ideas of universalism and humanism in anti-capitalist and anti-racist scholarship and movements as a way of countering the appropriation of post-humanism and particularism by the right as a way of defending autocratic and exclusionary politics. This return involves the unearthing of ideas on the human and the universal developed within anti-colonial thought. This research aims at joining discussions on “the human” and “the universal,” by focusing on the imaginaries that women’s anticolonial guerilla movements have produced against Asian imperialisms and colonialisms Specifically, I conduct a comparative study of the praxis of women guerillas in the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in relation to human-ness and universalism as they unfold in a context of repression, where the global forces of capitalism, securitization and imperialism, and the regional forces of patriarchy, colonization, and nationalism intersect.