Keyal Ahmed, “Benderî Bermûda” (1999).
Solid data regarding the changing territorial constellation of the war is generally hard to find due to its daily developments. This Wikipedia map was recommended to us by one of Rojava’s administrators →.
"Rojava’s population has nearly doubled to about 4.6 million. The newcomers are Sunni and Shia Syrian Arabs who have fled the scorched wasteland that Assad has made of his country. They are also Orthodox Assyrian Christians, Chaldean Catholics, and others, from out of the jihadist dystopia that has taken up so much of the space where Assad’s police state used to be.” Terry Glavin, “In Iraq and Syria, it’s too little too late,” Ottawa Citizen, Nov, 14, 2014
“The unexpected and quick defeat of the Kurdish peshmerga forces in Sinjar, which was until recently populated mainly by followers of the ancient Yazidi Mesopotamian faith, prompted the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to jump into the scene … ‘After IS stormed Sinjar and the peshmerga withdrew from there, a security vacuum emerged and the Yazidis faced the threat of a huge massacre. So, we decided to move in,” said Redur Khalil, YPG’s spokesman … The YPG and PKK have even formed a special force, the Sinjar Defense Units, to defend Sinjar.” Mohammed Sali, “PKK forces impress in fight against Islamic State,” Al-Monitor, Sept. 1, 2014 →.
“In the 1960s, some 120,000 Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship, forcing them to live in a sort of grey zone where they could not own property, were banned from certain professions, could not own cars, and could not get passports to leave the country. Syria also banned Kurdish political parties and put limits, similar to its neighbor Turkey, on Kurdish-language publications and education.” Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 61.
Interview conducted with Dilar Dirik in De Balie, Amsterdam on October 22, 2014.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“The Social Contract,” January 29, 2014 →.
Exactly how much territory and how to define this in terms of monopolized violence—implied by the term “state”—is highly contested. The New York Times created this “visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria” in an attempt to provide data on the origins of Islamic State fighters as well as the areas currently under their control →.
A relevant article reconstructing the rise of the Islamic State consists of interviews with a senior official militant—nom de guerre Abu Ahmed—who was imprisoned in the US-led Camp Bucca, where the current leader of the IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was incarcerated as well, and where the main recruitment of his cadre took place. Martin Chulov, “Isis: The Inside Story,” The Guardian, Dec. 11, 2014 →.
Curator Vivian Ziherl speaks of the term of “Thirld Worldism” as a history that has to be continuously rewritten, thus questioning dominant linear—modernist—narratives that laid the foundation for colonization as such. One such attempt at an alternative historical exploration of Third Worldism can be found in Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Thirld World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
On the 1936 Spanish revolution, see Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936 (San Francisco: AK Press, 1994); for a more extensive historical examination of the concept of libertarian socialism, see Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red, eds. Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, David Berry (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
Amil Kemal Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 87.
“The PKK Foundation in Sakine Cansiz’s words,” written on November 25, 1978 →.
This truce was far from permanent, and in fact marked the beginning of the dominance of armed struggle in the Kurdish liberational movement: “At the start of June 2004, KONGRA-GEL (the organizational name of the PKK at the time) declared the undeclared five-year unilateral cease-fire ‘obsolete’ as they claimed that Turkey’s military operations against the limited remaining guerrilla forces within the borders had been accelerated since early spring. In fact, there existed no five-year ceasefire but an end to the ‘armed struggle.’”Amil Kemal Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 214.
Marcus, Blood and Belief, 179.
Ibid., 230.
“The PKK Foundation in Sakine Cansiz’s words.”
Abdullah Öcalan recalls: “Young women fighters in particular, whose participation should have been understood as an important enrichment of the movement, were treated disparagingly as a burden, punished for their love of freedom and forced into the most primitive patriarchal relationships.” A. Öcalan, Prison Writings II: The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century (London: Transmedia Publishing, 2011), chapter “The PKK.”
Marcus, Blood and Belief, 249.
Interview conducted with Dilar Dirik in De Balie, Amsterdam on October 22, 2014.
Kurdish Women’s Movement representative Fadile Yıldırım recalled on this issue that “the enemy is not just outside, we also have an enemy inside … The Kurdish women’s freedom movement started inside the national liberation movement.” Fadile Yıldırım, “Women and Democracy: The Kurdish Question and Beyond,” lecture at the first New World Summit, May 4, 2013, Sophiensaele, Berlin →.
Öcalan’s most elaborate attempt to articulate a social, historical, cultural, and political analysis of the roots of the Kurdish Question—narrating the birth of subsequent tribalism, statism, capitalism, and patriarchy—in order to provide a viable scenario for an autonomous and democratic Kurdish movement can be found in his Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilisation (London: Transmedia Publishing, 2007).
Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution (Cologne: International Initiative Edition/Neuss: Mesopotamian Publishers, 2013), 35.
Ibid., 36.
See Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, “Reassembling the Political: The PKK and the project of Radical Democracy,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012).
Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism (London: Transmedia Publishing, 2011), 10.
Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (New York: Verso Books, 2015), 138.
Bookchin’s most elaborate description of the ecological society is to be found in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982). Janet Biehl, a long-time collaborator with Bookchin, reported on the exchange between Öcalan and Bookchin during the conference “Challenging Capitalist Modernity,” Feb. 3–5, 2012, Hamburg. See J. Biehl, “Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy,” New Compass, Feb. 16, 2012 →.
Bookchin defines this concept as following: “Communalism draws on the best of the older Left ideologies … From Marxism, it draws the basic project of formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism that integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics … From anarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well as the recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only by a libertarian socialist society.” Ibid., 15.
On the relation between confederalism and participatory democracy Bookchin writes: “A confederalist view involves a clear distinction between policymaking and the coordination and execution of adopted policies. Policymaking is exclusively the right of popular community assemblies based on the practices of participatory democracy. Administration and coordination are the responsibility of confederal councils which become the means for interlinking villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities into confederal networks.” Ibid., 75.
Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden distinguish three interrelated projects: “A democratic republic, democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism. The democratic republic seeks to redefine the Republic of Turkey, by disassociating democracy from nationalism; democratic autonomy refers to the right of people to decide on their own priorities and policies, to determine their own future; and the project for democratic confederalism is to serve as a model for self-government, its concrete realization sought through the political organization of society at four different levels, namely, communes in villages and districts, the organization of social groups (such as women and youth), organization on the basis of cultural and religious identities, and civil society organizations.,” “Understanding Today’s Kurdish movement: Leftist Heritage, Martyrdom, Democracy, and Gender,” European Journal of Kurdish Studies 14 (2012).
Academic Amil Kemal Özcan attributes the capacity of the PKK to communicate Öcalan’s new ideas of radical democracy to its policies of “micro-education”—a tireless if necessary one-to-one model of communication with its constituency. Further, Özcan states that “the PKK-led ‘cause’ of the Kurdish populace in the Republic of Turkey is not a national one but an archetype of ‘identity liberation movement’ for which a nation-state is not sine qua non but a forthcoming peril. It is thus, in spite of Öcalan’s bold ‘surrender’ (the total abandonment of aims and objectives of a classical nationalist movement such as independence, federalism or semi-autonomous rule, the unkind and undisguised opposition to the Kurdish autonomization in northern Iraq), that the undeniable majority of the Kurdish masses continue to back the PKK—under any name—and the ‘president Öcalan.’” Amil Kemal Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 219.
“Since 2005, the PKK and all affiliated organizations have been restructured on the basis of this project under the name of KCK (Association of Communities in Kurdistan-Koma Civakên Kurdistan) which is a societal organization presented as an alternative to the nation-state. The KCK has aimed to organize itself from the bottom to the top in the form of assemblies. ‘KCK is a movement which struggles for establishing its own democracy, neither ground on the existing nation-states nor see them as the obstacle.’ In its status, called KCK Contract, its main aim is defined as struggling for the expansion of radical democracy which is based upon peoples’ democratic organizations and decision-making power.” Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, “Reassembling the Political: The PKK and the project of Radical Democracy,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012).
“In the light of lessons we have learned from the latest international experiences, not being a party force which stands completely above the people but which becomes the servant of the people, and not being a dysfunctional assembly but an innovation of an assembly which is functioning and determining everything is the most fundamental—and distinguishing—task that we will fulfil for socialism. The success that we achieve in this respect will at the same time be the success of socialism.” From a speech by Öcalan in 1995, quoted in Amil Kemal Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds, 140.
Interview with Dorsin Akif conducted in the Star Academy in Ramelan on December 23, 2014.
Kaya, “Why Jineology?”
Ibid. For a critical account, see Janet Biehl, “Impressions of Rojava: a report from the revolution,” ROAR Magazine, Dec. 16. 2014 →; and J. Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 29.
Zîlan Diyar, “The Whole World is Talking About Us, Kurdish Women,” Kurdish Question →.
Dilar Dirik, “The Representation of Kurdish Women Fighters in the Media,” Kurdish Question →.
Janet Biehl, “Revolutionary Education: Two Academies in Rojava,” Ecology or Catastrophe (blog), Feb. 7, 2015 →.
Pablo Lafuente, “For a Populist Cinema: On Hito Steyerl’s November and Lovely Andrea,” Afterall 19 (Autumn/Winter 2008) →.
Hito Steyerl, “Kobanê Is Not Falling,” e-flux.com, Oct. 10, 2014 →.
Interview with Abdullah Abdul conducted in the artist’s studio in Amude, December 18, 2014.
Interview with Nesrin Botan conducted in the Mitra Hasake cultural center, December 20, 2014.
The year-long Stateless Democracy research project conducted by New World Summit and New World Academy is being realized in collaboration with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.
I wish to thank the Democratic Unity Party (PYD), and its representatives Sheruan Hassan and Amina Osse in particular, for securing our travel and accomodations, and for facilitating the many interviews in Rojava. I thank the New World Summit research team—Younes Bouadi, Renée In der Maur, and documentary filmmaker Rens van Meegen—with whom I travelled to Rojava and who helped collect the necessary materials to understand the day-to-day practice of democratic confederalism. I further thank Dilar Dirik for her critical reflections on this essay, Vivian Ziherl for the many discussions on feminist politics, Mihnea Mircan for his call for workers to leave the studio and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei for his relentless editorial support. I would also like to thank Urok Shirhan for helping me understand that internationalism means there are no “others”; rather, there are mechanisms of separation—inside and outside of ourselves—that need to be overcome in order to recognize this. I hope this essay contributes to that process.