Transdemocracy

Jürgen Gerhards and Silke Hans, “Why not Turkey? Attitudes towards Turkish membership in the EU among citizens in 27 European countries,” Journal of Common Market Studies, 2011: 741–66 →.

“EU-Turkey statement,” European Council, March 18, 2016 →.

Matthew Weaver, “Turkey rounds up academics who signed petition denouncing attacks on Kurds,” The Guardian, January 15 2016 →. On the lifting of immunity, see the article by Democratic Peoples’ Party (HDP) co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş: “Free Speech Isn’t the Only Casualty of Erdoğan’s Repression,” New York Times, April 13 2016 →.

Patrick Kingsley, “Turkey is no ‘safe haven’ for refugees—it shoots them at the border,” The Guardian, April 1 2016 →.

Sylvie Kauffmann, “Europe’s Illiberal Democracies,” New York Times, March 9, 2016 →.

See Luke Harding, “We should beware Russia’s links with Europe’s right,” The Guardian, December 8, 2015 →.

See Scholars for Justice and Peace, “Report on Recent Incidents of Violence against HDP and Kurdish citizens in Turkey,” 2015 →.

Guney Işıkara, Alp Kayserilioğlu, and Max Zirngast, “Erdoğan’s Victory by Violence,” Jacobin, November 2, 2015 →.

Fehim Taştekin, “Turkey’s minorities join race for parliament,” Al-Monitor, April 10, 2015 →.

At the New World Summit in Utrecht in January 2016, Dilek Öcalan, a representative of the HDP, gave a lecture on the theoretical relationship between Öcalan’s concept of democratic autonomy and the political work of her party. See → (starting at 1:03:35).

Harriet Fildes, “The rise of the HDP – elections and democracy in Turkey,” Open Democracy, June 3, 2015 →.

Pinar Tremblay, “Kurdish women’s movement reshapes Turkish politics,” Al-Monitor, March 25, 2015 →.

At the New World Summit in Rojava in October 2015, Katerin Mendez, a representative of the Swedish Feminist Initiative (F!), gave a lecture on the concept of intersectionality as developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, in relation to the work of her own party as well as to the Kurdish women’s movement. Mendez defined “intersectional analysis” as a way “to see how rights, opportunities and the ability to influence society actually look like for different groups.” See →.

“HDP’S Election Manifesto,” April 2015 →.

Cihad Hammy writes in this regard: “Erdoğan’s politics and Ocalan’s politics collided head on when the HDP, embracing a revolutionary and democratic politics, scored a great victory in the June election, surpassing the Turkish parliament’s 10% threshold. This impressive performance temporarily stalled Erdoğan’s ambitions, hence the subsequent escalation of conflict and the brutal crackdown on the Kurdish movement ever since. Erdoğan terminated the peace process and launched a war against the popular base of the HDP. In reaction to this war people organized local assemblies and declared self-rule all over North Kurdistan.” See Cihad Hammy, “Two visions of politics in Turkey: authoritarian and revolutionary,” Open Democracy, August 20, 2016 →.

For more elaborate texts on the concept of stateless democracy in the writings of Abdullah Öcalan and other Kurdish activists, with an emphasis on its practice in the autonomous region of Rojava, West Kurdistan (Northern Syria), see Stateless Democracy, eds. Dilar Dirik, Reneé In der Maur, and Jonas Staal (Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 2015) →.

See “Who Are We” at the HDP website →.

“Dual power” here refers or course to the Russian revolution of 1917, when the government was taken over by political parties that had previously been pacified in the Duma, in alliance with the new Moscow soviets. Together they established a structure in which the Provisional Government and the soviets shared power.

“HDP vows to ‘realize democratic autonomy’ across Turkey after legislative election,” Nationalia, April 22, 2015 →.

Mona Tajali, “The promise of gender parity: Turkey’s People’s Democratic Party (HDP),” Open Democracy, October 29, 2015 →.

For Podemos in its own words, see Eduardo Maura, “Europe needs to change—and using grassroots democracy is how we do it,” The Guardian, October 13 2014 →.

Tremblay, “Kurdish women’s movement,” Al-Monitor.

The concept of transdemocracy emerged through a conversation among Renée In der Maur, Dilar Dirik, and philosopher Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei. It takes Öcalan’s concept of democratic autonomy and other related forms of nonstate self-governance and turns them into a methodology—a series practices of transitional politics.

See also the debate “We, The People of Europe,” held on June 2, 2016 at the conference “Re:Creating Europe” in De Balie, Amsterdam. During the debate I proposed an artistic campaign entitled New Unions to several organizations and practitioners whose work is related to the concept of transdemocracy, including Slawomir Sierakowski (Krytyka Polityczna), Costas Lapavitsas (Institute for New Economic Thinking), and Angela Richter (theater artist).

Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 112–13.