Rojava in Focus: Critical Dialogues

The theory, practice, and challenges of the feminist, anticapitalist Rojava revolution.

More than a decade has passed since the revolutionary process began in Rojava, later evolving into the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Guided by Abdullah Öcalan’s theory of Democratic Confederalism, a philosophical and political project aimed at building an ecological, nonhierarchical society, the people of Rojava aim to construct alternative, directly democratic institutions capable of transcending the capitalist nation-state.

Rojava in Focus advances a discussion about the revolution within the framework of Democratic Confederalism, assessing the achievements, contradictions, and various shortcomings. The book follows the experience of the revolutionary movement that animates the DAANES, highlighting its achievements as well as the significant obstacles it has encountered. Rojava in Focus grapples with the gap between aspirations and reality, aiming to bridge this gap through constructive criticism.

Essays by activists associated with the Kurdish Freedom Movement and sympathetic critics expand our understanding of the vast changes taking place in the region, the challenges ahead, and connections to other movements around the globe. As well, they point to where the movement may head next.

Contributors include Azize Aslan, Debbie Bookchin, Kamal Chomani, Matt Broomfield, Sixtine van Outryve d’Ydewalle, and Anna Rebrii and Berivan Omar, among others. The book is completed by interviews with members of the Rojava leadership, such as Foza Yusif,  Îlham Ehmed, Salih Muslim, and activists of the DAANES.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Press
• Release date: Feb 18, 2025
• ISBN: 9781849355735

Book preview

Foreword

I

This is a beautiful book.

By that I do not mean that it is a good book. It is a good book, a very good book indeed. Every single chapter is very informative and very stimulating. All the chapters develop slightly different arguments, but they are all bound together by a unity of debate stimulated by the opening chapter by Cihad Hammy and Thomas Jeffrey Miley titled Lessons From Rojava for the Paradigm of Social Ecology. A really excellent book, which I have enjoyed very much.

But that is not quite what I mean when I say that it is beautiful. There is a beauty in the concept of the book that can be felt from the very beginning. At its center is the clear line drawn between commitment and identification. We are committed to this movement, we are part of its struggle for a different world, but we do not accept its limits, we do not identify with it, we overflow. As Hammy and Miley put it right at the beginning of the book, we position ourselves unequivocally in favor of the revolution, even as we seek to help it to confront its contradictions and transcend limitations. And then: Together, we all grapple with contradictions—the process by which identity negates itself to evolve and develop to a different stage—in order to create a ‘crack’ . . . in the rigidity of identity in Rojava, thereby enabling the light of Democratic Confederalism to achieve its objectives.

They develop a critique in two connected senses: they (and indeed all the authors) criticize the failings that they see in the Kurdish revolution in Rojava, but this is not a criticism coming from outside. They criticize because criticism is essential to the meaning of revolution. One striking feature of the revolution in Rojava, and in Öcalan’s writings, is that public criticism and self-criticism is seen as an important part of the revolutionary process. The essays in this book takes this process further, going beyond the criticism of particular failings and pushing toward some understanding of the central contradictions of the process. This is reflected in the structure of the book, which is shaped as a debate, starting from the provocative essay by Hammy and Miley and going on to a series of very thoughtful responses to their provocation, and then to a conversational response by the two authors and ending with a chapter of reflection from people who are living the process in Rojava. Debate is written into the concept of the book: this is what we think, let’s talk openly about these issues because they are crucial to the future of the revolution in Rojava (and, I would add, the world). That is what I find beautiful about the book: it breathes critical debate.

Maybe this is obvious and not so special. Yet history suggests that that is not the case. Perhaps nothing has done so much to destroy revolutionary hope over the last century as identification and the closure that it signifies. Possibly we all have a tendency to identify, to defend that which sparks our enthusiasm, to close our ears to criticism, to follow the leader. The Russian Revolution inspired so many who dreamed of a different world, but for so many millions it then turned into something to be defended from criticism, something to identify with, to the point of worshiping Stalin and refusing to see the horrors of Stalinism and of Soviet communism in general. The result was that when it all collapsed there seemed to be no hope left, no revolution possible. An extreme example, of course, but we can probably think of many other examples, from China to Cuba to Venezuela and so on. Not to mention the sectarianism that has done so much to destroy hope: we are X, you are Y, clear lines, we cannot think, we cannot speak.

It is not just a question of attitude but also one of organization. The Party is the organizational form of identification. The Party is a definition of people: you are members or you are not members. The Party has a program, a definition of ideas and aims; the Party has a hierarchy, a set way of doing things; the Party has a leader and a leadership structure. The Party is oriented toward taking power and exercising power and this is reflected in every aspect of its operation. There may well be room for criticism but only within the Party and within certain limits.

Critique has a different organizational form. It is the assembly, the council, the commune, the soviet: that organizational form that has been the counterpoint to the party throughout the whole history of anticapitalist struggle. It is, if it works well, a place of open debate, of saying we think this is wrong, we have a different idea, how can we go forward disagreeing and yet sharing our common project? The assembly, in the beautiful expression of Sixtine Van Outryve and Paula Cossart in their chapter that includes a discussion of the gilets jaunes movement in France, as a way of democratizing not consensus but rather dissensus.

That is the beauty of this book: it sets out to democratize dissensus. It is an assembly-book and not a party-book. And this goes to the very heart of the dilemma of the Rojava revolution: the tension between the party-form (represented by the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the party that negates itself and yet does not), on the one hand, and the proclaimed aim of democratic confederalism, social ecology and communalism, on the other. This is not a simple contrast, for each side exists in-against-and-beyond the other.

II

Rojava in Focus they call the book, and yes, it is focused on the Rojavan revolution, but it is much more than that. I have never (yet) been to Rojava, but the chapters of this book excite me because their arguments go to the heart of revolutionary hope, wherever we are. Rojava does not stand on its own: it is part of a world of struggle. The dream of a different society exists everywhere, driven forward by the struggles against the horrors of the existing order. We fight against the world of money in a million different ways: by saying NO to the creation of a rubbish dump near where I live, that contaminates the land for miles around; by setting up camps to scream against the genocide carried out by the Israeli state in Gaza (supported by so many other states); by going on strike or sabotaging the labor process; by reading Capital; by organising revolutionary groups that fizzle out after a few months, or perhaps not; by trying to find ways of living that are not shaped by the pursuit of profit; by fighting in every way possible against fossil fuels and the other measures that are destroying the future for humanity. The world is full of people walking in the wrong direction, searching for a path toward a better way of living. And then when we see a movement that strides with strength and clarity and new ideas of how a different world can be created, geographical distance does not matter. Rojava is in our hearts, in our thoughts, just as the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. They seem to offer a way of achieving what we are looking for. They are beacons of hope that give us strength to go on fighting against the global catastrophe in which we live.

It is not surprising, then, that we idealize these movements, that we look to them for a perfection that does not, and cannot, exist. It is very good that someone reminds us that the creation of different worlds is an unrelenting, hard-fought struggle. In any communal assembly, for example, debates are bound to be infected by family feuds, traditional misogynistic practices, superstitions, babies crying or cell phones ringing, gazes of desire. All of these things enter into the democratisation of dissensus that is probably the only way forward for humanity. Revolutionary transformation can only be a process, as Azize Aslan reminds us so forcefully in her chapter: the organized collective action that drives such transformation is inherently nonlinear, unpredictable and nonhomogeneous. In this process, it is of fundamental importance that a book like this should say something is going wrong here, there is a gap between what we say and what we do, let’s try and understand what the problems are, so that we can shift our direction.

III

Local communes are not functioning as they should. They are often sparsely attended, and they do not play an important part in social decision making. Their empowerment and development is not taken seriously enough by the leaders of the movement. This runs counter to the notion of a communalist revolution proclaimed in the writings of Öcalan and expressed in the aim of democratic confederalism.

This is the core of Hammy and Miley’s criticism of the current development of the Rojavan revolution. It is an opinion shared, with variations, by the different authors. The central question is then why? Why is this happening?

One obvious answer is that the appalling conditions of war that have dominated the area have made it impossible to develop the desired communal participation. In their reply to the debate, both Miley and Hammy reject this explanation as inadequate: Placing blame exclusively on the opposition (external factors) is an easy and facile approach, and the true complexity lies in grappling with internal contradictions. The authentic path to emancipation and freedom and the creation of radical politics and immanent critique involves confronting these internal contradictions.

What, then, are these internal contradictions? This is a particularly important question for us who do not live in conditions of open war, at least for the moment, but who do share the aspirations of the movement. What are these internal contradictions and can they be overcome? In his chapter, Kamal Chomani accuses Hammy and Miley of utopianism, of basing their criticisms of the current development of the revolution in Rojava on unrealistic expectations. But is the aspiration of creating a society based on some sort of democratic confederalism, or on the mutual recognition of dignities, unrealistic? For someone like me, sitting thousands of miles away from Rojava, this is an important question. Is Rojava a shining light of hope, as I like to think, or is it showing us that there are limits to what can be achieved by social transformation?

I find it helpful to make a distinction between revolution on behalf of and revolution by. The classic understanding of revolution that prevailed for most of the last century was the idea that revolution should be carried out on behalf of, for the benefit of, those most oppressed by capitalism. This is expressed brilliantly by Lenin in his 1902 book, What Is to Be Done?, in which he argues that the workers by themselves can reach only a limited level of consciousness, which he calls trade-union consciousness, which, while militant, remains within the limits of the capitalist system. To go beyond that, it is necessary to build the party, a dedicated group of professional revolutionaries who will take power and carry out a profound social transformation. Inevitably, there is the formation of a leadership, a vanguard, who will bring about social change on behalf of the masses, establishing a nonexploitative society. I feel an enormous admiration for Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and all the other dedicated militants who gave their lives and deaths to the struggle to create a different society. But the result was a disaster.

The idea of a revolution on-behalf-of is certainly attractive: it seems to be realistic and also appeals to profound feelings of human solidarity. But it has enormous problems. The idea of on-behalf-of implies a separation that is bound to become toxic. The separation between those-who-lead and those-who-are-led implies that those-who-lead better understand the interests of those-who-are-led than they do themselves. The led, the masses, have a false consciousness, or the wrong mentality. However well intentioned the leaders are, there is an authoritarian relation here. And the leaders are likely to develop interests distinct from those of the led and possibly opposed to those who are led. To bring about change, they need to gain power, and the winning and holding of power quickly becomes the central aim of the leaders. Always on behalf of the oppressed, of course. Trotsky wrote a very early (1904) critique of Lenin’s idea of the party, arguing that it would lead to a substitutionism, whereby the party substituted itself for the working class, although it can be argued that he himself later fell into the same substitutionist approach. Substitutionism is not just a danger, it is actually inherent in the party form.

Despite the good intentions and the extraordinary dedication of so many people, the party-revolutions, the revolutions-on-­behalf-of in the twentieth century resulted in the creation of very authoritarian societies (the USSR, China, North Korea, for example) in which the led, the masses, played very little part in the processes of social decision making. The collapse of the Soviet Union was seen by many as the end of the possibility of revolutionary change. But in a society based on exploitation and destruction, the desire for radical social transformation cannot be buried so easily. What collapses is the idea of revolution-on-behalf-of, party-­revolution, ­revolution-centered-on-the-winning-of-state-power. Revolution has to be rethought, reorganized. Revolution-on-­behalf-of has to become revolution-by-the-people-themselves.

The rethinking of revolution has been taking place through many struggles around the world and had been going on long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are, however, two towering examples of struggles in which those who started out thinking of leader-revolutions came to a similar conclusion: The old idea does not work, we have to rethink the whole idea of revolution. Those two outstanding examples are the PKK under the leadership of Öcalan, in Kurdistan, and the Zapatistas in the southeast of Mexico. In both cases, there is a transition from revolution-on-behalf-of to revolution-by. In the case of the Zapatistas, a small group of dedicated revolutionaries from an organisation called the Forces of National Liberation (FLN), a political-military organization whose aim is the taking of political power by the workers, according to its own statutes, went to the state of Chiapas ready to teach the Indigenous people about revolution and soon learned through experience that they were the ones who had to learn from the local people. In the case of the Kurdish movement, the realization that the old idea of revolution needed to be replaced by a new one came from the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, influenced by his reading in prison of the writings of Murray Bookchin. Very different contexts but in both cases a radical change pointing in a similar direction: anticapitalist revolution is more necessary than ever, but it has to be a revolution that is very different from those that dominated the twentieth century. And because so many struggles and movements in the world had come to similar conclusions, these two particular movements have had enormous influence among the rebels of the world.

The process of rethinking and reorganising a radical social transformation is certainly not a simple one. At its core, in both cases, is the terrifying idea expressed by the Zapatistas: we are ordinary men, women, children, that is to say rebels. This is a radical break with the Leninist tradition. In the Leninist tradition, the revolution is to be led by extraordinary people, those who, for one reason or another, have risen above the understanding of the masses. In the new approach, there is no distinction between leaders and masses, no hierarchy between leaders and led. This is captured in the notion of dignity, a concept developed by the Zapatistas, especially in the early years of the uprising. To think of a revolution by the people is to recognize their dignity. Current society is based on the negation of people’s dignity (as Kurds, as Indigenous, as workers, as peasants, as women), but our dignity is our refusal to accept that negation. It is a dignity-against-its-own-negation. Inevitably, that means thinking of organisation in a different way, as a form of organisation that facilitates the articulation of dignities. This cannot be a party, it has to be some sort of assembly or commune in which people can express their fears and their hopes and come to some sort of common decision. This, in turn, is bound to a different understanding of time. Assemblies are likely to function much slower than Parties: a party aims to reach decisions efficiently in order to function as an instrument for change. A party is pointed toward the future, and its justification is justified by the prospect of future revolution. An assembly is its own justification. In a society based on hierarchy, an antihierarchical organisation is change already, here and now and not in the future. The aim of radical transformation of the whole society still lies ahead but there is not the abrupt separation of present and future that lies in the concept of the party. It is rather a question of the gradual or rapid expansion of the change that the assembly already embodies. If we think of the assembly as a prefiguration of a form of social organisation that could fill the world (in place of commodity-money-state), or as the present existence of a world that does not-yet exist but could do (to borrow from Ernst Bloch), then revolutionary time is something quite different from that of the party. We walk, we do not run, because we are going far, as the Zapatistas put it.

The shift from the idea of revolution-on-behalf-of to revolution-­by involves profound changes in how we think and how we act. These changes are at the core of the Kurdish concept of democratic confederalism, at the core too of the repeated changes in the organization of the Zapatistas (see, for example, the twentieth part of the communiqués leading up to the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the uprising of January 1994), and also at the core of so many movements throughout the world.

In all this, we come back to the charge of utopianism that Chomani makes against Hammy and Miley. We are walking on a tightrope stretched across an abyss, the abyss of human destruction. The enduring question is: can we get to the other side, to a society that is based on the mutual recognition of human dignities? The old way of thinking about social transformation failed and led to miserable results, but can the new way of thinking about revolution succeed, or is it simply unrealistic nonsense? We are ordinary people, the Zapatistas say: but is that true, and can ordinary people really bring about the social transformation that we need? That is the question for all of us that lies behind the critique in this book.

There are perhaps two issues here. The first is the weight of inherited structures and practices. It is not easy for those who have been brought up in the practices of revolution-on-behalf-of to undertake the fundamental changes in thinking and doing that are involved in a switch to revolution-by, especially when those changes come from the traditional Leader and in the context of the existing organisational structure of the PKK, a structure that clashes with the concept of democratic confederalism. This clash is very present in the critiques of the Rojavan revolution developed in these chapters. The clash seems inevitable, either because people want to hold on to power or simply because they are blind to what is involved in the radical grammatical change impelled by Öcalan. The conflict is not necessarily insuperable, but it is important to recognize it, as the chapters of this book do.

There is a second issue that I find more difficult. This is the terrifying we are ordinary people. I say terrifying because it is the most profound theoretical and political challenge in the rethinking of revolution. How can ordinary people be the revolutionary subject when we know how they/we are sucked into the everyday reproduction of capitalism, into the buying of commodities to survive, into selling or trying to sell our own labor power in order to earn some money? The appeal to ordinary people has to be an appeal to schizophrenic (in the common sense) or self-divided ordinary people, who reproduce capitalism and rebel against it at the same time. Both sides are surely present in all of us, to different degrees. Our capital-reproducing side is articulated and reinforced through the abstracting and individualising forms of capitalist social relations, most obviously the state. The wager of revolution-by-ordinary-people is to articulate and reinforce the rebellious, collectivising side through assemblies, communes or other similar forms of organisation: a messy, prolonged, process marked by ups and downs, interrupted by babies crying and cell phones ringing. In any case the contradictions are bound to remain and will be the stronger, the more tightly we are embedded in capitalist social relations. The wage is of central importance here. If we have to earn a wage in order to live, then we are unlikely to have much time or energy for going to meetings of the commune or participating in communal responsibilities. The capitalist organisation of activity as labor creates a separation between productive activity and social conviviality. Perhaps communalization (or communizing, as I prefer to call it, in order to avoid the romanticizing of existing communes sometimes associated with the idea of communalism) has to overcome this separation in order to articulate the utopian thrust more effectively. In other words, the force of communes will depend ultimately on the transformation of labor: engagement in communes must be part of people’s daily activity, the reproduction of themselves and their dependants. It might be important in this context to revive the ideas of council communism with its emphasis on workers’ councils: to think of communal organisation as being inseparable from people’s productive activity. I understand Azize Aslan’s chapter on the social economy to be pushing in this direction.

IV

A foreword? This is not what a foreword should look like. It’s just an enthusiastic jumble of ideas inspired by the book, a kind of jazz improvisation. I got carried away. But that’s the way I feel about the book. It’s enormously stimulating, sending ideas off in all sorts of directions, yet with a very solid, serious basis: the everyday struggle in terrible conditions to transform life in Rojava and throughout the world.

There is a beautiful paradox in this sharp criticism of the Rojavan revolution. The critique is a song of praise to a revolution that puts self-criticism at its heart.

Introduction: Revolutionary Contradictions

Cihad Hammy and Thomas Jeffrey Miley

In 2012, amid the escalating violence in Syria, the Kurdish movement seized power in a northern region systematically marginalized by the Syrian state. Capitalizing on the power vacuum that had resulted from the war between the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the armed opposition in Syria, the Rojava revolution emerged under the leadership of the Kurdish movement. Its aim was to realize a long-envisioned project: the establishment of a democratic, self-governing, ecological, feminist society. This volume is intended as a contribution to debates about the nature, achievements, and limits of the Rojava revolution, or the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). It is written from a perspective of critical solidarity with the revolutionary process underway there, seeking to illuminate the main dimensions of the revolution in both theory and practice.

The volume takes a dialogic form. It is, in the first instance, a record of our friendship and intellectual collaboration—one of us an American academic based in the UK at Cambridge, the other, Cihad Hammy, a democratic confederalist from Kobanî, in Northern Syria, now residing in Germany. Years of dialogue resulted in our coauthoring the 2022 article Lessons from Rojava for the Paradigm of Social Ecology, initially published in Frontiers in Political Science. Our ambition was for the article to spark a broad debate on the left, both within and surrounding the movement, about the strengths and weaknesses of the revolutionary road Rojava has taken since the new administration’s inception in 2012.

To this end, we invited people we know from circles surrounding the movement both in Rojava and among the diaspora, as well as on the internationalist left, to provide critical responses to our article. We include seven responses from people on the left affiliated, or close to the movement in the diaspora, as well as a group of reactions from inside Rojava. And we conclude, in dialogic form, with a conversation in which we address many of the main points raised in these critical responses. The result is a rather unique compilation—one that conveys a spirit of critical dialogue, perhaps even a model for critical support.

This format, fashioned in a circle of critique—and of critiques of critique—combined with a dialogue about the latter critiques, truly distinguishes this volume from other contributions to the literature on the Rojava revolution. Ours is not a starry-eyed account (to borrow Anna Rebrii and Berivan Omar’s phrase in chapter 4) nor is it a cynical one that veils itself in a false or hypocritical posture of feigned objectivity. This does not mean we neglect to ground our perspective in a rigorous pursuit of the truth. Rather, it is to say that we accept the epistemic limits to our effort, while attempting an evenhanded but nevertheless partisan account of the revolutionary process underway in Rojava. We position ourselves unequivocally in favor of the revolution, even as we seek to help it to confront its contradictions and transcend its limitations.

To write about any revolution through academic measures—strictly adhering to the rules of scientific objectivity and maintaining a clear distinction between researchers and their object of study—is not only to perpetuate epistemic violence but also to neglect the complexity, destructiveness, and contradictions of the revolutionary process, as well as the subjectivity of the people involved in it. It is indeed odd to regard those who are actively involved in the revolution and are shaping new frameworks of social organization, as well as generating novel forms of knowledge, merely as a passive object of study. This book endeavors to transcend this hierarchical approach to research, recognizing all participants—including activists, academics, and people involved in building the revolution in Rojava—as cocreators of knowledge about the revolution. Another common feature of academia is the separation between about (the object of study) and for (the purpose of study). During the research process, the about zone includes abstraction and extraction of knowledge of those being studied, while for pertains to the social and political interests of researchers that diverge from those of their subjects. In this context, for is mostly centered around the academic gains and promotion of the researchers. In response to this approach, activist research attempts to overcome the separation between about and for; the research’s main objective is to help address and overcome people’s problems. This book falls into this category: we write about the Rojava revolution for the Rojava revolution, considering the people in Rojava as coproducers of knowledge on the subject. Together, we all grapple with contradictions—the process by which identity negates itself to evolve and develop to a different stage—in order to create a crack (in the sense of Marxist sociologist John Holloway) in the rigidity