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The Kurds in Syria: A complex interplay between local, regional and transnational

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ROJAVA (The Kurds in Syria: A complex interplay between local, regional and transnational)

Reporting period: 2017-09-01 to 2019-08-31

While extremely graphic images from the Syrian civil war appearing at the world media, smiling young Kurdish female guerrillas at the cover of magazines such as Elle, Marie Claire presented another picture. Kurdish fighters have become driving forces in offensives against ISIS and gained worldwide news coverage. However, the story of the Kurds in Syria is more than this.
In the midst of this battlefield of local, regional, and global forces, the Kurds in Syria have not taken sides with any party to the conflict. Instead they engaged in creating a –self-governing model based on carving an autonomous region out of north Syrian territory. Before the civil war in Syria, the Kurds had already developed the local councils, which have been active as a parallel structure of government to that of the state, organizing justice and mediating in conflict. With the collapse of the state, they came out into the open and enlarged their field of operation, including organizing social life and providing security through the newly emerged self-defence committees under these councils. Carving out three enclaves and naming them ‘canton’ , the Kurds declared a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria. This region has been named Rojava, the Kurdish word for ‘west’ implying western Kurdistan, and, rather than talking about the ‘jihad’ as most of the other rebels did; the Kurds engaged in creating a self-governing model based on this area. That model based on criticizing the existing nation-states in the region promoted the equality between different (ethnic/religious) groups, advocated the empowerment of women and functioned on the bottom-up constructed local councils as the main sites of governance.
The Kurds in Syria have been deprived of their fundamental national rights, including Syrian citizenship. Therefore, addressing issues of national identity and political representation is a central concern of the self-governing experience. The Kurds in Syria have pursued this based on a project called ‘democratic autonomy’ inspired by the struggle of their ethnic-kin in Turkey. Like the Zapatistas’ conceptualization of the self-government in terms of assemblies, which are not only institutions of administration but also spaces of deliberation, the Kurdish movement in Turkey, today, claims not to want to take power (in the sense of control of the state) but to develop alternatives for the sovereign power of the state by creating a network of practices through which self-government can emerge. Inspired by this model, the Rojava self-governing experience is based on a three-pillar concept: ‘strong critique of the nation-state; concerted effort to create conditions of equality between different (ethnic/religious) groups; and the empowerment of women, promoting equality at all spheres including the governing positions embodied in the system of co-chair(wo)manship’.
The Rojava autonomous region as an embodied form of that project and its fight against the ISIS has made the revival of Kurdish identity based on a huge transborder political mobilization possible. In this sense, historically as well as actually, Rojava as a border area between Turkey, Syria and Iraq played a crucial role in terms of Kurdish identity formation.
This project which looked at how alternative spaces of governance are created investigated the emergence of that model in that autonomous region, tracing back to its ‘founding ideas’ and also looking at the influence of the self-governing experience of the Kurds in Syria on the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. So it aimed to contribute to the understanding of the behaviour of the groups in a civil war and of the possibilities in creating a successful transition to a post-war context.
In doing this, it aimed at bringing the different perspectives and scales into the same analysis. Furthermore, the project also connected discussions of place making and constitutive politics with that of social movements. At the end, the broad theoretical objective of this research project was to understand how borders, territorial units and the identities configured in and around them are made and unmade.
The stated general aims of this project were studied under two main titles: The first one was to explore the emergence and working of a self-governing autonomous region which aimed at a genealogical inquiry of the formation of Rojava self-governing body. In doing this, the exploration of the ‘founding ideas’ of this autonomous self-rule in Rojava has become central to the project. The second title has dealt with the diffusion of this self-governing experience. Begin with the Kurds living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and diaspora; they all got inspired from the self-governing experience of the Rojava. The project specifically focused on studying the Kurdish mobilization in Turkey in relevant to the Rojava. To study this, the activists from different social movements who took part in helping the Kurdish refugees who flew to Suruç, a Kurdish populated town on the border to Kobanî, between September 2014 and April 2015 during which this town hosted around 100,000 refugees, have been interviewed.
The results of research have been disseminated through articles/bookchapter submitted and presentations in conferences and workshops. A co-edited book on different forms of governance from Rojava to Zapatista, Western Sahara, Mapuche will also be published in Spanish.
This project has studied Rojava case from the perspective of (changing) relations between people, power and politics. In this perspective, the construction of an autonomous space n Rojava created a rupture in the system of representation configured by the state in a regional and international order and has shown the possibility of changing relations between people, power and politics. Therefore, studying that autonomous territorialisation has become a crucial beginning point in understanding the complex interplay between local, regional and transnational actors based on Rojava experience; and this project, not being trapped by reductionism nor moving on from predetermined categories, claims to study that complex interplay genealogically and relationally.
On the other hand, the project also pointed out the structural problems represented by that complex interplay between local, regional and transnational actors. First of all, Rojava is still in the state of war among the various actors and any time this self-governing experience can face a very serious problem of existence. Secondly, creating a new system of governance is an on-going experience and there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding the different aspects of this administration. Since the struggle for existence is still on the agenda, the solution for these problem could have been postponed until now. But constructing a sustainable system will compel answers in near future.
However, at the end, the self-governing experience of the Kurds in Rojava represented an interesting and important case, not only for similar peoples all around the people but also among the Kurds. The Kurds as a divided people are searching for different solutions to their main problem of addressing issues of national identity and political representation. State formation and federal autonomy has been (and is) at the top of the agenda in Iraqi Kurdistan whereas the Rojava has been (and is) trying to establish a non-statist form of societal organisation.