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.
