Stateless Democracy

Here, the vision of a society instituted otherwise by the
Kurdish-led resistance — and the Kurdish Women’s Movement
in particular — stands out as a critical case of power
and politics coming together, if one understands politics as
the ability to think propositions and power as the ability to
meaningfully implement them. The democratic experiment
in the autonomous region of Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan, enacted
amid the multifarious tragedy of the ongoing Syrian
Civil War and despite the unimaginable set of hostilities
surrounding it, captured the imagination of another possibility
at the critical time of its battle against the selfproclaimed
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. While the world
gasped in tremor, the Kurdish Women’s Movement fought
both literally and symbolically against the so-called state
alongside scores of armed women and men. The decisive
battle in Kobanê seems not to have been waged over the
territory as such, but against the state as it embodies
power relations that are as patriarchal as much as they
are oppressive, motivated by the ideal of living together in
a constellation that embraces direct democracy, gender
equality, and sustainable ecology. This effort was realized,
moreover, while breaking through the national borders of
no less than four states, demonstrating that they must be
rendered meaningless in order to act out the imaginary
of a commonly shared, albeit heterogeneous, world.
Not letting the reality of the ongoing struggle slip from
our sight, NWA takes the lived project of democratic
confederalism as practiced by the Kurdish Women’s Movement
as a critical proposal for our time. If for its learning
sessions NWA gathers together artists, students, activists,
and theorists from the fields of philosophy, sociology, and
conflict studies, among others, to deliberate on the possibility
of these propositions for the ideal of democracy, then
this publication offers a number of critical texts from which
to begin to articulate one’s own position towards the battle
over democracy in Kobanê. In doing so, the reader aims to
create insights into how our own version of democracy is
up for contest and that such battles, no matter how far they
may be, are shared by us all.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my
sincere gratitude to all collaborators in this undertaking
and the members of the Kurdish Women’s Movement for
sharing their knowledge with us. My thanks go to Jonas
Staal and his team at New World Summit, as well as my
colleagues at BAK’s home base in Utrecht. I am indebted
to the Doen Foundation, Amsterdam for making the project
possible, as well as to Centraal Museum, Utrecht, whose
acquisition of NWA, as part of the collaboration with BAK
titled Future Collections (2014–2015), contributed significantly
to the realization of this session. Last but not least,
I would like to thank the cultural and educational institutions
De Balie, Amsterdam and the Willem de Kooning
Academy, Rotterdam for hosting this fifth edition of NWA
and its manifold nomadic itinerary.
Maria Hlavajova is artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.