Stateless Democracy

The Kurdish Women’s Movement encompasses a variety of
different, interconnected social and political organizations,
political parties, armed wings, cooperatives, and other nonparliamentary
action groups, active in the larger region of
Kurdistan. Situated across the territories of Turkey, Syria,
Iraq, and Iran, and in the large Kurdish diaspora around
the world, these organizations strive towards the liberation
of the Kurdish peoples from state oppression. The Kurdish
Women’s Movement has played a key role in translating
their resistance against state oppression towards a
fundamental critique of the model of the nation-state itself,
which they regard as a patriarchal construct in service of
the global capitalist doctrine. This critique forms a central
part of what became known as the Rojava Revolution; the
revolution that in 2012 declared autonomy of a region in
the northern Syria, called Rojava, or Western Kurdistan, as
Rojava means “West” in the Kurdish language. Within the
Rojava Revolution, the Kurdish Women’s Movement plays a
leading role in creating a new political model of stateless
democracy: a practice of democracy separated from the
construct of the state. This reader is an attempt to bring
together key texts to understand and learn from this revolutionary
practice of democracy and its impact on the fields
of education, culture, and art.
The historic base of the Kurdish Women’s Movement
can be found in the prominent role of women in the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK), the Marxist-Leninist organization
that was founded in 1978 to wage armed struggle against
the Turkish government in favor of an independent Kurdish
state. The PKK came into existence as a response to the
long oppression of Kurds in the region, in particular by the
Turkish government, which denied the cultural and political
rights of its Kurdish citizens. Abdullah Öcalan, the key
founder and leader of the movement, supported women’s
emancipation from the outset, claiming that women
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