Stateless Democracy

affairs, in matters such as, for example, who should be
co-president of a certain canton. It is also the body that
pushes women’s liberation as central to understanding
and instituting democracy. Many cooperatives have
been founded to guarantee the systemic integration of
women in politics and economy. Autonomous women’s
councils exist parallel to the general people’s councils on
all levels, from neighborhood communes to the canton
level. They have the power to unconditionally veto the
people’s councils.
Certain operational mechanisms such as quotas and
co-presidencies might seem very bureaucratic, but these
are mechanisms to help guarantee that true change is
implemented. The real social work, the real struggle, is
to ensure that these widely advocated liberation principles
become accepted and internalized across society, to
understand that if we want to be a society in which different
people can live together peacefully, then we must
all govern this society collectively and equally. If we truly
appreciate women, then we need to set in place quotas
to guarantee that women are fully recognized in their
potential. It might be that one day quotas are no longer
needed. And this goes both ways: for example, there are
now many areas where women dominate, so a 40 percent
quota was recently introduced in these regions so
as to avoid an overwhelming presence of women in one
committee. This is also to make sure that men do not
avoid certain aspects of political and social life, as in the
case of family-related committees, in which men must
also take part and assume responsibility.
In spite of this, however, democratic confederalism and
its aim of democratic autonomy have continued to develop
and flourish, particularly in Cizîre canton, which is
the largest and safest area, situated in the eastern-most
part of Rojava. Not long ago, an alternative university, the
Mesopotamia Academy of Social Sciences, was founded
despite the ongoing war. There, dominant assumptions
and methods around concepts such as knowledge and
science are challenged and reinvigorated. One of the
things people have learned in the process is that if you do
not establish something parallel to your armed struggle,
everything will crumble. The social revolution in Rojava is
also a guarantee for the fight. It means that you establish
something, you create structures that people are willing
to protect because they represent a perspective that they
desperately need.
Very often the idea of radicalism is understood as needing
something very opposed to what is happening
around you at the moment. My understanding of what
constitutes radicalism, or radical feminism in the case
of the Kurdish issue, is that women are now recognized
as equally capable of running life alongside men; that
they have an autonomous organization, even an army;
that they are teachers in schools; that they actively
participate in the economy; that patriarchy is no longer
seen as the norm; that women’s liberation has become
a cherished aim of a revolution that seeks to change the
mentality of society. And all of this in a region where the
fact that a twelve-year-old girl could be married off to a
seventy-year-old man used to be tolerated.
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The intensity of the war — especially in Kobanê, which has
been at the forefront of the fight against ISIS — has forced
many aspects of the political project to be slowed down.
You do not defeat ISIS or change society through individualistic
actions that may appear radical because they
are shocking, which is how radical feminism has been