Stateless Democracy

perceived in recent times. On the contrary, you challenge
society by truly — collectively — attacking the roots
of oppression and radically empowering and politicizing
grassroots communities.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is in many ways just
an extension of what is happening in the world at large.
Its systematic attacks on women, its femicide, finds
its nemesis in the Kurdish Women’s Movement. Furthermore,
one has to ask why they call themselves the
Islamic State? What have they seen in the concept of the
state that appeals to them? The mechanisms of domination
that the state very effectively perpetuates in this
world — that is what. In many ways, ISIS is a product of
the world order in which we live, actively exploiting the
existing conditions, while at the same time being a result
of these very conditions. That is why the Rojava Revolution
is not only an alternative in opposition to ISIS, but is
also an opposition against the policies of that region and
the mechanisms of the global order more generally.
For instance, the United Nations focuses only on stateactors:
states will receive aid, states will receive support,
states will receive acknowledgement. This is why not
much humanitarian aid reached the people in Rojava,
because the cantons are not acknowledged as states,
even though the Syrian regime no longer applies there.
Legally, it is a no man’s land. Because of these absurd bureaucratic
policies, refugees in Rojava continue to starve.
JS: What you are describing seems to have everything
to do with defining in practice a genuine
cultural and democratic revolution. This is apparent
not only in the way that the Rojava cantons organize
themselves, how they confront their opponents, such
as ISIS, a product of imperialist politics and radical,
patriarchal, totalizing state policies — but more crucially
— in how Rojava cantons operate in the face of
a geopolitical order that is not able to think through
the radical premises of democracy, of liberating
democracy from the structure of the state.
DD: The Rojava Revolution, in Kobanê for example, is very
often reduced to a fight that is only about self-defense, as
if it were only about toppling ISIS, which is indeed a major
issue or else people would face genocide. But the system
that is being implemented in Rojava, its structure and
mentality — that is what really frustrates ISIS and the international
order alike. In a sense, this is self-defense also in
a philosophical way, of setting the terms of your existence.
Turkey calls the PKK, PYD, and ISIS all terrorists. The
word “terror” is a very sensitive one for the Kurds,
because our communities have been criminalized as
terrorists for so long. But it is clear that these two “terrorist
systems” are not the same to Turkey, already because
the PYD, for instance, did not receive funding or support
or at least silent approval from Turkey, while ISIS did. At
the same time, the international order has for two years
remained willfully blind to the threat of ISIS despite repeated
warnings from the Kurds.
JS: At the end of the day, the geopolitical order
seems more afraid of a democracy that is capable
of organizing itself outside of the state — critiquing
and undermining that very order — than the idea of
so-called terrorism.
DD: It is very interesting indeed to see how nobody wants
to acknowledge the cantons, despite it now being very
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