Rojava: a state subverted or reinvented?

Abstract

This article discusses how Rojava and its ‘Autonomous Administration’ simultaneously subvert and reinstate the state(s) they are fighting. Based on Abdullah Öcalan’s (b. 1948) conversion to libertarianism after his imprisonment in 1999, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has been invested in presenting its political experiment as a ‘stateless democracy’, which has elicited both enthusiasm and suspicion from anarchists worldwide, and from large sections of the Western left. Far from trying to prove or disprove Rojava’s own narrative, this article analyses how the construction of Rojava is a complex and often self-contradictory process, both at the rhetorical/propagandist level and in terms of actual military, political and social practices. By engaging many enemies (ISIS, al Nusra, the Free Syrian Army, the Assad regime, Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey), both discursively and in battle, and trying to obtain support from various potential and mutually conflicting allies (the United States, Russia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the EU, the Western left, the Assad regime) the PYD/YPG-J (People’s Protection Units) are entrenched in a fraught space in which subversion and mimicry coexist in uneasy tension.