Abstract
Most politically minded Kurds agree that their people need liberty. Moreover, they agree they need liberation from the domination they suffer from the four states that divide them: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. What is less certain is the precise nature of this liberty. A key debate that characterizes Kurdish political discourse is over whether the liberty they seek requires the existence of an independent Kurdish nation-state. Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed intellectual leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has argued that Kurdish liberty can only be achieved through liberation from the nation-state model itself. Instead of founding an independent Kurdistan, Öcalan proposes regional autonomy for the Kurds through a strictly egalitarian and directly democratic confederalism reminiscent of Murray Bookchin’s anarchist-inspired libertarian municipalism. We argue, in response to Öcalan’s approach, that employing an anarchist rejection of the state is largely mistaken. We diagnose certain historical and conceptual problems with the anarchist understanding of the state and develop the admission made in passing by certain anarchists, including Öcalan, that anarchist liberty could only be achieved after a long period of statist existence. Mostly counter to the anarchist model of non-domination, we propose a republican model of liberty and liberation, also as non-domination, that necessitates the formation of an independent state, at least in this historical period, for Kurds and hence any dominated people to count as truly free. We conclude by attempting to combine certain elements of the anarchist and republican conceptions and offer a synthetic communitarian view that could serve as a better foundation for Kurdish aspirations for liberty.
Highlights
Many peoples in the world suffer domination
We aim to show that the republican criticisms of anarchism are apt and that a possible compromise between anarchist and republican conceptions of liberty, founded on a kind of shared communitarianism, might be the best option for the Kurds
Let us begin by summarizing the experiences of the Kurds in the present and over the past couple centuries before we address an anarchist conception of liberty developed by certain Kurdish forces, see how republicanism would respond to this anarchist proposal, and see if a kind of compromise could be struck that might constitute the preferable form of a conception of Kurdish liberty
Summary
Many peoples in the world suffer domination. The overcoming of domination is liberation. This article is an attempt to develop a conception of liberty as non-domination that, we think, is most applicable to a particular people who suffer domination today: the Kurds. The two main views which treat liberty as non-domination are anarchism and republicanism. We aim to show that the republican criticisms of anarchism are apt and that a possible compromise between anarchist and republican conceptions of liberty, founded on a kind of shared communitarianism, might be the best option for the Kurds. Methodologically speaking, what we engage in, in this article, is a comparative conceptual analysis in the service of a people’s liberation struggle, that is, we compare conceptions of liberty for the sake of discovering which conception might be the most useful to a dominated people for providing clarity concerning their goal of liberation
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