Revolutionary Self-Defense as a Rival Ethics of Nonviolence: Rojava and Kurdish Liberation

Abstract

Rojava has recently received significant global attention thanks to the victories achieved there by the revolutionary Kurdish militia controlling the region and its Women’s Protection Units against ISIS. An international community that has long been silent about Kurdish oppression was suddenly fascinated by the Rojava revolution and its potential for women’s liberation. But this current interest elides vital political and conceptual contributions of activists in Rojava and elsewhere in Kurdistan, and reinscribes the orientalist and imperial scripts invoked in the representation of the emancipatory politics of the region’s peoples. Pushing against these frameworks, this paper examines the new method of Kurdish decolonization, “democratic confederalism,” as a distinct and perhaps novel contribution to the global repertoire of anticolonial thought and practice, especially with its re-envisioning of the revolutionary role violence and nonviolence can play in liberation. Tracing the intellectual and political process that turned decolonizing Kurds from the pursuit of a territorial nation-state towards the revolutionary and feminist transformation of colonized sites and lives, it distinguishes this decolonial politics and its central means of community self-defense from both its reactionary opposites and revolutionary siblings. Foregrounding its foundationally anti-nationalist character, the paper proposes to approach this revolutionary, egalitarian, and community based self-defense as a rival ethics of nonviolence.