Abstract
This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, not only in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large. It explores, first, the ideological underpinnings and second, the practical implementation of democratic autonomy both in south-eastern Turkey and in north-eastern Syria, or Rojava. Divergences between the two, I will argue, are not merely the result of contradictions between ideology and practice, or of the PKK’s enduring Leninist vanguardism, but also arise because the ideology itself remains ambiguous or implicit on the questions of party organization and the legitimacy of armed resistance. These ambiguities help to account for the apparent tension between grassroots anarchism and Leninist centralism in democratic autonomy, not only in practice but also in theory.
Highlights
In the spring and summer of 2016, and especially in the wake of the failed coup attempt on July 15, Turkey has been moving at an accelerated pace towards an authoritarian and autocratic regime by president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi)
This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large
Democratic autonomy may be seen as an attempt to come to grips both with the durability of the Turkish state and with the PKK’s own Leninist and Stalinist heritage
Summary
In the spring and summer of 2016, and especially in the wake of the failed coup attempt on July 15, Turkey has been moving at an accelerated pace towards an authoritarian and autocratic regime by president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi). State authorities had themselves tacitly encouraged the Islamization of Turkish society since at least the 1974 Cyprus invasion, and accelerated this process after the 1980 coup, they had always dealt harshly with any manifestation of Kurdish identity – which helps to explain in part the violence of the guerrilla campaign initiated by the PKK in 1984 At first blush, both the ideology and the practice of the PKK seem radically at odds with both Kemalist and Islamist styles of governing Turkey. PKK supporters in Turkey and elsewhere have reproduced his critique of nationalism as an outdated, bourgeois, statist and/ or ‘Jacobin’ doctrine, targeting Turkish nationalist elites, and Kurdish rivals, in particular Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), who have increasingly come to be seen as the PKK’s main rival in the Pan-Kurdish arena. As I will argue below, despite this relatively close link between ideology and practice, there is a strange tension between the current PKK discourse of democracy, autonomy and bottom-up grass-roots self-organization and the consistently hierarchical, centralistic and top-down organization that the PKK has maintained in practice
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