Can democratic confederalism in Kurdish-led North and East Syria model solutions to the crisis of state governance?
The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) governs three million citizens on the nominal basis of municipal devolution, inter-ethnic cooperation, and women’s autonomy, in the world’s largest formal system of non-state governance. But under the pressure of great-power conflict, resource competition, existential warfare against Turkey and ISIS, and economic crisis, its unique ideology (‘democratic confederalism’) is rapidly evolving.
A broader crisis of state governance is currently spreading throughout and beyond the Middle East, driven by the same pressures. State collapse, state capture and proxy conflict are engendering renewed, reactionary, statist authoritarianism. In order to understand likely alternatives emerging through this crisis, critical assessment of democratic confederalism’s novel political imaginary, democratic institution-building and day-to-day practice is therefore urgently required.
I am a journalist, fluent Kurdish speaker, and co-founder of the region’s top independent news source, Rojava Information Center. Building on three years’ (2018-2020) research experience in AANES, I will scrutinise AANES’ seemingly-utopian theory of governance through a practice-based research framework, assessing its real-world evolution and residents’ everyday, subjective experience. I will thus explore democratic confederalism’s synthesis of community-based, multiethnic idealism and centralized, nationalistic pragmatism as modelling a flawed but instructive alternative to nation-state governance.
Despite states’ fundamental role in precipitating region-wide crisis, Western policy-makers remain dismissive of non-state governance. My analysis will meet academic knowledge gaps by arguing democratic confederalism responds to emergent global challenges of post-state governance, and provide concrete policy recommendations for engaging with the AANES and other non-state actors in sites of crucial geostrategic relevance.