Picture by Beshr Abdulhadi. Some rights reserved. What do you make of events in the Kurdish areas of Syria, particularly what David Graeber has called “the remarkable democratic experiment” in Rojava? What is the relationship between Kurdish groups and revolutionaries in the rest of Syria?
The self-governance of Rojava in Northern Syria by the PYD is a direct result of the mass movement by the people of Syria (Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians together) against the Assad regime. The popular uprising pushed the regime to conclude a deal with the PYD in July 2012, in which it withdrew from several Kurdish-majority regions in the North to redeploy its armed forces to repress the uprising elsewhere, while maintaining a small presence in some areas such as Qamichli and Hassaka.
Institutions in these areas are dominated by PYD-affiliated organizations, with an assortment of Kurdish, Syriac, and Assyrian personalities who had little to lose from entering the agreement. For a far majority of Kurdish political parties and activists, Rojava is only a new form of authoritarianism rather than democratic confederalism in action. As evidence of this, many of them point to the exclusion of opposition parties and activists from youth groups within Rojava.
