Problematic narratives and challenges in Rojava

While there are a lot of positive things to consider when it comes to the revolution as it has occurred so far, there are plenty of problematic things that are restricting its ability to expand even faster and could challenge the very possibility of systemic change. Each challenge affects Rojava in a unique way.

When the Assad regime left the majority of the region, what was left behind were people without any skills through the practice of politics due to the oppression before. So when the local political parties took control of the common institutions of influence of Rojava at that time they simply copied the council structure of the Assad regime with regard to certain elements of taxation and bureaucracy. This has lead to a lot of arbitrary structures that aren’t in line with the goals of the revolution being put into practice and compete for peoples resources and energy within the system. There is a certain hesitancy to share public statistics and in a lot of cases there is a lack of statistical measurements being carried out in the first place. This has been a limiting factor in the ability of revolutionary actors in Rojava to coordinate between each other and to understand the outcomes of their own projects.

The bureaucratization of the security situation in Rojava has been an issue. While there is a genuine need to monitor the internal security situation given the war front is not so far from most places in Rojava, there can be an excess of asayish (public security forecloses, not ypg/j) checkpoints on highways not near the front line. A permission system for press movement/access also limits the creative ability of people to document what is happening here in Rojava (what is said for security reasons might have more to do with propaganda reasons). From an ethical dimension, the new internal army in Rojava has created a program of conscription among the male youth in the society for 6 months service. While the aim for now of this institution is just to educate people ideologically and give them self defence training for the security challenges that Rojava may face ahead, forcing people to join the organization violates the persons consent and is counter revolutionary to the goal of respecting peoples consent in society.

Its very important to point out that while the institutions of local democratic assemblies and cooperatives exist and this is an important step, they are still very underdeveloped and so its unfair to say yet that these are the practical basis for the society as it exists now. The market economy with family businesses still dominate the economic structure of the society and working with mostly just money is still dominant (the ideals of the tev-dem movement to promote the trade of just resources and some form of gift economics has yet to be put into visible practice). There is also a large problem in this society of the cultural value of education. Due to a lack of education infrastructure in the region pared with an attitude of putting cultural education over a general education has lead to difficulties in making people value education for its quality of broadening the human mind and providing more opportunities.

When it comes to changes in gender roles in society there are some great institutions to help move forward the changes in society. However there is a problem with the logic of how these institutions intend to resolve the gender inequality in society. Yes, it is important to educate the women about the history of woman’s oppression and provide them the safe spaces to develop themselves, but this is being organized exclusively at the expense of trying to also practice normalize relations between men and women in the society. This means that so far, there has been for example the teaching of history and theory to understand the problem, but little to no practical effort or tactics to have men and women be in the same public spaces without them practising discrimination on how they express themselves in front of the opposite sex. There is a fear here that a positive program for practising healthy human relationships could meet a severe conservative cultural backlash from the local population but could also induce pressure from neighbouring regimes that use religious/conservative culture as a way of controlling the society. So this brings up another point about when its necessary to take risks to advance the revolution and here I believe this is one of the great internal debates that is happening about when to role out controversial educational or organizational methods into the society.

Its also important to point out that while it might be obvious given some unfortunate historical events that sometimes some arabs and assyrians are not on the same page of revolutionary practice as the kurds, there are divisions amongst the kurds in favour of the capitalist model of development in Iraqi Kurdistan. Some people from here go over to fight with the peshmerga rather then the ypg/j as there is an effort going on right now by the government in Iraqi Kurdistan to gain some influence and control over what happens in Rojava. Likewise there are still many people here that support the Assad regime, and while at the time of this writing the Assad regime has seen a significant weakening, these people have refused to heavily invest themselves for the benefit of everyone in this region out of loyalty to Assad.

So this revolution currently has a lot of counter revolutionary tensions in relation to respecting peoples consent that need to be addressed in the near term. Philosophically this can boil down to how to educate a society in an ethical way to respect peoples consent, because agency and autonomy come from having ones consent respected. Its also important to continue developing and practising new tactics to minimize the influence of political players that just want to maintain power by reinforcing old ways of organizing within the society. In the next article im going to map out what a revolution can be in relation to how its been attempted or perceived through recent history and how it could be perceived now given changes in geopolitics, youth culture and technology.