20 April 2020|Thomas Jeffrey Miley

The Rojava revolution faces great challenges going forward.  But the revolutionary forces have already made history.  Their democratic confederal project – with its emphasis on direct democracy against the state, multicultural accommodation, gender emancipation, and social ecology – has inspired people across the globe.  In a time when the very future of humanity, and of life on the planet, are under unprecedented threat, the revolutionary experiment in Rojava stands out as a valiant attempt, in the midst of a still-unfolding catastrophe, to construct a radical democratic alternative to spiralling violence and tyranny.

Thomas Jeffrey Miley is a Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the executive committee of the European Union Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC).  He is co-editor, with Federico Venturini, of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).

Main picture of men and women of YPG and YPJ in Rojava in 2016 via RojavaStruggle/Flicker