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ABSTRACT
The emerging socio-political entity of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), lauded and criticised for its proclaimed progressive model, gave rise to by now a sizable literature on its now seven-year-old self-styled stateless, gender-egalitarian, ecological, direct-democratic social experiment that is referred to as democratic confederalism. Its alternative spatiality, however, received relatively less attention. In cases when it did, the dominant spatial organisation of political rule, that is, exclusive, national and territorial statehood became the point of reference. Building on the always contested and never absolute nature of the modern spatiopolitical order, this paper raises the problem of alternative spatial organization of political rule on the basis of the democratic confederalist experiment in Northern Syria. Drawing on a notion of strategies of spatialisation, understood as the practical ways of agents to deal with what is external to them as part of reproducing themselves and their spatiality, it argues that democratic confederalism as the spatialisation strategy of the DFNS constitutes an alternative mode of spatialisation, but its concrete shape is determined as much by its interaction with the spatialisation strategies of others, that is, by geopolitics, as it is by the practices and intentions of those who formulated it.
Notes
1. I use the terms ‘Autonomous Administration’ and ‘the DFNS’ interchangeably throughout this article.
2. Furthermore, even as an observed empirical regularity, fixed and exclusive territoriality has never been as institutionalised in the non-Western world as it did in the Western world. Any talk, therefore, of a classical epoch of Westphalian territoriality is also a reduction of world spatiality to a European spatiality.
3. I borrow the term ‘strategies of spatialisation’ from Teschke and Lacher (Citation2007). Unlike Teschke and Lacher, however, I take ‘strategies of spatialisation’ at a more social-ontological level, referring to all sorts of spacemaking practices rather than merely spatialisation or territorialisation of large-scale political rule (cf. Sack Citation1986).
4. Particularly his famous Theses on Feuerbach (Marx and Engels Citation1998, 569–71).
5. Lefebvre’s notion of power as residing in ‘the State’ as the mega political subject of capitalist modernity does not allow for a more diffused concept of power relations, one that one finds in, say, Foucault’s work. See Shields (Citation1999: 180).
6. For purposes of clarity, it must be noted at this point that ‘agents’ refer solely to individual or collective human agency with capacity to act intentionally no matter whether intentions produced unintentional or intentional results.
7. The changing discourse of the Party is analysed in Özcan (Citation2006).
8. This period from 2005 onwards saw the establishment of a number of mostly clandestine organizations and mechanisms from local citizen councils and arbitration mechanisms to academies, religious groups and armed youth organizations, the most significant of which being the Koma Civaken Kurdistan, or KCK (Union of Communities in Kurdistan) that acted as the umbrella organisation for all affiliated organisations, or the ‘commune of communes’ in Bookchin’s parlance; see Leezenberg (Citation2016).
9. The claim to organisational distinctness is very much a controversial topic. The link between the PKK, which is recognised as a terrorist organization by Turkey’s NATO allies and the EU, and the Syrian PYD, YPG/J, SDF, or the whole DFNS proved to be extremely problematic. Turkey squarely designates these as the same as the PKK, or simply its Syrian branch, and therefore a terrorist organisation (Ministry of Foreign Affairs Citation2017). The USA on the other hand, seeks to distinguish the SDF from all the others. The DFNS denies any organisational link with the PKK but admits that they are ideologically similar.
10. See the edited volume on national cultural autonomy by Nimni (Citation2005).
11. While the political settlement of the enclave-exclave system around Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau has an extremely complex history, the contemporary arrangement in the context of the EU renders this system more manageable.
12. An English language version of the document is available at https://peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/charter-of-the-social-contract.
13. An English language version of the Social Contract of the Democratic Federalism of Northern Syria is available at http://vvanwilgenburg.blogspot.com/2017/03/social-contract-of-democratic.html.