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2026
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| Online-Zugang: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20385771 |
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| author | Sánchez Rodríguez, Jesús |
| author_facet | Sánchez Rodríguez, Jesús |
| contents | <p class="MsoNormal">There are reports that aspire to document and reports that aspire to understand. This is one of the latter. The PKK and Democratic Confederalism — a work by the political scientist and essayist Jesús Sánchez Rodríguez, also the author of Las vías imposibles de la izquierda and Cartografía del pensamiento político — is an in-depth analysis of one of the most original, least known, and most misunderstood political experiments of recent decades: the transformation of a Kurdish Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement into the world’s foremost proponent of so-called democratic confederalism, and its practical application in the part of northern Syria known as Rojava.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The text unfolds across five parts of considerable analytical depth. The first reconstructs the history of the Kurdish people — dispersed across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran — and the emergence of the PKK in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan, tracing with rigour the path from anti-colonial Marxism-Leninism to the open warfare of the 1980s and 1990s. The second part is perhaps the most singular of the whole: the analysis of Öcalan’s ideological shift during his imprisonment on the island-prison of İmralı, where the Kurdish leader read Murray Bookchin, Walter Benjamin, and Immanuel Wallerstein, and elaborated a theoretical synthesis that abandoned the nation-state as an objective and placed feminism and ecology at the centre of the political project. The third part examines the implementation of those ideas in Rojava from 2012 onwards: the popular councils, the mandatory co-presidency with gender parity, the female military units (YPJ), and the cooperative economy. Parts four and five, of particular critical density, analyse the internal contradictions of the project — the tension between the vanguard party and participatory democracy — and the external pressures that threaten it, culminating in an assessment of the state of the question up to 2026.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">What makes this report especially valuable for the reader is its refusal to yield to either of the two poles that have dominated the literature on the subject: neither the official demonisation promoted by the Turkish state, nor the militant hagiography of certain sectors of the Western left. The author establishes from the preface that he will occupy the space of rigorous analysis that exists between the two, and he fulfils this with intellectual honesty sustained throughout more than a hundred pages of dense and well-documented argumentation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The comparison with analogous historical experiments — the Russian soviets, Yugoslav self-management, the anarchist collectives of Aragon, and the Bolivarian communes — is one of the most lucid moments in the text, and allows the Kurdish experience to be situated within a historical perspective that reveals both its originality and its structural vulnerabilities. The chapter devoted to the failed peace process in Turkey and to Öcalan’s call of February 2025 lends the report a currency that few works on the subject can claim.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">In short, anyone wishing to understand why tens of thousands of foreign volunteers joined the Kurdish militias, why intellectuals such as David Graeber considered Rojava the most ambitious democratic experiment in the contemporary world, or why the Battle of Kobanî became a global symbol, will find here the analytical foundation that press headlines never provided. Essential reading for those interested in the limits and possibilities of radical political transformation in the twenty-first century.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_20385771 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | The PKK and Democratic Confederalism. An unprecedented sociopolitical experiment in the midst of war Sánchez Rodríguez, Jesús Kurdistán Oriente Medio guerra Teorías Políticas <p class="MsoNormal">There are reports that aspire to document and reports that aspire to understand. This is one of the latter. The PKK and Democratic Confederalism — a work by the political scientist and essayist Jesús Sánchez Rodríguez, also the author of Las vías imposibles de la izquierda and Cartografía del pensamiento político — is an in-depth analysis of one of the most original, least known, and most misunderstood political experiments of recent decades: the transformation of a Kurdish Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement into the world’s foremost proponent of so-called democratic confederalism, and its practical application in the part of northern Syria known as Rojava.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The text unfolds across five parts of considerable analytical depth. The first reconstructs the history of the Kurdish people — dispersed across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran — and the emergence of the PKK in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan, tracing with rigour the path from anti-colonial Marxism-Leninism to the open warfare of the 1980s and 1990s. The second part is perhaps the most singular of the whole: the analysis of Öcalan’s ideological shift during his imprisonment on the island-prison of İmralı, where the Kurdish leader read Murray Bookchin, Walter Benjamin, and Immanuel Wallerstein, and elaborated a theoretical synthesis that abandoned the nation-state as an objective and placed feminism and ecology at the centre of the political project. The third part examines the implementation of those ideas in Rojava from 2012 onwards: the popular councils, the mandatory co-presidency with gender parity, the female military units (YPJ), and the cooperative economy. Parts four and five, of particular critical density, analyse the internal contradictions of the project — the tension between the vanguard party and participatory democracy — and the external pressures that threaten it, culminating in an assessment of the state of the question up to 2026.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">What makes this report especially valuable for the reader is its refusal to yield to either of the two poles that have dominated the literature on the subject: neither the official demonisation promoted by the Turkish state, nor the militant hagiography of certain sectors of the Western left. The author establishes from the preface that he will occupy the space of rigorous analysis that exists between the two, and he fulfils this with intellectual honesty sustained throughout more than a hundred pages of dense and well-documented argumentation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The comparison with analogous historical experiments — the Russian soviets, Yugoslav self-management, the anarchist collectives of Aragon, and the Bolivarian communes — is one of the most lucid moments in the text, and allows the Kurdish experience to be situated within a historical perspective that reveals both its originality and its structural vulnerabilities. The chapter devoted to the failed peace process in Turkey and to Öcalan’s call of February 2025 lends the report a currency that few works on the subject can claim.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">In short, anyone wishing to understand why tens of thousands of foreign volunteers joined the Kurdish militias, why intellectuals such as David Graeber considered Rojava the most ambitious democratic experiment in the contemporary world, or why the Battle of Kobanî became a global symbol, will find here the analytical foundation that press headlines never provided. Essential reading for those interested in the limits and possibilities of radical political transformation in the twenty-first century.</p> |
| title | The PKK and Democratic Confederalism. An unprecedented sociopolitical experiment in the midst of war |
| topic | Kurdistán Oriente Medio guerra Teorías Políticas |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20385771 |