Abdullah Öcalan
Among the many horrors unleashed by the current regime in the U.S., little has been written about its impacts on the extraordinary social and political experiment that was underway in Eastern Syria, in the area of Rojova. Even though Rojova has been essentially dismantled due to Trump’s policies in the region, I think more of us need to understand what they attempted, as it could provide a model for the future, once the authoritarian project has collapsed. Far from being a mere wartime anomaly or a localized ethnic uprising, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria represented a deliberate, mass-scale implementation of a radical alternative to the capitalist nation-state. For over a decade, this region operated as a living laboratory for a political theory that basically severed the concept of democracy from the structures of state sovereignty. Rojova showed that current human societies can organize themselves, on a large scale, around the principles of ecological balance, gender liberation, and decentralized cooperation even under conditions of total siege.
The intellectual lineage of this experiment originates in the dramatic philosophical transformation of Abdullah Öcalan, the co-founder and ideological leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Founded in 1978, the PKK initially operated as a traditional Marxist-Leninist vanguard movement, seeking to establish an independent, socialist Kurdish state through guerrilla warfare against the Turkish Republic. However, Öcalan’s capture by Turkish authorities in 1999 and his subsequent solitary confinement on Imrali Island forced a profound reevaluation of his political commitments. Unable to communicate with his party cadres, Öcalan immersed himself in Western philosophy, post-Marxist critique, and social theory. The decisive conceptual pivot occurred when he encountered the writings of the American social ecologist and anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin.
I also discovered Bookchin’s work when I was researching How Soon Is Now. Bookchin diagnosed that our drive to dominate nature is inextricably linked to our drive to dominate one another. He recognized that the foundational architecture of capitalism—specifically, the private ownership of physical and intellectual property—is inherently ecologically unsound. Bookchin warned: “The private ownership of the planet by elite strata must be brought to an end if we are to survive the afflictions it has imposed on the biotic world, particularly as a result of a society structured around limitless growth”.
Bookchin was deeply suspicious of the reformist compromises of modern environmentalism, which Trumpism has now wiped away. He rightly argued that initiatives like green consumerism, carbon taxation, and the simple transition to renewable energy are insufficient. Partial solutions function as a smokescreen, deflecting public attention from the terrifying reality that the current economic paradigm cannot be salvaged. Merely buying organic food or driving electric cars will not lead to our salvation if the underlying logic of the system remains predicated on infinite extraction and wealth hoarding. We cannot consume our way out of a crisis created by hyper-consumption. In How Soon Is Now, I applied Bookchin’s framework to propose a systemic alternative: a “mutualist” society where hierarchy is dissolved and the very concept of private property is replaced by “usufruct”. In this model, individuals and communities have the right to steward and productively utilize resources, but they cannot hoard or destroy them
Women fighters in Rojova
Influenced by Bookchin’s theories of libertarian municipalism, Öcalan recognized that the nation-state itself was the primary engine of structural violence, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. He concluded that true liberation could not be achieved by merely conquering state power or altering its flags, and that the oppression of women was the basis of all further oppression. In his text Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution, he observed that “the history of the loss of freedom is at the same time the history of how woman lost her position and vanished from history… Woman’s downfall and loss is thus the downfall and loss of the whole of society.” To correct this civilizational error, Öcalan decoupled the idea of democratic organization from the coercive mechanisms of government, writing that “democracy is governance that is not a state; it is the power of communities to govern themselves without state.” Astonishingly, Öcalan’s radical thesis, written behind bars, provided the model for the autonomous experiment in Rojava.
Instead of a sovereign state, Öcalan formulated a model he termed Democratic Confederalism, a paradigm designed to construct a “stateless democracy” from the ground up.
In the New York Times Magazine in 2015, journalist Wes Enzinna tracked how this theoretical shift traveled from an isolated prison cell to the battlefields of Syria, noting that Öcalan “began assigning Bookchin’s books to PKK militants,” and how this transformed the strategic objective of the entire movement. Democratic Confederalism is built upon three non-negotiable pillars: grassroots direct democracy, absolute gender liberation, and ecological sustainability. Within this framework, society is understood not as a collection of isolated individuals or national subjects, but as a network of self-governing communities capable of managing their own affairs through consensus and voluntary federation, effectively rendering the traditional, bureaucratic state apparatus obsolete.
When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2012, the sudden withdrawal of Bashar al-Assad’s military forces to defend Damascus created a historic power vacuum in the northern provinces. Rather than attempting to establish a conventional government, local Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian civic coalitions seized the moment to translate Öcalan’s theoretical concepts into material reality. The core operational cell of this new society was the local commune, an assembly comprising between 30 and 400 households. Power flowed explicitly from the bottom upward; these neighborhood communes dispatched delegates to district, regional, and cantonal councils, ensuring that all legislative authority remained rooted in face-to-face local participation. Enzinna’s reporting documented how these ordinary assemblies managed the granular realities of daily survival under wartime conditions, resolving immediate municipal crises regarding meat prices, fuel distribution, and electrical grid maintenance entirely outside the logic of centralized state planning or corporate monopoly.
Simultaneously, the administration implemented Jineology—or the “science of women”—a core tenet of Öcalan’s philosophy which asserts that the subjugation of women is the historical foundation of all subsequent forms of hierarchy and state oppression. To dismantle patriarchal structures, the region instituted a mandatory co-presidency system, requiring that every single administrative, political, and civic office be jointly held by one man and one woman. Autonomous women’s councils were granted absolute veto power over any communal decisions pertaining to women’s rights, and child marriage, dowries, and polygamy were legally abolished. Writing for Defense One in 2018, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon emphasized that this institutional commitment went far beyond mere representation, demonstrating that gender parity was treated as the foundational prerequisite for the region’s entire legal and social transformation. This structural autonomy was defended by the all-female Women’s Protection Units, or YPJ, whose members approached their military service not merely as combat duty, but as a direct defense of their social emancipation.
In the economic sphere, the region sought to develop a social economy based on the commons and cooperative labor, intentionally insulating itself from the extractive dynamics of global capitalism. While recognizing limited private property, the administration systematically prioritized worker-owned cooperatives in agriculture, manufacturing, and basic services. In a prominent 2014 essay for The Guardian, the late anthropologist David Graeber explicitly compared the socioeconomic transformations in Northeast Syria to the anarchist-collectivist movements of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Graeber argued that both projects successfully demonstrated that complex, multi-ethnic populations could effectively organize production, distribution, and consumption around the principles of mutual aid, collective ownership, and restorative justice, even while enduring severe international economic embargoes and constant military threats.
The historical trajectory of this autonomous territory was inextricably bound to a precarious, highly paradoxical military alliance with the United States. Following the watershed siege of Kobanî, where Kurdish forces successfully repelled the Islamic State, the Syrian Democratic Forces—an alliance of Kurdish, Arab, and Christian militias—became the primary ground partner for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. This arrangement created an unstable geopolitical contradiction: a radical, anti-capitalist social movement protected from its hostile neighbors by the military might of the world’s preeminent capitalist superpower. As the SDF advanced against ISIS, the administration expanded into non-Kurdish, Arab-majority territories such as Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. In his dispatches for The New Yorker, journalist Luke Mogelson documented the intense sociological and cultural friction that occurred during this expansion, detailing the immense difficulties the administration faced when introducing its progressive, secular, and feminist governance principles to deeply traditional rural Arab communities that had been severely traumatized by years of totalitarian religious rule.
The structural vulnerability of this arrangement was laid bare following the collapse of the Assad regime and the rapid realignment of American foreign policy under the second Trump administration. Upon returning to office in January 2025, President Trump enacted an explicit policy of military retrenchment, viewing the open-ended presence of American troops in Syria as a costly liability and actively signaling that northern Syria fell within a Turkish sphere of influence. Through a series of aggressive diplomatic maneuvers managed by special envoy Tom Barrack, Washington normalized relations with the newly established transitional Syrian government led by Ahmad al-Sharaa. The definitive betrayal occurred in late 2025, when the United States formally recognized the Damascus government as its primary counter-terrorism partner, effectively rendering the autonomous administration obsolete. Stripped of American air support and diplomatic protection, the region was left completely exposed to a massive, coordinated military offensive launched in January 2026 by Turkish-backed forces and the Syrian national army.
The physical dismantling of the autonomous zone culminated in the sweeping integration agreement signed on January 29, 2026. Under the harsh terms of this capitulation, the Syrian Democratic Forces were formally absorbed into the regular Syrian national army, and control over all international borders, airports, and lucrative oil fields was immediately surrendered to the central government in Damascus. While the transitional government granted certain conditional concessions to prevent immediate ethnic cleansing—including the formal recognition of Kurdish cultural identity and the restoration of citizenship to formerly stateless individuals—the radical experiment in stateless, bottom-up democracy was systematically dismantled and folded back into a centralized state structure.
We should not see the recent, very tragic suppression of the Rojava experiment as due to any inherent failure of its political or social theories. They faced the very brutal, state-centric mechanics of contemporary global geopolitics we are seeing unleashed across the planet. For over a decade, under the most harrowing conditions imaginable, millions of people successfully demonstrated that a society can function efficiently without a centralized state apparatus, that institutional gender parity is achievable, and that an economy can be structured around ecological balance and the common good rather than private accumulation. Though its physical territory has been re-absorbed by the state according to current reports, the concrete historical record of what was achieved in Northeast Syria remains completely intact, offering a vital conceptual blueprint and a tangible proof of concept for the alternative forms of human organization that must inevitably emerge when our current authoritarian projects collapse, which, eventually, it will.