Abstract
After the outbreak of the Syrian war, the armed resistance of the Kurds against the radical Islamists drew considerable attention from across the world. Although the Kurdish movement has a history of forty years of armed fight in the region, especially against Turkey, they gained global fame during the war in Syria. Apart from media attention to the resistance of women, in particular, the establishment of a political system, democratic confederalism, which the world was not familiar with, came to exist in the area liberated from the religious fundamentalists in Syria. The Kurds during the Syrian civil war, on one hand, gained international fame for their fight against the radical Islamists; on the other hand, they put a new theory of governance, democratic confederalism, in practice in northern Syria. This paper seeks to provide a brief review of the theory of democratic confederalism and its practices in Rojava to build an argument regarding its future. This case study aims to explore how and why the theory and practices of democratic confederalism co-exist and which factors may influence the Rojava revolution’s future. This review’s central argument is that while democratic confederalism is a revolution in the field, it is also an experiment whose future depends on how the people will adopt it and how the global and regional powers will approach it.
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