In recent years, following the collapse of the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdish freedom movement, the struggle for autonomy in the towns and cities of northern Kurdistan, or Bakur, has undergone a significant shift from a non-violent re-organization of social and political life to a militant self-defense movement.

The declaration of round-the-clock curfews in the summer of 2016 left many Kurdish cities under a de facto military siege, setting the scene for an urban war. Local youth dug trenches and built barricades to protect their neighborhoods and their democratic autonomous initiatives from police raids. While the guerrillas who had until then stayed up in the mountains came down to support the youth, Turkey’s special forces tore apart towns and cities and razed entire neighborhoods to the ground. According to a UN report, at least 2,000 people died during these clashes.

The devastation of the war was not just material, however. The fact that Turkish special forces burnt civilians alive, stripped people naked, did not allow the bodies of those killed to be buried, and widely circulated images of mutilated dead bodies and cut-off limbs to celebrate their victory via social media, made a lasting mark on Kurdish people. Today, the experiment with democratic autonomy in urban Kurdistan has come to an end as thousands are imprisoned, organizations closed down, elected officials removed from office and towns and cities occupied by heavily armed security forces.

From Anti-Colonialism to Democratic Autonomy

The idea of democratic autonomy developed in Kurdistan during the late 2000s, in the context of an armed struggle against Turkish occupation and colonization. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon argues that colonization is violence. The defining characteristic of a colonial regime is that its violence destroys nature, people and culture without ever needing to build consent. Many Western liberal legal regimes were formed within a framework of colonization. Such regimes protect the state’s monopoly of violence against colonized communities as well as the right of the state to exert violence against its “others.” By alluding to the imagined threat posed by the “other” to resort to violence to defend itself, liberal law transforms this possibility into an issue of security and thereby legitimizes and legalizes its own organized violence.

As the only internationally recognized discourse for the oppressed, claims of human rights violations are in turn burdened with the responsibility of producing evidence that the state has transgressed its legal and legitimate use of monopolized violence. Also, in order to sustain their legitimacy, human rights institutions are obliged to unquestionably condemn the violence used by actors other than the state and hence further contribute to the normalization of the state’s monopoly on violence. Fanon invites those who struggle against colonization to create a world different from the one Western liberal law institutes.

Postcolonial writers who follow in Fanon’s footsteps criticize the nation states that emerged after the anti-colonial struggles. They point out that nationalism has created a new hegemony in these states, shifting power from colonial elites to national elites and acting as a means by which colonized peoples enter the stage of global capitalism as workers and capitalists. In this process, peasants, women and the poor — who actively participated in the anti-colonial struggle — are sent back home, and the means to govern, produce, reproduce and defend themselves are confiscated from them by the newly independent state apparatus. They are then transformed into citizen-subjects capable of operating within and subjecting themselves to the social, economic and legal context shaped by a global capitalist reality.

In Kurdistan, the idea of democratic autonomy emerged as a response to this colonial and postcolonial experience. The Kurdish freedom movement can be understood as a movement that seeks to reclaim the means of self-governance, self-production, self-creation and self-defense from the Turkish state and the ruling elites of Kurdistan. Democratic autonomy invites people to transgress social relations and loyalties that have long been imposed on them. It promotes spaces where forms of representation and belonging can multiply to resist the homogenizing effect of the nation state, of the nuclear family, of capital and of positivist science.

Autonomy is not a turn inwards, nor does it denote independence from external relations. To the contrary: autonomy involves an engagement with multiple levels of conversation, negotiation and exchange. It suggests horizontality in place of the verticality instituted by the nation state and capital. Whereas capital seeks to secure geographies for accumulation, whereas the state system tries to homogenize social identities, and whereas the modern legal system attempts to monopolize the law and the legitimate use of force, democratic autonomy opens these up to a future of indeterminacy and possibility.

For the Kurdish freedom movement and its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, democratic autonomy is therefore a political form in which Kurds, Turks and other people in the Middle East can pursue empowerment and liberation and can struggle against nationalism, patriarchy and capitalism without recourse to the state-form. As such, the movement argues that the pursuit of democratic autonomy can serve as a means of peace-making in the wider region.

Autonomy and the Peace Process

Social scientists have long debated why post-conflict societies — from Ireland to South Africa — often face the disempowerment of emancipatory social forces. Some believe this to be a result of the fact that national regimes and peace processes have often been formulated by global capitalist actors whose primary goal is to secure capital accumulation, consolidate the nation state and invalidate ideologies alternative to neoliberalism.

Having learned from the negative experiences of the past, latecomers to the conflict resolution process like the PKK and the FARC therefore argue that the peace process should be seen as a social and political struggle more than a diplomatic endeavor — as a means rather than an end in itself. Society must exercise its self-defense and increase its capacity for freedom during the peace process. In other words, the spaces that open up during peace negotiations and peace struggles have to be seized upon as spaces for exercising freedom here and now. Only a society that can defend and govern itself can achieve peace without losing its potential for radical social transformation and its capacity to build alternative worlds.

This explains why the Kurdish freedom movement in Turkey has created various local, national and international institutions, brought various sections of the Kurdish and Turkish public together and formed new alliances during the peace process. It aimed to expand the space of negotiation by including new actors in the process through the many conferences it held and the three political parties it created. Meanwhile, Abdullah Öcalan, as the key negotiator of the Kurds, used the “negotiating table” as a platform to formulate a legal framework for the struggle for liberation.

The Turkish government, however, had other expectations of the peace process. It aimed at increasing its regional power by declaring itself as the representative of Kurds and Turks alike. Its objective was the disempowerment of the Kurdish freedom movement’s discursive, representational and operational capacity. It hoped to secure Kurdish territories for the investment of capital, and to consolidate state power by promoting a collective Islamic identity that unite the varying historical trajectories of Kurds and Turks alike. In 2015, two years after it began, the Turkish government gave up the peace process and resorted once more to military means to deal with the “Kurdish question” — a decision that appears to have been motivated at least part by the fact that Kurdish groups were much more effective at using the peace process as a way to address various oppositional groups inside Turkey and bring them together against the policies of Erdogan’s AKP government. 

From Model to Movement

While Öcalan introduced the concept of democratic autonomy to the vocabulary and discourse of the Kurdish freedom movement in the early 2000s, it only became a subject of debate, criticism and elaboration for a wider public beyond the movement’s cadres after the launching of a key meeting in Diyarbakır in 2010, when Kurdish activists invited Turkish journalists and intellectuals to evaluate their proposed solution to the Kurdish question. There, they presented their ideas of democratic autonomy and encountered a fierce opposition — not because the invited journalists and intellectuals were hostile to the recognition of Kurdish identity, but because they deemed this proposal to be utterly unrealistic.

Apart from a reform to the constitution that would exclude any reference to ethnicity, the proposal promoted by the Kurds had little to say about the restructuring of the Turkish state and the correcting of past wrongs. Rather, it included an elaborate model of self-governance and power-sharing where references like “people’s parliaments”, “communes”, “peasants”, and “women” expressed a desire to build a radical democracy in the political and economic realm as well as in health, education and other fields.

For the intellectuals of Turkey, who at the time were heavily invested in the fantasy of liberal democracy and the rule of law, the proposal seemed to be distracting energy and attention from “real issues.” However, only a few years later, that which was once deemed unrealistic was already being practiced in many cities and towns across Kurdistan. Moreover, and somewhat ironically, the desires that informed the Gezi protests of 2013, when a million people took the streets of Istanbul and cities across Turkey, had an undeniable affinity with the demands for democratic autonomy as formulated by the Kurdish opposition.

Democratic autonomy in the Kurdish cities primarily involved the creation of assemblies at the local and regional level. Residential assemblies in neighborhoods, towns and cities would make decisions concerning infrastructure and other important social issues. In the local elections of 2009, the Kurdish opposition gained 97 municipalities and expanded this number to 99 in 2014. Now, however, these new municipal authorities had to respond to the demands of the unofficial people’s assemblies, limiting their decision-making capacity and devolving the power of educated, middle-class elites and professionals to everyday people and workers. In addition to the general popular assemblies, there were also thematic assemblies on health, justice, the economy and education that aimed to democratize social policy and local governance.

While the economy assembly encouraged the formation of cooperatives and held meetings with businessmen, trade organizations and entrepreneurs along with the poor and the unemployed, the assemblies on public health provided free services and educated health workers. Academies opened up around Kurdistan providing ideological formation and skills training for those who participated in the construction of democratic autonomy, while truth and justice assemblies aimed to resolve local disputes to ensure that people in Kurdistan would stop using formal institutions of law and to promote the dissemination and democratization of community justice. 

Another important characteristic of the democratic autonomy experiment in Kurdistan has been its strong feminist component. The Kurdish women’s movement formed all-female assemblies in towns and cities and women held the right to veto decisions concerning women made in mixed-gender collectives. Furthermore, all assemblies and all formal institutions — including the municipality itself — had one woman and one man serving as co-presidents. In many mixed assemblies, the movement achieved the goal of equal representation of women and men.