“In 2011, Kurdish revolutionaries, in alliance with Arabs, Assyrians, and other peoples from the region, declared Rojava independent from the Assad regime and established a system that they refer to as “democratic confederalism,” or stateless democracy.”
“This practice of democracy without the state is structured by a collectively written social contract that defines the key principles of the revolution: self-governance, gender equality, the right to self-defense, and a communal economy.”
“Through communes, cooperatives, and councils, the performance of stateless democracy has now taken shape over three years. Its primary aim is the development of a system of thought and political practice that structurally undermines the monopolization of power.”
“These decentralized structures are referred to as the “Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava,” which comprises the total assemblage of self-governing political entities from this autonomous region.”
“I have previously written about the practice of stateless democracy in the context of the Rojava revolution, and here I will engage two related concepts: the form and the performance of stateless democracy.”
“The nation-state is a structure that demands of its subjects a specific self-consciousness as “citizens.” Abiding by the monopoly of power enforced by the state takes the form of a series of performative acts that are demanded of citizens—from paying taxes to voting—through which the form and legitimacy of the state is strengthened.”
“As such, one could argue, the form of the state embodies a script. Those that perform this script are granted a certain privilege for their service in maintaining the state’s legitimacy.”
“This is different in the case of those who are deemed irrelevant as potential citizens (undocumented migrants, refugees, and so forth) or who attempt to challenge, alter, or rewrite the scripts through which the stage we call the state directs us (social movements, whistleblowers, liberation organizations, i.e. “terrorists,” and so forth).”
“In the case of stateless democracy, the form of the nation-state is rejected and replaced by a performance based on an ideology of self-governance at all levels of society.”
“This performance brings about a proliferation of new forms, rather than being subjected to a single given one. The success of stateless democracy relies on what the Kurdish revolutionaries refer to as the “mentality” of the individuals constituting the communal organizations that perform self-governance at the base; one could also say that it concerns the state we are in—both literally in terms of the state as a structure of governance, and metaphorically in terms of our “state of mind.””
“The manner in which the ideology of stateless democracy is internalized defines whether or not its performance can be successful.”
“While an imperialist state such as the US employs non-state or extraterritorial entities such as drones, extralegal prisons, and proxy armies (out of which the Islamic State emerged), this love for extraterritoriality embodies a mere wish to expand the state, rather than a liberation from it.”
“Unsurprisingly, the imaginary of the Islamic State—the “rogue” proxy-child of foreign intervention and financing—cannot but strive for yet another state.”
“While its rhetoric focuses on the establishment of a worldwide caliphate, recently leaked documents, such as those that became known as the “ISIS Papers,” show a rigid but rather conventional blueprint for a new nation-state.”
“According to Dilar Dirik, representative of the Kurdish Women’s Movement, non-state entities that truly “live without approval” are of a different kind, as they are subjects engaged in the terrifying process of emancipation—a rejection of old forms in an attempt to perform new ones.”
“Non-state entities that change mentality move beyond the usual script imposed upon them through the form of the nation-state. Consequently, they live a dual form of terror: the terror of liberation, and the state-terror that is employed to punish those that engage in this process.”
“For regimes such as Erdoğan’s in Turkey, the true terrorists are those that Hesso describes: the humans and cats that decide to go off-stage—or better, off-state—altogether. The fourth wall of the geopolitical theater that the Kurds are dismantling consists of performing the fact that life beyond the state is possible, even though no one yet knows exactly which form this life will take.”
“What we can say with regard to the new forms that the Rojava Revolution has developed so far is that the assemblage of radical institutions gathered in the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava is essentially the “form”—or the transformative base—of stateless democracy.”
“The formation is transformative in that its decentralized, conflicting, and complex structures are hard to unify even in thought. As such, they interrogate the very idea of what the form of a nation, people, or community is supposed to entail in terms of a homogeneous entity.”
“The heterogeneous, self-assessing nature of power performed through the disciplined practice of stateless democracy attempts to undermine any monopolization of power by all possible means.”
“While “discipline” might be considered a problematic term for some, for the Rojava revolutionaries the capacity to collectively govern goes hand in hand with the governance of the self. This governance no longer takes place through an external actor—the “cop inside our head,” in this case the former Assad regime—but through an attempt to define oneself as both an actor in and cocreator of the collective script entitled stateless democracy: a script that is performed off-state and thus, inevitably, a script that has to be performed as a terrorist.”
“The term “discipline” in this context can be understood in two ways: discipline in terms of a capacity to self-regulate one’s performance in order to develop the common script of stateless democracy; but also discipline in terms of one’s field of expertise.”
“this analysis and understanding of morphology is not limited to the confines of a painting or museum; one could, for example, engage in a morphological analysis of a parliament.”
“If we would limit ourselves to a descriptive understanding of what a parliament depicts, we learn that it is a place where politicians and the government assemble.”
“A morphological reading of a parliament, on the other hand, will tell us more: it shows us the parliament as an arena, as a theatrical space, where power is performed both through a specific spatial configuration, a specific number of actors, a composition of symbols, as well as an overall choreography.”
“From a descriptive perspective, it is only of relative importance whether the parliament is circular, square, or triangular—the only thing that is important is that it’s a parliament, and functions as such: people assemble, debate, vote, and this has a certain impact on the external world. From a morphological perspective—from a perspective that reads into the form of the parliament—we understand that a square parliament creates a different spatial and social dynamic than a circle, to the point that the form and choreography of the assembly affect the outcome: an open-air parliament might produce a radically different outcome than a covered one; a parliament with benches might produce a radically different outcome than a parliament with chairs”
“Each spatial configuration, each object, each choreography inscribes a set of ideas into the performance of its actors. So while the nation-state is a construct that demands a specific performance, so do the shapes and forms through which its power is articulated and inscribed upon those speaking in its name.”
“Ideology, in other words, has a material reality, which one can understand through morphology: through art. The discipline of the revolutionary practice of stateless democracy thus also affects the possibilities of the discipline of art to engage new, yet unscripted morphologies.”
“the practice of stateless democracy reintroduces, both in politics and in art, the idea of a permanent revolution of form.”
“and is now Rojava consists of many government buildings, monuments, and parliaments built by the former regime. But with the Rojava revolutionaries’ rejection of the nation-state paradigm, they also lost the overall form that maintained their unity. Suddenly, the government buildings, monuments, and parliaments were left formless.”
“That is to say, for those non-state subjects that embody the revolutionary cadre of the autonomous region, these infrastructures had abdicated their previous construction of power.”
“They were no longer acknowledged in their authority, as the form of the nation-state as such was no longer recognized. The practice of stateless democracy stripped government buildings of their power; it reduced public monuments to isolated islands no longer capable of enforcing their historical narratives; and it handed over the exclusive space of the parliament to communal councils and assemblies.”
“Ideology changed the nature and meaning of form, even though this is not yet the same as creating new forms in the way that Hesso and the Rojava Film Commune are investing in a transformative culture that takes the imaginaries of the revolution as its point of departure.”
“As an artistic and political organization, our idea has been to reclaim the concept of the parliament as a temporary and public space, where we invite those dealing with parliamentary exclusion, such as blacklisted and stateless political organizations, to appear.”
“We approached the notion of ideology as a material form; we approached ideology as a morphology.”
“For example, Rojava claims to be recuperating democracy’s origins as found in the form of the agora (assembly) of ancient Greece, the space where the theater of politics began.”
“The fact that Rojava’s parliament is designed as a public space is a result of the declaration of Rojava’s stateless democracy, which by definition turned all parliaments into public, communal domains.”
“The circular shape of the parliament derives from the shape of the assembly and its attempt to dislocate power from a clear center and instead engage in an egalitarian social composition in which the distance between people is equalized.”
“The circular arches represent the foundational pillars of the practice of stateless democracy, each carrying one of the key concepts of the collectively written social contract that forms the basis of the autonomous Rojava region.”
“The trilingual representation of words on the arches, such as “Confederalism,” “Gender Equality,” and “Communalism,” is an expression of the cultural diversity of the region; the Democratic Self-Administration always communicates simultaneously in Assyrian, Arabic, and Kurdish.”
“The large canvasses that cover the roof of the parliament are hand-painted fragments of flags representing organizations that play a key role in the Democratic Self-Administration, together giving shape to a new confederate whole. Revolutionary practice and a revolutionary imaginary created the ideological design of the parliament; its morphology is ideology materialized.”
“The Constructivist aesthetics of the parliament engage the principle of a permanent self-interrogation of power in the practice of stateless democracy: the spherical shape of the parliament is no perfect circle; it does not commemorate a successful revolution of the past, but one that is enacted continuously in the present.”
“The pillars of the parliament and the principles they represent are not necessarily in unity; they seek for connections, and in the process often stand in public conflict with one another.”
“The decentralized placement of the arches that form the parliament as a whole further strengthens this sense of a parliament that is in permanent construction, even when it is finished”
“The permanent construction of the public parliament thus also aims at a permanent aesthetic and ideological self-interrogation, a parliament in a state of self-critique: a hybrid architectural manifesto that can only be completed through the ongoing engagement of its users.”
“This ideal of permanent construction relates directly to the self-assessing structures of power employed by the Rojava revolutionaries: its morphology thus cannot but engage these same principles in the domain of aesthetics.”
“The parliament, as the Democratic Self-Administration and the New World Summit intend it to be, is ideology materialized. Not just as a mere form, but as a form to be performed, and a performance aimed at self-interrogation and transformation.”
“Rojava has shown that revolution is first of all a performance of ideology. The Rojava revolution is not one that hopes for a different world in an unknown future when statehood is achieved and utopia has developed properly and linearly, as our revolutionary textbooks have taught us. Rather, it is revolution as a painstakingly won process of building a new society through a change of mentality and a change of performance: through a change of form. The Rojava revolution proposes a different performance of politics, and as such, also a different performance of art.”
“The evental moment of the Rojava revolution has liberated the performance of democracy from the construct of the nation-state.”
“Rather than performance following the prescribed scripts of the state, the revolutionary break from old oppressors and masters allows for ideology to be performed differently, to take a different form.”
“Concepts of self-governance, long in the making through decades of guerrilla struggles in the mountains of Bakûr, are liberated from their bondage to a structure of governance that was never their own.”
“Revolutionary realism—the one and only true realism—thrives, and the formula that structures the paradigm of a new world is spelled as follows: Ideology = Form.”
“… Out of old monuments, new shapes grow: the images of father and son Assad disappear, and a multiplicity of faces emerge, those of the martyrs of the Rojava revolution. A swarm of fighter-portraits consuming the pedestals one piece at the time …”
“… In Kobanê, for months the epicenter of the struggle between the Kurdish revolutionaries and the Islamic State, reconstruction is in full swing. Despite Erdoğan’s refusal to allow for a humanitarian corridor, soberly built foundations of new houses have emerged all over. Just one neighborhood remains in ruins. No one touches a single stone or bombshell there: the ruins have been declared a monument—an enormous, permanent, and open scar in the heart of the city …”
“… On the first floor of a bombed cultural center, where children play with half-melted guns, a series of murals is still visible. Despite the bullet holes and the black graffiti of Islamic State militias smeared on the walls, the depictions of traditional Kurdish instruments and covers of books by local poets have remained …”
“… A few streets from the bombed cultural center, a new one has opened. A sharply dressed teacher sits in the garden with his students, playing traditional folk songs. Songs of defiance, performed in defiance. Stubborn forms that will be performed, again and again, despite everything, against everything, for resistance is life …”
“… During a conference, a Kurdish party leader lectures in Arabic. While having fought for the right to speak Kurdish, now she decides not to: she was a former minority, now a majority; her Arab listeners were a majority, now a minority. She could perform power, but decides not to …”
“… A former guerrilla fighter is now a minister. She has been offered a private car and driver; she is offered the services of waiters and cooks; she is offered a bodyguard and bulletproof glass. Instead, she does the dishes for her assistant, she cooks for her team, she walks home alone. She performs differently …”
“… In Rojava, cats silently move through ruins and new building sites; they stand guard with fighters and rest with artists. Even the cats have changed form; even cats are terrorists here.”