The Kurdish Movement and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria: An Alternative to the (Nation-)State Model?

Is the Rojava model really deconstructing the model of a state or is it potentially a new state form? Does the ‘democratic confederalism’ model that the Kurdish movement claims to be implementing in Northern Syria draw on/reproduce different modes of identity/belonging than that of the nation and the state? This paper argues that the shift from a nationalist movement towards a project that offers a stateless solution seems to be incomplete and needs to be further questioned. The first section begins with a brief discussion of the notion of statelessness and the historical background and ideological transformation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its ‘paradigm-shift’. The second section shows that despite positive aspects towards a post-national stateless model, the narratives of the representatives of the Kurdish political movement in Rojava display nationalist elements by prioritizing the Kurds and their cultural identity and a political power at the top of which Öcalan’s personality cult stands; and engages with the concept of the multitude, proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri whose work on radical democracy is theoretically relevant to the Rojava model.