In the Kurdish Freedom Movement, ecology is one of the three pillars of democratic confederalism, alongside women’s liberation and radical democracy. Thus, it links the domination of nature to the domination of people by the state and capitalism. Though this notion of ecology is place-based, it ultimately offers an alternative understanding of human geography as a web of collective agency and relations of care among humans and other-than-human life beyond the homogenized national container. In her contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Gülay Kilicaslan explores how this concept allows us to rethink democratic self-determination as a networked practice that transcends borders.
*
In the summer of 2015, when I returned from Canada to visit my family and continue my research work on forced migrants in Istanbul, Turkey, I did not expect to find myself in the midst of a war we had all thought was over. My WhatsApp feed filled with screenshots of text messages sent by government authorities to civil servants in Cizre, Bakûr (Northern Kurdistan) ordering them to leave the city before a round-the-clock curfew. Soon after, photos and videos of occupation began to circulate: streets reduced to rubble, Turkish flags hanging from shattered balconies, and tens of thousands of displaced residents carrying their belongings in search of another place to call home. On the shutter of a grocery store in Silvan, Amed, my hometown, a message spray-painted by security forces read: ‘Devlet geldi!’ (‘The state has arrived’). Indeed, the state had ‘arrived’ and displaced people who it had already displaced two decades prior!
The visuals that portrayed Bakûr of 2015-16 have become painfully familiar again as we watch, often struggling to keep looking, the videos and photographs emerging from Gaza since October 2023. Displacement functions as a state technology of population control in the context of anti-colonial and minoritized struggles, inscribed in the historical record of marginalized peoples from Sri Lanka and Colombia to Kashmir and, most recently, Gaza/Palestine. In Bakûr, displacement and dispossession have been the primary tools of the Turkish colonial state to secure territory and discipline Kurdish life. Here, I am focusing on the two most recent episodes of forced displacement in Bakûr.
The first took place in the 1990s, when the war between the Partîya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK – Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish state intensified. During this period, Turkish security forces forcibly evacuated nearly 3,500 villages and hamlets, displacing an estimated 3.5 million Kurds. The second episode occurred in late 2015, when urban warfare broke out in the city centers and towns of Northern Kurdistan in the aftermath of the collapse of the peace negotiations between the PKK and the Turkish state. During and after this second period, Turkish security forces displaced more than half a million Kurds once again. Some Kurdish migrants sought refuge in Iraq and European countries during both episodes, while many others remained within Turkey.
Forced displacement as a counterinsurgency strategy
In both episodes, the Turkish state used forced displacement as a counterinsurgency strategy to demobilize Kurds, suppress claims to Kurdishness and autonomy, secure territorial control over Northern Kurdistan, and ultimately pursue colonial objectives of removing and assimilating Kurds. In other words, to produce compliant subjects and governable territory. Yet this particular form of forced displacement has paradoxically acted as a catalyst in the anti-colonial struggle led by the Kurdish Freedom Movement, organized around the PKK. Thus, it has enabled a scale shift that deprovincializes an already transnational Kurdish politics in the Middle East by expanding it into new geographies (western Turkey, Europe, and North America) and tying it to other frontlines of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. This in turn enabled the Kurds to develop diverse strategies, build a collective identity and historical narrative, expand their resources, and establish a strong, global, grassroots movement that strives to decolonize Kurdistan and Kurdishness.
In what follows, I briefly highlight how Kurds transform their displacement and dispersal into collective organizing and translocal and transnational mobilization aimed at dismantling state, patriarchal, and capitalist structures through practices of democratic confederalism in which women play a leading and autonomously organized role.
Turning displacement into organizing
The colonial state technologies of displacement and dispossession did not only scatter Kurds. They also reconfigured the terrain and the terms on which the Kurdish Freedom Movement organized transnationally. In light of the movement’s ideological shift from claiming statehood to building resistant communities within and across state borders, dispersal became a condition for expansion. Social movement scholars call this an “upward scale shift” of organizing.
Village evacuations and camp formations in the 1990s fed into urban and transnational civil-society building in the 2000s: as forced migrant Kurds arrived in peri-urban districts of Amed, in Istanbul’s gecekondu neighborhoods, in Mêxmûr, Rojava, and later in Germany, France, Canada, and elsewhere, they did not appear as unorganized ‘internally displaced’ or ‘refugee’ populations or diasporic communities in its traditional sense – communities that would only be expected to do politics to seek reforms within liberal democratic Western institutions. Instead, movement infrastructure rapidly assembled in new localities in the form of party branches, neighborhood committees, culture and language associations, labor organizations and unions, women’s organizations and youth networks. This formed the basis of democratic confederalism.
As articulated in Abdullah Öcalan’s prison writings, democratic confederalism is a form of self-determination without and against the state. Rather than claiming a new nation-state, the Kurdish Freedom Movement proposed a non-statist, translocal system built through communes, assemblies, cooperatives, academies, and congresses at multiple scales. Here, autonomy functions as a method for establishing democratic relations within and between communities, rather than as a territorial endpoint. Thus, the intention is to bypass state borders and weaken state apparatuses. Hence, women, youth, indigenous, and minoritized groups organize autonomously, develop their own theory and mechanisms of self-defense, and participate in decision-making through co-chairing and quota systems.
Self-determination as networked practice across borders
In the Bakûr context, the democratic autonomy campaign institutionalized this horizon through structures such as the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), which coordinated campaigns on gender, ecology, labor, language, justice, and local governance across municipalities, NGOs, unions, and people’s assemblies in and beyond Kurdistan. In this sense, dispersal did not suspend self-determination; it demanded that self-determination be rethought in transnational terms as a networked practice across borders.
Central to this reorientation is the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, which insists that there can be no freedom for any communities without women’s freedom. Emerging from within the Kurdish Freedom Movement and expanding across Bakûr and other parts of the greater Kurdistan geography (Rojava (Syria), Rojhelat (Iran), Bașûr (Iraq)) and the diaspora, Kurdish women have built autonomous structures in guerrilla organizations, municipalities, and civil society, turning the slogan Jin, Jîyan, Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom) into everyday practice. In Bakûr, women-liberationist municipalism took shape in women’s houses, cooperatives, women-only markets, and mechanisms such as co-mayorship, quotas, and autonomous women’s councils that institutionalized gender parity and feminist decision-making in local governance.
In Rojava, women’s communes, Jinwar women village, Mala Jin (women’s houses), self-defense units, and Jineolojî academies link bodily autonomy to territorial self-rule, weaving feminist struggle together with ecological and anti-capitalist projects. Globally, Kurdish women have forged internationalist alliances with movements in Lebanon, South Africa, Palestine, Afghanistan, Mexico, Brazil, and beyond. These practices constitute a translocal and transnational Kurdish feminist movement that centers women’s liberation as the condition of possibility for democratic confederalism and for any meaningful project of decolonization.
Horizons of social ecology
In this context, the ecology movement within the Kurdish Freedom Movement has emerged, viewing the destruction of rivers, forests, and neighborhoods in Kurdistan as a key aspect of displacement and dispossession, and therefore a critical element of the state’s counterinsurgency strategy. Ecology, alongside women’s liberation and radical democracy, is articulated as one of the three pillars of democratic confederalism, drawing on social ecology to link domination of nature to state and capitalist domination of people.
Through campaigns against the Ilisu Dam, GAP (Southeastern Anatolia Project), mining and other extractive investment projects, activists in formations such as the Mesopotamia Ecology Movement and the Mesopotamia Social Forum have worked to connect ‘local’ struggles over water, land, and urban renewal with a broader anti-colonial and anti-capitalist horizon. Their organizing ranges from village and neighborhood ecology councils to research, legal challenges, and international solidarity networks, framing the defense of Kurdistan’s rivers and landscapes as inseparable from Kurdish self-determination and the effort to build a communal, non-extractive economy.
Grounded in anti-colonial struggles
This horizon now travels explicitly through initiatives such as Global Tapestry of Alternatives and Network Women Weaving the Future. The latter network brings together women from different struggles and geographies to create a democratic women’s confederalism. Together, these initiatives link Jin, Jiyan, Azadî to struggles far beyond Kurdistan, weaving radical local processes into a shared fabric of transformation from below. When read in a dialog with BG’s call for a Deep Democracy and for a Pluriverse of Peace, democratic confederalism speaks directly to the need, as described by post-development and pluriverse debates, to transition from Eurocentric universalism to a tapestry of alternatives and “pluriversal territories,” where shared horizons are articulated from situated, grassroots struggles.
In this sense, the condition of Kurdistan as an international colony in the Middle East and Kurdish dispersal across vast geographies under counterinsurgency does not interrupt self-determination. It rather forces it to become networked and pluriversal, a claim not only on a territory but on a world that is grounded in the anti-colonial struggle of Kurdistan yet resonant with other struggles against extractivism, racial capitalism, and border violence in other geographies across the world.
Politics of refugee autonomy
Nowhere is this clearer than in sites like Mexmûr, a refugee camp built by villagers who refused the village-guard system in the 1990s and crossed into Başûr (Iraqi Kurdistan) rather than become collaborators. In Mexmûr, as Dilar Dirik eloquently describes in her book “The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice”, displacement from Bakûr was transformed into a long-duration mode of ‘governance’ in refugee autonomy: residents organized themselves through communes, people’s and women’s assemblies, and academies, building their own education, health, and economic systems and explicitly presenting the camp as a prototype of democratic confederalism.
Similar logics travel through diaspora structures in Europe, where former refugees and migrant workers have established people’s and women’s assemblies, migrant workers and youth organizations, and cultural centers that understand themselves as components of the same confederal project. Of course, and predictably, they have become targets of surveillance and criminalization by Turkish and European government agencies. In each case, borders are not simply crossed; they are politicized as governing regimes to be contested by building transnational and anti-state politics from below.
Towards a web of collective agency
This practice of Kurdish organizing against and beyond borders must be read as more than a local adaptation or experiment. The movement’s hope is that an anti-capitalist, feminist, and ecological project emerging from this specific situation can interact with other ideas without perpetuating Eurocentric universality. This may also resonate with what some theorists call an insurgent universality, in which a shared horizon is articulated from the edges of worlds through concrete practices of common struggle. Democratic confederalism thus offers a counter-formation to racial capitalism, border regimes, and statist territoriality by proposing a different understanding of human geography itself, understood as a web of collective agency and relations of care among humans and more-than-human life, beyond the homogenized national container.
The fact that this horizon is formulated under the slogan Jin Jîyan Azadî underscores its claim. Coming from a history of displacement and at the intersection of empire, colonialism, and war, Kurds articulate a deprovincialized transnational politics that speaks from Kurdistan to all wretched of the earth. It offers an emancipatory imagination for life-making at the margins of the world-system. It is thus a contribution to a pluriversal horizon that refuses both assimilation into the nation-state and a retreat into closed particularism, while offering a set of tools for reclaiming democratic collective power.