Democracy without the state
Jonas Staal builds parliament in northern-Syria
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Jonas Staal:
The reason for being here is a collaboration with the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and the artistic and political organization New World Summit, that I founded in 2012. Together we are building a new public parliament in the Rojava region and organizing two international summits. It is through the New World Summit that the collaboration with the Democratic Self-Administration came about and that the members of my organization have been welcomed here three times since 2014.
To give some context to this region: “Rojava” means “West” in Kurdish, and refers to the western part of Kurdistan – many people tend to refer to it as northern-Syria. The Syrian civil war in 2011 forced Assad to concentrate his army to the south of the country and left behind a power vacuum in the north. Kurdish revolutionaries took this momentum to reclaim their land and, in collaboration with peoples from the region such as Arabs and Assyrians, to declare their political autonomy in the form of “democratic confederalism.” This process is known today as the “Rojava Revolution.” In the democratic model that came as a result notions such as self-governance, gender equality and communalism take a central role. The revolutionary Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned by Turkey since 1999, describes this model as “democracy without the state.” Essentially: stateless democracy.
The New World Summit consists of different people, such as researcher and producer Younes Bouadi, programmer Renée In der Maur, architect Paul Kuipers, photographer Ernie Buts and designer Remco van Bladel. Together, we have been developing for several years parliaments for stateless political organizations, amongst others in Berlin (2012) and Brussels (2014). These parliaments consist of large scale architectural constructions in which we so far were able to facilitate representatives of more than thirty stateless political organizations from all over the world, such as the Basque Country, Azawad, Somaliland, Baluchistan, West-Papua and Tamil Eelam. We believe the sphere of art is that of the imaginary, a space where we can develop new models of political representation and performative practices of politics.
The Kurdish movement has been involved in this process since the very beginning: especially the women’s movement that inspired the philosophies of Öcalan and practices the ideals of stateless democracy to its outer consequences was very important in this process. Revolutionaries such as Sakine Cansiz, murder in Paris in 2013, rejected the idea of the nation-state as a patriarchal construct, inherently intertwined with the doctrine of global capitalism. With Öcalan, the women’s movement concluded that for a stateless people confronted with colonialism and occupation the nation-state can never be a solution, but forms the essential problem.
The New World Summit always aimed to be a parliament for a stateless democracy, not limited to a specific territory, ethnicity or notion of statehood. This idea is indebted to the vision of the Kurdish movement, and our contributors Rojda Yildirim, Dilar Dirik, Adem Uzun, Havin Güne?er en Dil?ah Osman in specific. It is their political vision made possible a new artistic vision that we as the New World Summit try to realize through our parliaments.
C’est l’#arbre_à_palabres ? #démocratie
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