New World Academy Reader #5: Stateless Democracy

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New World Academy is an alternative learning platform for art and politics established by artist Jonas Staal and BAK. Developed together with the Kurdish Women’s Movement as a nomadic platform that unfolding throughout 2015, the fifth sequence of the New World Academy explores—from artistic, activist, and scholarly perspectives—the proposition of delinking democracy from the nation-state: the notion of “stateless democracy.” On this occasion, the fifth reader of the New World Academy, titled Stateless Democracy, has been published.

If initially the Kurdish struggle, led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party , had aimed to establish an independent state, since the 1990s PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, together with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, have turned to questioning the patriarchal and capitalist nature of the very concept of the nation-state itself. Within this process the Kurdish revolutionary movement developed an alternative model called “democratic confederalism” or “stateless democracy” that invoked a confederate composition in which gender-equality, self-governance, secularism, cultural diversity, communal economy, and social ecology form key pillars.

Since 2012 this proposition has been put fully into practice in Rojava, Western Kurdistan in Syria, in alliance with the peoples of the region. New World Academy Reader #5: _Stateless Democracy _provides key texts that offer an overview of both the political and cultural dimensions comprising what has now come to be known to history as the Rojava Revolution. The texts in the reader are as much an introduction to the model of stateless democracy practiced in Rojava, as a potential political paradigm through which to confront the many related crises in politics, economy, and ecology that we face across the world.

Contributors: Kajal Ahmed , Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya , Janet Biehl , Murray Bookchin , Dilar Dirik , Zîlan Diyar, David Graeber , Havin Güneşer , Joost Jongerden, Gönül Kaya , Abdullah Öcalan (founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party ), Pinar Öğünç , Jonas Staal , and Hito Steyerl .

Edited by Renée In der Maur and Jonas Staal in dialogue with the Kurdish Women’s Movement this fifth reader examines the itineraries of the Kurdish Women’s Movement—an umbrella organization that has been foundational in shaping the political objectives of the Kurdish liberation movement internationally.

Realization of this publication has been made possible by financial support from the DOEN Foundation, Amsterdam and the Creative Europe Programma of the European Union.