Governance of Resistance in Northern Syria

This book examines governance developments in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (also known as Rojava) ten years after the emergence of the de facto Kurdish administration. The governance of Rojava has attracted scholarly and popular interest due its revolutionary beginnings and radical political agenda, which promotes democratic confederalism, gender equality, social ecology and libertarian socialism. Here, contributions from a wide range of scholars assess the processes and challenges of this administration, providing a unique case study of governance in a conflict context characterized by alternative political ideologies. Based on on-the-ground fieldwork and theoretical analysis, chapters explore how the community grapples with the challenges of the new administrative structures, the experiences of its different communities - Kurdish and non Kurdish - and the construction of political and social identities. Specific governance challenges relating to gender equality, education, migration and displacement are highlighted and juxtaposed with the 'resistance narrative' that underpins the administration's governance style. The book, crucially, also takes a wider analytical frame to understand what the Rojava experiment means, assessing its radically different nature from conventional nation-state structures, and discussing the new meanings of citizenship it puts forward.