Since early 2026, Rojava in North East Syria, has been under renewed assault by the new Syrian regime. A majority-Kurdish region, Rojava has, for more than 12 years been home to one of the world’s largest experiments in democratic autonomy and ecological living. The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), led by Kurdish activists and facilitated by the organisational work of Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk (TEV-DEM; ‘Movement for a Democratic Society’), has built a new model of political community and legality in the wake of the Syrian civil war. Since 2014, the DAANES has provided safety, political and legal rights, and the means to lead a meaningful and peaceful life for almost 5 million stateless peoples from more than 11 religious and ethnic backgrounds. The DAANES experiment in Rojava can also be credited, uncontroversially, with the defeat of Daesh, through the organisation of its population into self-defence units that have also empowered women to ‘appear’ and struggle as equals alongside their male counterparts. 

At the centre of the Rojava revolution, and the founding of this democratic confederalist community, has been the development of a complex democratic and insurgent proto-legal constitution, or Social Contract, that enshrines the principles of gender equality, language rights, ecological principles and the universal right to life. The emphasis placed on gender equality, has been fundamental to the Rojava project, and much of its energy and democratising force has been pushed forward by the Women’s Revolution, embodying the values of the Kurdish Women’s Movement: Jin, Jiyan, Azadi—Women, Life, Freedom. 

In this short blog post, I reflect critically on the urgent developments taking place in Rojava, following a month of aggression that has seen the liberation of former Daesh fighters held in prison camps under the authority of the DAANES, attacks on Kurdish towns and neighbourhoods in Rojava. Such attacks have been documented through the emergence of images and reporting of the targeted murders of Kurdish women fighters, who are once again the objects of sensationalising interest as they are the victimised through the cutting of their iconic braided hair from their deceased bodies, or the throwing of their beaten bodies off of buildings. What we are witnessing now following this renewed intensification of often gendered and sexualised violence against Rojava and its inhabitants, is a process of integration, subsumption, and potential political erasure. In the finer details, there is now a negotiated struggle as to how and to what extent the political revolution in Rojava and its achievements can be protected or enveloped within the constitution of a new Syria. Where does ‘integration’, and its poisonous conceptual effects, leave the revolutionary lessons and critical pedagogy of Rojava? What happens to the Rojava Revolution when ‘autonomy’ is folded into ‘unity’? What remains of Rojava revolution when it must negotiate its survival through the logic of incorporation into national statehood?

My aim here is to reflect on the (com)memorative and political dimensions of what this latest stage of assaults on Rojava means for the revolution that has been unfolding for the past twelve years, and the broader symbolic and political meaning of Rojava as a beacon of hope within these ‘dark times’ (to invoke Brecht anew). At stake in the current conjuncture, and in the transnational politics of solidarity on the left today, is an active process of epistemic erasure of Rojava and its political achievements. This erasure is enacted both through a media discourse that is insufficiently critical of the neo-imperial power politics of the region, as well as through the selective solidarities and competing politics of attention, shaped consistently through the coloniality of the ‘White’ gaze. This erasure is further sustained by nationalist and imperial narratives of despair and hopelessness that render revolutionary projects impossible. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely within this terrain of despair that Rojava’s political potential continues to re-emerge: as evidence that feminist, anti-colonial, insurgent legality is possible.

I find myself driven to reflect in this way as a means to find and channel what is perhaps the most important political affect of all: hope. At its foundation, the tradition of critical (legal) thinking has sought to connect radical theorising with movements that embody hope amid the violences, inequalities, and the depredations of the colonial-capitalist world system. One of its central commitments has been the intellectual labour and cultivation of political possibility, both within and beyond the strictures of our present political conjuncture. Among contemporary social movements, Rojava represents one of the most compelling sites of political possibility. For over a decade, the DAANES has cultivated a sense of political possibility, an actually existing experiment that contributes to the praxis of anti-colonial anti-capitalist freedom and democracy today. 

Political hope—hope in politics itself—emerged under (im)possible conditions in Rojava, and now spreads beyond its borders, inspiring movements across Syria, Kurdistan, and the world. The revolution’s spirit endures: on the one hand, in the struggle for a pluralist Syria; on the other, in the transnational mobilisation in solidarity with Rojava. This has not only extended to an interest in Rojava among anarchist and left democratic circles, but the formation of a transnational diasporic public sphere of Kurdish intellectuals and activists, the most profound of which is the women’s movement Jineoloji. As the revolution’s spirit has travelled beyond its territorial origins, its institutional on-the-ground survival has, however, remained bound to the volatile geopolitics of the region. 

With Trump’s new ally al-Sharaaf in power and his stated vision to ‘unify’ Syria, the democratic governance structure of the DAANES was immediately placed under pressure. ‘Unification’ is not a concept easily reconciled with the political architecture of the DAANES, which was always already an intentionally decentralised and plural society, sustained by core principles outlined in the Social Contract and, ultimately, by the commitment to self-rule by peoples. The dilemma, as I see it, lies in how to think through the tension between ‘unification’ and ‘integration’, on the one hand, and a revolutionary ethos committed to the cultivation of difference across cultures, ethnicities, and religions, on the other. In essence, I am curious about extending the critique that the revolution itself had towards statism, and its imbrication with patriarchy, and coloniality. What happens to critique when it can no longer be lived, but must adapt to new circumstances and institutional cultures and values in order to survive? 

On the discourse of ‘failure’

Rojava’s future has always been uncertain. Structurally contingent and subject to the national interests of neighbouring states, this uncertainty was never not anticipated. From the beginning, the revolution made clear that its objective was neither statehood as secession, nor was it their incorporation into the liberal world-system. This point is crucial, given how frequently Rojava is represented otherwise. This uncertainty, this finitude, and the contingency of the political present, is precisely what made Rojava so powerful and potent—it had the effect of concentrating the mind and willing the possible to be born in the face of impossibility. It is this instance of focus and will, that is doubly profound, when we remember how Rojava is a project of the stateless peoples of the region for whom there never was a future, who found themselves adjacent to, if not firmly on, the slaughter bench of history. Despite this lack of a predictable future (what Jacques Derrida [1] called la futur), those stateless peoples of the post-civil-war conjuncture managed to build in theory and practice, in the midst of war, and under the threat of annihilation, something Euro-Modern political philosophers could never even dream of. They imagined a future yet-to-come (l’avenir) and made it material upon this earth.

Before addressing the claim that its recent agreement with Syria’s new leadership constitutes a ‘failure’ or a ‘blow,’ it is necessary to clarify the factual terrain, including the substance of the March 2025 and January 2026 agreements between the new Syrian regime and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The first such agreement, from March 2025, was widely met with both anticipation and apprehension. Whilst merely a memorandum of understanding, this 14-point agreement nonetheless outlined the administrative, military, and security integration, without setting out the details of this new political ordering. This agreement also contained a profound historical ‘admission’, namely the formal recognition of Kurds within Syria. The re-figuration of Syria was thus initially seen as something about which we can be ‘hopeful’, suggesting a new attitude toward the long-standing erasure of Kurds and the memory of them being stripped of citizenship and belonging by the Syrian state. Yet, the implementation and negotiations stalled, partly due to planned meetings being cancelled by the new Syrian government, and pressure exerted by Turkey over their concerns with Kurdish political power in Rojava. By December 2025, the fragility of these negotiations became brutally clear. Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo (Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashriyeh) came under sustained attack, resulting in hundreds being displaced, and hospitals, homes, and civilian infrastructure was bombed. Whilst the Syrian government forces captured strategic sites, including the Tishreem dam, it effectively isolated Kobane. The military siege of Kobane, a symbolic stronghold of Kurdish liberation in Syria, and the location of the defeat of Daesh in 2015 by the YPG and YPJ, was subject of Genocide Watch’s statement from the 27th of Janaury 2026. This statement urgently called for immediate humanitarian access to Kobane, and the protection of civilians, as well as the end of the siege. Placing Kobane under siege again, like the murder of Kurdish women fighters, has become a focal point of the Syrian regime’s strategy; by working to bring the inhabitants of the city to their knees, it carries a broader symbolic importance, in cutting off the life and spirit of the Rojava project and its imagination of a better and more democratic Syria. 

A renewed agreement was reached on the 30th of January 2026, though no official text has been published as of yet. This agreement came following international pressure and intervention by a number of government leaders, and the call for Kurds to mobilise in defence of the DAANES. This moment crystallized the transnational nature of Rojava’s revolution: it was not only a struggle for democracy and autonomy within Syria but also a signal to Kurds across borders, and to the broader world, that the principles of inter-ethnic cooperation, gender equality, and democratic autonomy were under attack, but still very much alive and resisting hunger and death. In a recent interview published by the online magazine Amargi, Mazlum Abdi (Commander-in-Chief of the SDF) explained how in his opinion this deal had to be reached to avoid further loss of life. I read this claim, in this context, as importantly and necessarily arguing against a sacrificial ‘Jacobin’ imaginary of politics [2], one that gives over its youth to violence and destruction for the revolution to continue in one particular political form. It is not a new argument within the Kurdish Liberation Movement, but rather, a point Abdullah Öcalan has stressed since the ecological and confederalist paradigm shift he initiated in the early 2000s. 

Significantly, the latest agreement has been portrayed as being to the disadvantage of the Kurds. It has been framed by some as a ‘betrayal’, a ‘failure’, a catastrophic ‘blow’. But we should not reduce Rojava to a Kurdish project because it was more plural than that. And we should also not simply see Rojava’s success within a nationalist, land-grabbing and colonial gaze which valorises the Westphalian image of nation-state as the end of politics. The aim of the DAANES, and of the Kurdish Liberation Movement for the past twenty years was never a ‘sovereign state’ in the European image, but what they call a ‘nation without a state’—confederalism and democratic autonomy. 

The future of Rojava?

On the 14th of February 2026, a day usually marked by the trite expression of love in the Euro-American world, the Platform of Action for Women’s Movements and Organizations in Rojava / North and East Syria, published a collective letter as the beginning of their campaigns leading up to International Women’s Day on March 8th. In the guise of a ‘Statement to the Public’, this political love letter to Rojava and its people—Kurd, Arab, Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian and many others beside—placed the actions, sacrifices, and achievements of ‘pioneering women’ at the centre of their vision of the future of Rojava. Affirming their allegiance to their heritage, and the future of the women’s movement and organisation in Rojava, they honour the sacrifices of the martyrs ‘who built bridges with their bodies and paved the way for us with their will, so that we could emerge from the darkness of exclusion into the light of the future.’ Connecting the recent violence against them and their comrades with the empowerment of fascist forces associated with the interim Syrian regime, they describe such crimes, including the throwing of a comrade Deniz from the third floor of a building, as expressions of a  

patriarchal mentality steeped in hatred, aimed at breaking the will of the women who have fought and won against terrorism. It is a pathetic attempt to terrorize society by targeting its symbols of struggle and beauty. 

Summarizing their achievements in Rojava over the past decade as the defeat (through struggle, not concession) of such an exclusionary ideology in the region and among its inhabitants—asserting once again that with this new regime such a mentality will not be allowed to return to Rojava on their watch. It is on this basis that they outline their International Women’s Day campaign and the contours of their continued struggle for women’s (self)protection.

They affirm, with love, hope and dignity: ‘We announce from the heart of the struggle the launch of a major national and international campaign to intensify the struggle in all areas.’ Asserting their power and agency they write: ‘We are not begging for our rights; rather, we are placing the international community and democratic forces before their historical responsibilities, and we present our demands as non-negotiable and non-postponable.’ Their demands, in short, are the full protection and willed extensions of the gender equality practiced and enshrined within the political community of the DAANES, both for themselves in Rojava, and for all of the ‘New Syria’. This includes not only rights of representation, language rights, the ‘absolute commitment to the Women’s Law’, the continuity of both the co-chair structure and the existence of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), but also a recognition within the Syria of tomorrow the need to dismantle and struggle against any subsequent return of/to a ‘patriarchal ideology.’ The addressee of these demands, surprisingly, is not the new Syrian regime, but ‘all feminist movements and democratic forces worldwide.’ It is before such addresses that their historical responsibility and complicity is placed by the Platform as an obligation they now have to help resist the erasure of Rojava and its feminist achievements. Affirming the universality of their demands for freedom and democracy, they call upon such movements ‘to strengthen women’s alliances and put international pressure to ensure that Syria’s future constitution is not with the exclusion and the marginalization of half of society.’ Their statement ends with a pledge: ‘A pledge to the martyrs and the severed braids: we will remain an invincible force against tyranny, and we will not stop until we see our gains ensured in the constitution. Long live the women’s revolution!’

This statement, this declaration of revolutionary struggle and resistance, this letter of love to the martyrs of the women’s revolution, is a profoundly important document today. Embedded within it, is not simply a commitment to the continued Women’s struggle in Rojava and a call for solidarity and the extension of these ‘universal human values’; but also, the seeds of a reorientation in thinking about Rojava, as well as a reminder of the temporality and ends of the Rojava revolution more broadly. For what is at stake with the integration of Rojava into a new Syria, is not defeat, nor is it the end of the story of democratic autonomy and Women’s revolution. Revolution, as such, is not a concluded event, but an ongoing pedagogical process which reshapes political subjectivity, collective imagination, and legal possibility even amid geopolitical retrenchment. In this sense, the question is not simply whether the revolution survives institutionally, but whether its ethical and epistemic transformations endure within an ‘unified’ and ‘new’ Syria.

In re-turning once again to the frame of interpretation of Rojava and its principles to an understanding of its politics as that which refuses the state form, that emphasises relationality, knowledge and the empowerment of women and minorities, we can begin once again to redefine and reimagine what hope looks and feels like within this context, and politics today more broadly. As the veil of legitimacy and authority of international law, liberal democratic regimes, and the fragile international order continue to fall before our ‘Western’ (dominated) eyes, those of us on the anticolonial/antifascist side of politics find ourselves confronted with the need to reimagine the place of these always already hypocritical and violent institutions within our political horizon. What the future and present of the Rojava revolution reminds us, what it teaches us, what it warns us against, is that politics today must relinquish its aspirations and utopian dreams about the state, about hegemonic regimes, and to find purpose and a future we cannot yet see, by holding fast to the insurgent democratic potential of equality, ecological living, and struggle, even when all seems lost. This is what political hope looks and feels like. The women of Rojava continue to teach us this, and our historical responsibility is before us and awaits our action. 

Hasret Cetinkaya is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights and Gender at Manchester Law School. Her research examines questions of power, agency, and ethics in relation to human rights and the law.

[1] ‘Hospitality, justice and responsibility: a dialogue with Jacques Derrida’ in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds.) Questioning Ethics: Contemporary debates in philosophy (1999: Routledge).

[2] On the limits of the ‘Jacobin’ imaginary of politics, see: Negri, A. (1999) Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Minnesota University Press, p. 212.