Where’s the Revolution in Democratic Confederalism’s “Ecology”?
Presentation to Seminar on Ecological and Gender Dimensions of the Democratic Confederalist Approach in Kurdistan

Since the early 2000s, the Kurdish freedom movement, inspired by its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan, has rejected a state-based "solution" to the social and economic injustices that pervade the Kurdish region in particular and the Middle East more generally.

Instead, it is seeking to build a new politics, rooted in what Öcalan has called "democratic confederalism" –  the everyday struggle to ensure direct grassroots democracy and to build a needs-based economy that dismantles the oppressions of patriarchy and class and that resets the current exploitative relationship between human and non-human nature.

This presentation to a seminar on the Ecological and Gender Dimensions of the Democratic Confederalist Approach in Kurdistan (held at the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS, University of London on 3 February 2018) highlights that, if taken seriously, the recognition that humans are part of nature and are not separate from it – and that all forms of life have a right to existence – sets a revolutionary trajectory that is radically opposed to that of mainstream environmentalism.