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Democratic Nation: the society that refuses to become a state
In Democratic Nation, Abdullah Öcalan imagines a political community built on pluralism, self-government and grassroots participation. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to tolerate and so easy to target. There is something almost scandalous in Democratic Nation: it dares to ask whether a people can become politically free without first becoming a state. In a world trained to think that sovereignty, borders, bureaucracy and armed institutions are the only serious grammar of politics, Abdullah Öcalan proposes something far more unsettling. He suggests that a nation does not have to harden into a state in order to exist. It can instead organize itself as a political society, plural, self-governing,…
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Democratic Confederalism: one of the world’s most advanced societies on the verge of disappearance
In Abdullah Öcalan’s first foundational text, Democratic Confederalism appears not just as a Kurdish political theory, but as a radical alternative to the nation-state; a society built on grassroots participation, pluralism and self-government, now threatened by war and centralism. When people speak about Democratic Confederalism, the danger is always the same: either it gets reduced to a slogan, or it gets treated like an abstract utopia with no body, no history and no enemies. But the point is exactly the opposite. We are not dealing only with a political theory. We are dealing with a rare historical experience, with a social experiment that tries to return politics to society, pluralism…
