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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Democratic Confederalism as Mytopraxis: Towards an Insurgent Analysis of the Kurdish Self-Determination Struggle

presenters

    José Vicente Mertz

    Nationality: Brazil

    Residence: Portugal

    CAPP - ISCSP - Universidade de Lisboa

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Keywords:

Mytopraxis, Kurds, Democratic Confederalism, Political Anthropology, Cosmopolitics

Abstract:

The recent development of the Kurdish self-determination struggle, from an ethnonationalist struggle to an internationalist movement, provides numerous possible paths of analysis for the phenomenon. First, how the development of the self-determination struggle in two antagonistic poles, linked to the intra-Kurdish class conflict, has materialised itself into two political organisational proposals: the Kurdish Regional Government on one side and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria – Rojava on the other. Second, the development of Democratic Confederalism as a disputing Kurdish cosmology, through the activation of the past and ancestry as tools to build new imaginative horizons. This process articulates mythological narratives with a quest for a precolonial past as a method to build a new future. Third, the internationalisation of the Kurdish question: the new Democratic Confederalism paradigm, which articulates communalism, women's struggle, and ecologism, allied with the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, has brought strong sympathy and visibility for the Kurdish cause, enabling it to surpass ethnic and regional barriers. This process has created a new figure in the Kurdish movement, the internationalist, who has brought Democratic Confederalism to different contexts, connecting it to diverse national autonomy struggles around the world. Finally, we can analyse it through the role of charismatic leadership in the Kurdish and regional context, where hidden discourses are often channelled through one person who assumes a prophet-like role. This work, through ethnographic work driven in the north and south Kurdistan and in the diaspora, will try to conjugate all these possible approaches of the current stage of the Kurdish self-determination struggle to bring a more comprehensive analysis of the Kurdish insurgent process, seeing it as an cosmopolitical movement.