Democratic confederalism and societal multiplicity: a sympathetic critique of Abdullah Öcalan’s State theory

The Kurdish-led project of democratic confederalism in Rojava (north and north-east Syria) has emerged as an unprecedented experience in eco-feminist and anti-capitalist direct democracy with global significance and regional ramifications. There is however virtually no critical engagement with the project’s intellectual foundations in the works of Abdullah Öcalan. This paper seeks to address this gap through a sympathetic critique of Öcalan’s historical sociology of the formation and dissolution of the state. It argues that there is a theoretical tension in Öcalan’s argument. His account of the originary rise of the Sumerian state is ‘internalist’ while his analysis of subsequent state-formation processes is ‘interactive’, which highlights the crucial role of external factors and hence implicitly the decisive significance of the condition of ‘societal multiplicity’. The paper then draws on Kojin Karatani’s ‘modes of exchange’ based world history to argue that Sumerian state-formation was also fundamentally interactive occurring within and through societal multiplicity. It therefore demonstrates the need for the incorporation of societal multiplicity in the conceptualisation of democratic confederalism and the analyses of its prospects as a non-statist political community. In so doing, the paper also contributes to critical geopolitics and anarchist international theory through underlining the social history of the rise of the state and the international nature of its dissolution.