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Jin-jiyan-azadi. Matristic culture and Democratic Confederalism in Rojava

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  • Alternatives to Sustainable Development: What can we Learn from the Pluriverse in Practice?
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Abstract

This article explores the significance of Jineolojî, an emancipatory praxis elaborated by the Kurdish Women’s Movement, for contemporary degrowth and pluriverse politics. Considering Jineolojî as the most original dimension of the Democratic Confederalist model of government in Northern and Eastern Syria (compared to other revolutionary projects), the article contributes to recent debates around the central place of “depatriarchization” in pluriverse debates. In the first part, we highlight a renewed interest in matriarchy, which has emerged at the intersection of ecofeminist with post-development and degrowth thought, noting how this resonates with the rediscovery of Mesopotamia’s matristic culture, which has been key to Democratic Confederalism and its radical critique of capitalist modernity and the nation State. We also highlight the inherent contradictions of the matristic model and formulate the question whether, and under what conditions, it bears potential for emancipatory political ecologies. The second part briefly describes the article’s sources and method, namely militant ethnography carried out with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, both in Rojava and in the European diaspora, cross-referenced with an analysis of some key texts of Jineolojî. The third part investigates the process by which the matristic perspective is being currently performed in Rojava through Jineolojî: a pedagogy for women’s self-defense, the autonomous re-appropriation of communalist and ecological praxis, and men’s liberation from hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that Jineolojî does not configure as a model of society to be recovered from a pre-patriarchal age, but as an original tool for liberating social potential towards gender, decolonial and ecological revolutions.

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Notes

  1. See the full text here: https://internationalistcommune.com/social-contract/.

  2. Interviewed on September, 2018.

  3. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20160929163726/http://www.freemedialibrary.com/index.php/Declaration_of_Democratic_Confederalism_in_Kurdistan.

  4. Interviewed on January, 2019.

  5. Interviewed on January, 2019.

  6. The first author prefers to use the “we” instead of the “I” since her ethnographic work in Rojava was deeply rooted in the collective experience of the women’s delegation.

  7. Collective interview on August, 2020.

  8. Interviewed on January, 2019.

  9. Interviewed on January and February, 2019.

  10. Interviewed on January, 2019.

  11. Interviewed on February 2019.

  12. See the website here: http://revolutioninthemaking.blogsport.eu/.

  13. Interviewed on January, 2019.

  14. Interviewed on December, 2018.

  15. Collective interview on August 2020.

  16. Collective interview on August 2020.

  17. Interviewed on July, 2019.

  18. Conversation held in July, 2019.

  19. See https://jineoloji.org/en/2021/01/20/booklet-killing-and-transforming-the-dominant-man/.

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Funding

This research was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Doctoral Grant no [SFRH/BD/133741/2017].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Social Studies, Rua Couraça dos Apostolos 11, 3000-432, Coimbra, Portugal

    Eleonora Gea Piccardi

  2. University of Santiago de Compostela, praza da Universidade 1, 15703, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Stefania Barca

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  1. Eleonora Gea Piccardi
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  2. Stefania Barca
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Correspondence to Eleonora Gea Piccardi.

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Piccardi, E.G., Barca, S. Jin-jiyan-azadi. Matristic culture and Democratic Confederalism in Rojava. Sustain Sci 17, 1273–1285 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01099-x

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