Of the progressive political experiments born during the Syrian revolution in the spring of 2011, only one remains today. It was launched in 2012 by the Kurds in Rojava, the Kurdish territory in northeastern Syria on the border with Iraq and Turkey. Ten years later, in La Démocratie sous les bombes ("Democracy Under the Bombs"), philosopher Edouard Jourdain and his colleague Pierre Crétois have brought together anthropologists, political scientists, philosophers, and witnesses to analyze how this unique, contemporary project to create a democratic confederation has taken shape in a context threatened by endless war.
Why did you write a book on Syrian Kurds of Syria rather than on Syrian revolutionaries?
My colleague Pierre Crétois and I wanted to understand the institutional development that has taken place over the last 10 years, in a more or less formal and lasting way, in the context of war. Among the Syrian revolutionaries, we saw the establishment of very precarious structures, which were similar to Bashar Al-Assad's quasi-failed state, which nevertheless ended up destroying them with the help of Russia. It's true that the two movements share the idea of reappropriating politics from below. But, except for the fact that the Syrian revolutionaries' experience is beginning to be well documented, notably in Burning Country, by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab [L'Echappée, 2019], their existence was too ephemeral for long-term study.
You mention the "courage" that was required to work on this subject: what kind of courage exactly?
Intellectual courage above all. Rojava is viewed with suspicion and is the object of all kinds of attacks, which are sometimes contradictory. The regime is accused not only of being authoritarian, even crypto-Leninist, of being guilty of war crimes, but also of playing the game of American imperialists, or of supporting terrorism against Turkey. Such a context does not lend itself to a calm analysis of the situation.
Many studies have been devoted to Rojava. How does your book differ from them?
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It seemed appropriate to take stock of the regime's multiple facets 10 years after the outbreak of the revolution. Letting this time pass has allowed most of the researchers in this book to report on an area they were able to visit. This was impossible during the early years of the conflict.
Often, books about the region deal with the Syrian conflict as a whole. When they concentrate on Rojava, they are either on the work of fighters or activists, or they only deal with one subject like the armed struggle or the place of women. These perspectives are valuable, but we decided to also include academics who could share their on-site research and show different aspects of Rojava, both in terms of its internal politics and its inclusion in an international context. Even though we are attached to our field of research, it seemed important to us to report on it without idealizing it.
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