Scale and exile: the portrait of the Kurdish question in the theory of democratic confederalism
Date
2017-08-31
Authors
Kermanian, Sara
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Abstract
This research examines the relation of scalar arrangements of the statist political orders and the formation of the condition of exile, exemplified in the case of the Kurdish statelessness through a critical reading of Abdullah Öcalan's theory of democratic confederalism. This reading, I will argue, permits understanding the scalar implications of what I call the tyranny of the present of the state. The tyranny of the present refers to the tendency of statist formations to expand the domination of their metaphysical presence through attempting to turn their present into the future of those who are considered less developed and aiming to prevent the perception of any unpredictable future that might interrupt their presence. This temporal hegemony is imposed through a centralized and hierarchical scalar order that determines quantitative multiplication of the diversity of human societies and the order of authority of the structure that brings them together as a whole. Together the scalar-temporal arrangement of the structure implies the ways through which the presence of the state determines the condition of the impossibility of the presence of the stateless and the exclusion of the stateless determines the condition of the possibility of the presence of the state. I will argue that this is the desire to leave the aporetic condition of the state/statelessness binary that leads Öcalan to aim for the destruction of the state and the construction of a communalist structure that permits the non-exclusive existence of time’s pure being in itself. However, his solution, similar to the communalist approaches by whom he is influenced, is limited by his ignorance of the paradoxicality of the creation of communalism externally and the destruction of the state internally and by his underestimation of the state-generating forces of the of rules of securitization in the international system that is not based on communal values.
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Keywords
Scale, Time and Space, Statelessness, Kurdish Question, Democratic Confederalism, Rojava, Political Exclusion, Democracy, Nationalism, Communalism and International Order