Rojava and the Zapatista Communities

Forms of democracy that perhaps are not gaining ground but which have been around for a good while and are still largely unconsidered by Western mainstream approaches are the regions of Rojava in North-Eastern Syria and the Zapatista communities in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. These two case studies represent an advance of broadly left-libertarian, from-below democratic forms. Both movements were originally Marxist-Leninist. The argument of this paper is that the significance of the two examples lies in their normative reformulation into more anarchistic radical democratic orientation. By ‘anarchistic’, as Williams (2018, pp. 5-6) explains, is someone or something who has an ‘anarchist sensibility’, or affinity/sympathy/resemblance, but are labelled ‘anti-authoritarian’, ‘autonomist’, ‘left-libertarian’, ‘libertarian-socialist’, etc. These examples, arguably, are also instances of moving away from the Mouffean tradition in terms of radical democratic thinking and into a more participatory radical democracy proper. This reformulation into bottom-up leftism of the two movments can perhaps inspire democratic scholarship into considering the two case studies in future research for they possess many elements which can hold an answer to many issues that researchers can come across in democratic innovations or may find that the solutions hitherto attempted in the Global North are/were insufficient. This paper attempts a comparative political theory method by presenting how the two case studies are radically democratic and what anarchistic elements do they possess. This method is important because the movements in question are situated in Global South contexts with many concepts and theories coming from their own non-Anglophone vocabularies. Furthermore, the two examples showcase how more direct and participatory democracies can exist on a large scale (Rojava is roughly the size of Belgium; the state of Chiapas roughly encompasses the Republic of Ireland). The anarchistic radical democratic elements that the two regions possess which are ‘of their own’ are, among others, - autonomous, bottom-up, (con)federal organising against statist structures (more horizontal in the case of Zapatistas); consensual decision-making and consensus-seeking in overcoming conflict; self-criticism; self-defence; feminism, ecology, heterogeneity, pluralism, and emphasis on inclusion (the Zapatistas stress including 'orotras' - non-binary people; the Rojava project is arguably women-centred).