Schooling against Hegemony and towards Self-Determination: Dibistanên Azad [Free Schools]

Most minority movements seek to enact self-determination in specific domains, of which education – and in particular mother-tongue education – is a central one. While some groups are denied this right altogether, others gain limited access under strict state control, and only a few succeed in establishing autonomous educational institutions with independent educational / political agendas. This paper examines Dibistanên Azad [Free Schools], schools established in several Kurdish cities in Turkey between 2014 and 2016, and conceptualizes them as a form of internal self-determination enacted through education. Dibistanên Azad emerged during the peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement (2009–2015), when Kurdish language, political, and civic organizations seized a political opening to establish schools with an autonomous curriculum sharply diverging from that of the Turkish state. These schools materialized long-standing demands for mother-tongue education and the broader political project of the Kurdish liberation movement. Following the collapse of the peace process, they were violently closed in 2016 during a period of severe democratic backsliding, as minority institutions and alternative forms of governance were increasingly criminalized. The schools subsequently continued their activities informally and clandestinely in private homes. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and document analysis, I analyze how the ideological and theoretical foundations of the Kurdish liberation movement are translated into educational practice. Informed by both this political tradition and global currents in decolonial pedagogy, Dibistanên Azad articulated an educational vision described by practitioners as radically democratic, gender-egalitarian, ecological, and azad [free]. I demonstrate how this vision was enacted through everyday pedagogical practices, spatial arrangements, teacher education, curricular materials, and forms of parental participation, while also critically assessing the tensions and limitations produced by operating under conditions of repression. By examining education as a site of de facto democratic practice under authoritarian retrenchment, this study contributes to debates on internal self-determination, showing how minority actors create and sustain autonomous political spaces within, and against, the constraints of an illiberalizing state.