With a population of around 40 million people, Kurds are considered the largest nation without an independent state. Indeed, since the geographical division of Kurdistan in 1923, Kurds have been the victims of various forms of discrimination and oppression by the nation states of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. They deprived Kurds of their legitimate political, social and cultural rights and they oppressed their demands for political and cultural freedom through violent means. With the eruption of civil war in Syria, the regime decided to withdraw its army from the Kurdish region of Rojava. The Kurds seized the opportunity and used the power vacuum to establish their interests and agenda through establishing a democratic structure in northern parts of the country. However, instead of building a Kurdish nation-state, the people of Rojava developed a hybrid political structure known as Democratic Confederalism. Today, this system functions through hundreds of councils and assemblies in northern Syria. In the course of my study, I conducted a content analysis to see whether the structure of Rojava’s political structure corresponds to a democratic model that can facilitate the development of human rights in general and the empowerment of women in particular.

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. / Graduate

The Syrian civil war has been one of the most complex armed confrontations in modern era. In thiscontext, the military participation of Kurdish female fighters of the YPJ Units has received globalmedia coverage. This thesis explores the gendered dimension of media representations of YPJfighters and the representation of the construction of their military identity. Firstly, it asks howBritish media represent their appearance and background, their ability to fight and their motivation.Moreover, it explores how pro-Kurdish media and on-line platforms represent the construction oftheir military identity and the way the YPJ is formed into a group. The data comes from 23 Britishand 8 pro-Kurdish media articles and is analysed with discourse analysis. The thesis finds thatBritish media representations echo the hegemonic discourse about women’s role as victims duringwar, while only the more liberal media represent motivations connected with a struggle againstpatriarchy, capitalism and the nation-state. Moreover, it finds that pro-Kurdish media represent YPJfighters as breaking stereotypical notions of femininity through a repetition of performativemilitary acts and about precarity being the condition of the group’s coherence. It also finds that thearticles function as interpellation to new fighters.