(AUDIO) Nationalism versus patriotism
What’s the difference between a state and a nation? And should nationalism play a part in spurring scientific endeavour?
Dr Thomas Jeffrey Miley talks on Rojava and the Left
20 April 2020|Thomas Jeffrey Miley
The Rojava revolution faces great challenges going forward. But the revolutionary forces have already made history. Their democratic confederal project – with its emphasis on direct democracy against the state, multicultural accommodation, gender emancipation, and social ecology – has inspired people across the globe. In a time when the very future of humanity, and of life on the planet, are under unprecedented threat, the revolutionary experiment in Rojava stands out as a valiant attempt, in the midst of a still-unfolding catastrophe, to construct a radical democratic alternative to spiralling violence and tyranny.
Thomas Jeffrey Miley is a Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the executive committee of the European Union Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC). He is co-editor, with Federico Venturini, of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).
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Only Mountains -Original Drama Radio Play by Maxine Peake
Only Mountains
Original Drama by Maxine Peake
When Pearl chooses Istanbul as the destination for her best friend’s hen do, it isn’t just the beautiful location that draws her there. While in Istanbul, Pearl meets people from the Kurdish community and her political convictions are strengthened through her encounters. But when she makes the controversial decision to join the YPJ, an all-female Kurdish militia fighting on the brutal frontline in Rojava against the Islamic State group, will her friends be able to change her mind?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g67x
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(AUDIO) The Kurdish Women’s Movement: On Revolution, Militarism and Body Politics
Isabel Käser traces the complex history of the Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movement, discusses how women’s autonomous organisational structures have emerged and how they operate today between the mountains and the cities of the four different parts of Kurdistan.
Her talk, at the LSE Middle East Centre, analyses the emancipatory power this movement holds but also unpacks some of the tensions that emerge from the interplay between militarism, the party’s body politics and the movement’s revolutionary quest for a more democratic Middle East. Recorded on 4 June.
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