Beyond Anarchy and Capital? The Geopolitics of the Rojava Revolution in Syria

Abstract

First paragraph: The drylands of the Middle East have been long seen not only as unfavourable to life, but also and relatedly, socio-politically fragile. Fraught with myths of eternal ‘ethnic’, ‘sectarian’, or ‘resource conflict’, the chronic political instability of the Middle East from Afghanistan and Yemen to Iraq and Syria has been often seen as intrinsic to a scarce ‘nature’, a scorched earth, tendentially collapsing into brute violence which in its spectacular extreme has been exercised by the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (IS).